My point - Romanies were Romanians were Romans ...
interesting connection, but only partly true as Gypsies were actually a tribe from India (from ancient times). They suffered a lot from European bigotry, not dissimilar to the bigotry of antiJewish anti-semitism of old. so they became ‘travellers’ of ill-repute.
BTW, just found this website, Romney’s real ethnic heritage is English:
http://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/mitt-romneys-ancestry/
The "travelers" are of non Roma ancestry. What seems to have happened is the Romany (aka Gypsies) showed up ~ in very few numbers ~ at just the time the Brits were imposing the enclosure laws on Ireland and Scotland.
There were tens of thousands of people who all at once had nowhere to live except in the streets. Some of them were co-opted by the Romany and the culture spread among the dispossesed.
Interesting piece of analysis done years ago demonstrated that Christopher Columbus had 12 Romany on board on his first voyage.
There are a number of different "tribes" or "hereditary occupations" among the Roma. There are also different "colors". Several years back I encountered a crew affiliated with a traveling carnival show down at a nearby Giant grocery. They think I look like their lawyer in this area who gets them out of jail, so they showed me how they stole stuff. Very interesting. They also managed to pull my wallet, remove all the threads, and return it to my pocket with a brandnew folded up dollar bill enclosing my dry cleaning ticket. Now that was cute ~ never detected a thing.
That group was made up of blue eyed blonds, brunettes, black people.....!
Yup, the Gypsies adopt others particularly if it benefits them. This happened in the South during slavery days where they had a scam involving selling a farmer a strong slave for cheap ~ they'd come back a night and rescue him.
They are very adaptable.
These weren't Travelers.
If you want them you have to check out Bill Clinton's lineage. His 5 times Great Grandfather Billy Blythe was a trail boss who was known as "a king of the gypsies" ~ all those towns ~ Blythe CA, Blytheville TX, etc. are named after him. His Baby Daddy was also a member of the Apostolic Church of the First Born, and his grandmother traveled with carnivals as a fortune teller.
Needless to say there are subtle distinctions not always obvious to the uninitiated!
The Europeans always sought to force the Gypsies and Travelers to settle down and become good citizens. It worked to a degree. America never fought them ~ and they settled down mostly in Los Angeles county in WWII where they went into the airframe manufacturing factories where their skills in light metal work were highly desired.
In Europe Gypsies are not terribly assimilated. In America they are.