My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My father and brothers were coal miners.
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.
I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
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.
Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.
When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
My dad is from Panama; he came to the U.S. in 1971. He came to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He thought he would go back, and then he met my mom here. I was born and mostly raised in Delaware.
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
I come from a line of railroad men. My great-grandfather was a surveyor for the Burlington Railroad.