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Maternal Grandfather (Russian): Russian soldier who was part of the Soviet force in the Ukraine at the height of the cold war in the mid 1950's. Met and married my grandmother and settled down with her to work as a minor official in local law enforcement.
Maternal Grandmother (Ukranian/Chinese): Daughter of a poor Ukranian man and a young Chinese woman. She met my grandfather when she was in high school and married him to get away from her abusive father. She worked on and off as a clerk for some minor government agency, but mostly was a housewife. My mother was their second child, their only girl. They sold my mother, then 18, to my father for roughly the equivilent of $3000 American in 1974.
Paternal grandfather: Chicago police officer, one the youngest children born to Irish immigrants at the height of the Great Depression, in the early to mid-thirties.
Paternal grandmother: Housewife, also the child of Irish immigrants and born in the Great Depression.
Gilda
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