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Ashley Collman
- President Trump has come under fire after tweeting Sunday that four non-white Congresswomen should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."
- Many labeled the comments racist and anti-immigrant. The women are Americans.
- Trump's ancestry in America goes back three generations. His grandfather came from Germany in 1885, and his mother came from Scotland in 1929.
- Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.
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President Trump has come under fire this week after telling four non-white congresswomen that they should "go back and help fix" the "places from which they came."
Many have labeled the comments racist and anti-immigrant, as the women are Americans.
The mayor of Kallstadt, Germany, where Trump's grandfather was born, told the Washington Post on Tuesday that Trump should think about where his own family comes from before making such remarks.
"Seeing the not-so-imposing homes of his ancestors might bring him back to earth," Thomas Jaworek said.
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Trump's family comes from a relatively recent stock of American immigrants, who have been here for a little more than 130 years.
Here is the history of how the first Trumps came to America and planted the seeds of the family's legacy.
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Donald Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf, was born on March 14, 1869, in Kallstadt, Germany.
Source: The Washington Post
The Drumpf family was not wealthy, and their financial situation became even more desperate when Friedrich's father, a winemaker named Johannes, died when the boy was just 8.
Source: The Washington Post
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Friedrich was too frail to work in the family's vineyard, so he was sent to another town to apprentice as a barber.
Source: The Washington Post
When he came back two-and-a-half years later, he realized that Kallstadt was too small to need another barber, so he started plotting a move to America, where one of his sisters was already living.
Source: The Washington Post
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On October 7, 1885, then 16-year-old Friedrich fled his home in the middle of the night and made his way toward Bremen to catch a ship to America. He left a note behind for his mother, explaining his plan.
Source: The Washington Post, The New York Times
When he got to New York, he moved in with his sister and her husband, in what is now the Lower East Side. He worked as a barber, and moved several times over the next few years.
Source: The New York Times
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Ambitious Friedrich, who was now going by Frederick Trump, got antsy again, and with news of gold being found in the Pacific Northwest, he moved to Seattle and opened a restaurant.
Sources: The New York Times, The Gotham Center for New York History
Ahead of the US presidential election in 1892, Friedrich became a naturalized American citizen with tens of thousands of others who were allowed to register to vote in Washington for the first time. He swore that he entered the US when he was under 18, that "he has behaved as a man of good moral character", and renounced any loyalty to Germany.
Sources: "The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate", The Gotham Center for New York History
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Frederick wasn't in Seattle long. Soon he packed up his life again and made his way north to capitalize on the gold rush. He didn't make his money off mining, though, but rather catering to the deluge of prospectors.
Source: The New York Times
Trump set up the Arctic Restaurant in Bennett, which also served as a casino and brothel.
Source: Bloomberg
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Trump moved his restaurant one more time, when a new railroad changed the route prospectors took into the Yukon. And then, in 1901, he closed shop once and for all and headed back to Germany.
It was during a visit home to Kallstadt that Trump met his future wife, Elizabeth Christ, who had grown up across the street from him (she was 5 years old when he left for America). By the end of the visit (when she was 21), the two were engaged.
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The couple wed when Trump returned to Germany a year later. He convinced his bride to move back to the US with him, but made a promise to her father to bring her back if she got homesick.
After only about a year in New York, where Trump returned to his trade as a barber, his wife did indeed get homesick, so the couple decided to return to Kallstadt. At this point, Elizabeth was a few months pregnant with their first child.
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But when Trump arrived back in Germany and requested to regain his citizenship, he was turned down and actually deported for leaving the country before performing his military service.
Sources: The Gotham Center for New York History, BILD
The Trumps reluctantly returned to New York again, where they eventually settled down in Woodhaven, Queens, in 1906. It was in the borough that Trump started buying up properties, planting the seeds of his family's future real estate empire.
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Donald Trump's father, Fred, was the couple's second son, who was born on October 11, 1905.
Source: The Washington Post
In 1936, Fred Trump would marry Mary Anne MacLeod, a young woman he fell in love with after meeting at a dance.
Source: The New Yorker
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MacLeod hailed from Tong, on the Isle of Lewis, part of the Scottish Hebrides islands.
Source: The New Yorker
MacLeod immigrated to the US just a month after the stock market collapse of 1929.
Source: The New Yorker
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Like her father-in-law, MacLeod already had siblings in the US and was documented as traveling back to her home country on occasion. The 1930 census and ship logs show she worked as a "maid" and "domestic."
Source: The New Yorker
Her life changed considerably after marrying Trump in 1936. He started to build a real estate empire in Queens in the 1940s, and she soon became a part of New York society.
Source: The Washington Post
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Mary Trump became a naturalized citizen on March 10, 1942.
Sources: The New Yorker, Snopes
Donald Trump was the fourth of Fred and Mary Anne Trump's five children, and was born on June 14, 1946.
Source: The Washington Post
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In 1977, Trump married his first wife Ivana, who had immigrated from Czechoslovakia. She became a citizen in 1988. Their three children Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric were born in New York.
Source: Associated Press
Trump married his third wife Melania in 2005, and she has been a US citizen since 2006. She told media outlets in 2016 that she sponsored herself for a green card in 2001 after working as a model in the US on a visa in the mid-1990s. Their son Barron was also born in New York.
Sources: INSIDER, Washington Post
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Melania's parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, became US citizens in 2018, using family sponsorship to obtain their green cards — a process that Trump calls "chain migration" and vowed to end.
Source: INSIDER
Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, and the son and grandson of immigrants.
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