A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations... four or maybe five generations.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My father and brothers were coal miners.
Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.
My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.
I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.
I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.
I grew up in Alsace - in Strasbourg, by the canal; the family business was coal handling. It was still in the days when three generations would live under the same roof. There were 15 people for lunch, 20 for dinner.
Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.
We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
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