Not surprisingly, I am a person who loves to go into antique stores. I love old things, and I love the thought of the stories that go with the history of the articles one can see in an antique store. I love the surprise of never knowing what you are going to find! It’s all about ‘the hunt.’ Sometimes I even go into thrift stores, although these tend to be filled with more junk than treasures.
A recent find from a thrift store was a book titled ‘Nan of the Gypsies.’ It is a young adult book about an orphan child traveling with a Gypsy caravan. She is adopted and educated by a wealthy woman who loves her as if she were her own child. Her benefactress loses her fortune, but Nan does her part to help the household survive economically. When her long lost uncle arrives from Romania, Nan learns that her father was a famous Gypsy musician and her mother came from a wealthy and important Romanian family. When her mother and father died unexpectedly when she was a baby, she was given to her father’s sister to be raised among the Gypsies. Difficulties among the Gypsy clan forced her to leave the caravan, and thus she was adopted and raised by the wealthy woman. In the end, a neighbor boy who has loved Nan for years marries her, and they go on a Gypsy honeymoon in a ‘roulotte.’ (wooden caravan pulled by horse) It is indeed a bit of a ‘fairy tale.’
Some interesting parts of this story to me is that the book was written in 1926, and it takes place in southern California. The band of Gypsies were in fact, trying to go over the border into Mexico. This tells me that there were indeed Gypsies in the U.S. during the first part of the 20th century. Also, there is reference to how this particular band of Gypsies got into the country (not by legal means). Nan tells a friend, “We landed in the night on a lonely marshy shore. Florida they called it. The sailing barge that brought us across the sea left before daybreak, and when the sun came up we were in our caravans riding across a flat lonely country. We saw very few people because we slept days and passed through the villages at night. The police sometimes followed us to see that we kept going until we were out of the town but nobody stopped us. Then, for weeks and weeks, we were crossing the wide sandy desert. We camped a long time in the Rocky Mountains. I never did understand that, I mean why we seemed to be hiding.” This tells me that it is conceivable that many Gypsies DID come into the country illegally, without a record. (I am being a ‘genealogy detective’ again!)
There are also references in the book to the negative sterotypes that people during that time held about Gypsies: that Gypsies steal, that they lie and are not honest, and that they are mean and unkind to others. Nan proves through her actions of generosity and kindness that she carries none of those personality traits. Someone in the early part of the 20th century was trying to change the ideas that people held about the Gypsy people.