I am a tru ROMA GYPSY, my mother is full blooded romanian Gypsy, my great grandparents came from romania b4 WWII broke out when HITLER was doing mass grave genocide and killing the gypsies as he did the jews.
Gypsies are an ethnic group. Here is some REAL information on the history of gypsies and to this very day they are still being persecuted and misjudged.
-------------------------------------------------
information i am posting is found at the followng link...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_people
The Roma (as a noun, singular Rom, plural Roma; sometimes Rrom, Rroma, Rromany people, Romany people, Romani people or Romanies) belong to many ethnic groups that appear in literature and folklore, and are often referred to as Gypsies or Gipsies. The Roma have their origins in India.
The Roma are still thought of as wandering nomads in the popular imagination, despite the fact that today the vast majority live in permanent housing. This widely dispersed ethnic group lives across the world not only near Southern and Eastern Europe, but also in the Americas and the Middle East.
Origins
The absence of a written history has meant that the origin and early history of the Roma people was long an enigma. As early as 200 years ago, cultural scholars hypothesised an Indian origin of the Roma based on linguistic evidence. Genetic information confirms this.
Although the Nazis claimed that the Gypsies were not Aryan, some members of the Gypsy Lore Society (established in 1888 in England) claimed that the Gypsies were the most ancient Aryans and "sought to protect them from mixing with non-Gypsy elements and from modernization...".
HISTORY
Linguistic and genetic evidence indicates the Roma originated from the Indian subcontinent. The cause of the Roma diaspora is unknown. However, the most probable conclusion is that the Roma were part of the military in Northern India. When there were repeated raids by Mahmud of Ghazni and these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire. This occurred between 1000 and 1050 CE. This departure date is assumed because, linguistically speaking, the Romany language is a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA)--it has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Until around the year 1000, the Indo-Aryan languages, named Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). By the turn of the 2nd millennium they changed into the NIA phase, losing the neuter gender. Most of the neuter nouns became masculine while a few feminine, like the neuter अग्नि (agni) in the Prakrit became the feminine आग (âg) in Hindi and Jag in Romany. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romany and other NIA languages is proposed to prove that the change occurred in the Indian subcontinent. It is therefore not considered possible that the Romas' ancestors left India prior to 1000 CE. They then stayed in the Byzantine Empire for several hundred years. However, the Muslim expansion, mainly made by the Seljuk Turks, into the Byzantine Empire recommenced the movement of the Roma people.
The Banjara people, numbering around 2,274,000 in India, are Gypsies who claim that they, too, are descended from the Rajputs, and that many of their ancestors left India through the Himalayas and never returned. For this reason, the Banjara are considered related to the Romani people. Many historians believe[citations needed] that the Muslim conquerors of northern India took the Roma as slaves and marched them home over the unforgiving terrain of Central Asia, taking great tolls on the population and thereby giving rise to such designations as the Hindu Kush mountains of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mahmud of Ghazni reportedly took 500,000 prisoners during a Turkish/Persian invasion of Sindh and Punjab.
Others suggest the Roma were originally low-caste Hindus recruited into an army of mercenaries, granted warrior caste status, and sent westward to resist Islamic military expansion. In either case, upon arrival, they became a distinct community. Why the Roma did not return to India, choosing instead to travel west into Europe, is an enigma, but may relate to military service under the Muslims.
Contemporary scholars have suggested that one of the first written references to the Roma, under the term "Atsinganoi", (Greek), dates from the Byzantine era during a time of famine in the 9th century. In 800 CE, Saint Athanasia gave food to "foreigners called the Atsinganoi" near Thrace. Later, in 803 CE, Theophanes the Confessor wrote that Emperor Nikephoros I had the help of the "Atsinganoi" to put down a riot with their "knowledge of magic".
"Atsingani" was used to refer to itinerant fortune tellers, ventriloquists and wizards who visited the Emperor Constantine IX in the year 1054.[68] The hagiographical text, The Life of St. George the Anchorite, mentions that the "Atsingani" were called on by Constantine to help rid his forests of the wild animals which were killing his livestock. They are later described as sorcerers and evildoers and accused of trying to poison the Emperor's favorite hound.
In 1322 CE a Franciscan monk named Simon Simeonis described people resembling these "atsinganoi" living in Crete and in 1350 CE Ludolphus of Sudheim mentioned a similar people with a unique language whom he called Mandapolos, a word which some theorize was possibly derived from the Greek word mantes (meaning prophet or fortune teller).
Around 1360, an independent Romani fiefdom (called the Feudum Acinganorum) was established in Corfu and became "a settled community and an important and established part of the economy."
By the 14th century, the Roma had reached the Balkans; by 1424 CE, Germany; and by the 16th century, Scotland and Sweden. Some Roma migrated from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. The two currents met in France. Roma began immigrating to the United States in colonial times, with small groups in Virginia and French Louisiana. Larger-scale immigration began in the 1860s, with groups of Romnichal from Britain. The largest number immigrated in the early 1900s, mainly from the Vlax group of Kalderash. Many Roma also settled in South America.
Roma in Sliven, BulgariaWhen the Roma people arrived in Europe, curiosity was soon followed by hostility and xenophobia. Roma were enslaved for five centuries in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1864. Elsewhere in Europe, they were subject to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labor. During World War II, the Nazis murdered 200,000 to 800,000 Roma in an attempted genocide known as the Porajmos. They were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (essentially mobile killing units) on the Eastern Front.
In Communist Eastern Europe, Roma experienced assimilation schemes and restrictions of cultural freedom. The Romany language and Romani music were banned from public performance in Bulgaria. In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum," and Roma women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future social welfare payments, misinformation or after administering drugs (Silverman 1995; Helsinki Watch 1991). An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Roma, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community" and that "the problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists" , with new revealed cases up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In the early 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to Eastern Europe. Sixty percent of some 100,000 Romanian nationals deported under a 1992 treaty were Roma.[citation needed] In Norway, many Roma were forcibly sterilized by the state until 1977.
In May 2008 Roma camps in Naples, Italy were attacked and set on fire by local residents.
