On my mother's side, we're Cherokee, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English. We're rumored to be somehow related to
Jim Bowie, but my great aunt Lottie was the last who knew the story, and it somehow "shamed the family", so she'd never tell anyone.
My father is 50% Italian and 50% German. His mother came over from Germany when her father didn't like where that country was headed... sometime in the 1920s when my grandmother was about 3.
My father's father's father came over from Italy about a decade earlier than that, and changed his last name upon arrival. There are two stories as to why... one is to evade the prejudices against Italian immigrants at the time... the other is that it was to evade the Mafia. There are many stories linking my paternal grandfather's family to the Mafia, but they mostly date from before my time, so I don't know a lot about it.