My mother's mother had 8 children, which probably didn't leave her with much spare time. She bore the wonderfully anticlimactic name Magdalena Karolina Wilhelmina Augusta Oppermann Hughes (my brother & I learned it as a chant), so it is a fair guess that she was part of the great German immigration to the Middle West in the 19th century. She lived barely long enough to see me -- died in my first year.

My father's parents immigrated from Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) around 1890. He was the first child born to them in the U.S. His mother died when he was little.