PatrickMead.net

As Spring arrives, so do the Travellers. Some have emailed me newspaper articles about them entering the area where they live. While some TV and newspaper outlets warn their customers about the scams, most people are completely in the dark; especially those who only watch national news, the elderly, or those who aren’t naturally suspicious [...]

I’ll post the 16th in my series on Hidden People sometime soon, but in the meantime head over to Finding Direction (www.deeandrews.net)for her interview with my constant companion, Scooby, the Wonder Parrot. 

Allow me to move away from the USA for one blog and introduce you to a hidden and forgotten people that once lived among us but who are now less than a memory in their own land. After the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression) many Southerners felt that it would be unbearable [...]

A typical plan of action: when the Traveller family comes into town they book themselves into a hotel. Preferred hotels have individual entrances with rooms that have a view over the parking lot to the main thoroughfare beyond. The women hit the stores. They and their children (less often, the adult males) will shoplift items [...]

"I’m not asking for a handout," the young lady said. Her older model subcompact idled on the street in front of my house. She was in her mid-twenties, fair skinned, red haired with one brown eye and one hazel. There was a baby seat in the back of her car, the top of a child’s [...]

For some, the first glimpse came in the form of a videotape. It was September 2002. In the parking lot of a small northern Indiana town’s mall a woman was seen beating her child in the backseat of a Cadillac SUV. The woman was caught a few days later and the world learned, bit by [...]

Around one million Romani are in the US. Many came over in the waves of refugees around the times of the World Wars, but very few of them came in as Romany. In fact, Ellis Island and other intake depots for immigration often sought ways to make sure the Gypsies didn’t come to America. Most [...]

After World War 2, reparations were paid to Jews and other persecuted groups — but not one franc, shilling, or penny went to the 5,000 Romani who survived the camps. The Gypsies (be aware that they do not like that name anymore. It has become offensive to many of them. I use it interchangeably with [...]

The Germans declared open war on the Romani people. We saw in the last column that many European countries encouraged barbaric acts against the Gypsies (aka Rom, Romany, Romani, Rrom) including sanctioned hunting parties where the Rom were killed and stacked like animals… but that ended in the 1800’s, right? Unfortunately, no. Hitler rose to [...]