Whenever I’ve thought of people’s heritages, I’ve been a bit envious because I never really thought of myself as having much of a heritage. After all, most, if not all, of my forbears were extremely white and extremely European.

When I stopped to ponder this question, I thought about those ancestors who chose to start a new life in this country. On my father’s side, the part of his family that gave me my last name came from what would today be Belgium and Germany, and they moved at first to Pennsylvania. As they made a life in this new land, they were also willing to fight and die for its freedom. In fact, one ancestor – Nicholas DeBolt –  was an officer under General Greene and died at the Battle of Brandywine. Fortunately, he had a son named Henry four years before that; had he not, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this now.

Most of my ancestors on both sides of my family worked primarily in agriculture, which is interesting because that’s something I’ve never been interested in. But it’s my grandmother’s parents who I probably admire most because they risked the most to start over in America. Charles Moline left Finland without his family in the late 1800s to find a place where he could settle and start a family. He crossed the Atlantic in 1889, the same year that his first child was born in Finland. Seven years later, his wife, Marja, brought their son (also named Charles) with her to America, and the Moline family started their new life just outside of Duluth, Minn. Their next child, Oscar, was born the next year. Six more children would follow over the years, including my grandmother, but only three of them would survive to adulthood.

I know it’s a cliche, but my great-grandfather worked his fingers to the bone and established a hard-working heritage for his family before he passed at the age of 82 in 1941. He died 25 years before I was born, so I only know fleeting stories about him, but I so admire his willingness to risk everything so he could provide a better life for his family. I’ve never been faced with a choices that he must have been faced with, but I hope that I carry inside of me at least a little bit of his grit and determination. That is, indeed, a heritage very much worth being proud of.