Happy belated Valentines 2024

[Andybev01]

I'll clarify that count; mom was pregnant 15 times, 3 miscarriages and technically I'm second youngest as a sister was born after me but fied a few days after her birth.

I was an uncle at 5 years of age as my oldest sister, 17 years my senior, was pregnant at the same time that mom was.

Our family first set foot on this continent in 1651.

If you saw the miniseries 'Barkskins' (if you haven't don't bother, it's awful) the characters are based on the maternal side of my family.

They took dramatic/historic license with a lot of details, but the structure and time frame are sound.

[Murfreesboro]

Wow, you all had a tv miniseries based on your family? 1651 is a long time ago. The earliest I know of in my family is c 1720. Which colony were ya'll in?

All those pregnancies! Your poor mom! But that's the way it used to be. People had as many babies as nature allowed. I guess if a woman were barren, it was glaringly obvious and humiliating for her. And it wasn't that uncommon for women to lose a child or two along the way. Such a hard thing. There were also lots of instances of women dying with a 13th or 14th child. That's tough to think of, too, how so many women over the centuries just got worn out with childbearing. I've sort of had a quandary about this subject all my adult life. I debated when I was younger whether it was ethical to deny life (I mean, before pregnancy happens; I was always pretty clear within my own mind that once a baby is conceived, it's alive and should be protected). I just couldn't face that life of pregnancies every other year. But now, I find that the best thing in my life is my kids, and I wonder if I was wrong not to have had more of them. It would have been nice at least to have had a second daughter, so my one daughter could have had a sister. Then I tell myself I at least gave them more than I had, since I grew up neither with siblings nor a father.

[Andybev01]

My ancestors landed in Montreal, Canada but it wasn't until the early 18th century that they migrated south to what is now Michigan.

The original couple were Honore Trepanier and Marie Pontonnier.

Marie was a filla `a marrier, a young woman brought to Canada by the Hudson Bay Company to marry and raise a family with a colonist.

Her first marriage was annulled because they couldn't have children. It was rumored that a jilted man used a curse at their wedding to make them infertile by tying a knot in a hemp rope.

The annulment was recorded as being due to witchcraft!

Her second husband was killed and scalped during a battle with natives.

Third time was the charm with Honore.

He was in the French navy and was allowed to remain in he colony.

Dad's side came over in 1820 and settled in Wisconsin.

Our family is fertile and long-lived.

My maternal grandfather was born in 1882. That's only 2 generations back.

My parents were in their 40s when I came along.

[Murfreesboro]

That's fascinating! My sons and I vacationed all around the Michigan coast in 2022. We stopped in Mackinac Island, and, on the UP, at Taquanamon Falls (sure I butchered that), Whitefish Point, Pictured Rocks, Newberry; Charlevoix and Sleeping Bear Dunes on Lake Michigan, and finished up at Hartwick Pines State Park, an old growth forest. Any of that sound familiar to you?

All my grandparents were born in the 19th century. My mother's father was born in 1875. I think the other three were all in the 1880s. I never knew my grandfathers, though I knew my grandmothers well. My mother was 40 when I was born, and my father was 47.

I've always said that my family has been in the South ever since there's been a South, but I recently learned that the Rev War vet was actually from Pennsylvania. However, he was a captain in the Virginia militia and ended up getting his land grant in Kentucky. Not sure what took him to VA.

My father's father's family came over in the late 1820s through Charleston and settled in Alabama. However, they were run out of England because they ran a newspaper too sympathetic to revolutionary causes, went first to Ireland and then to the US. I'm pretty sure that John Adams stayed with them when he was in London in the 1780s, because he and Thomas Jefferson (in Paris at the time) discussed procuring English language newspapers from a man, Adams' landlord, who shared the name of one my ancestors.

My mother's father's family was here pretty early, I think, but I'm unaware that they fought in the Rev. They were in North Carolina and, I think, ran away from the war into the mountains. I bet lots of people did that.

My mother's mother was the daughter of German immigrants who met and married in NYC in 1865. My great grandmother from that line was actually raised by nuns in a convent in Baden-Baden.

[Andybev01]

The lives our ancestors led sound like fiction as viewed from our technological world.

You can relocate anywhere on the globe in less than 24 hours, speak with and see anyone in the world in real time, in hi-definition and with true surround sound.

Access all of the worlds libraries and museums on a whim.

I can talk with my car, and she usually understands what I say however I'm confident that English is her second language.

[Murfreesboro]

LOL about the car, Andy.

I remember talking with my mother about their decisions to leave Europe, at a time when they knew it was forever, no going back. We used to say that it let you know how bad things must have been over there, that they were willing to leave everything and everyone they'd ever known and come to America. I don't think I could have done that.

My German great-grandmother has always interested me. Her father, a farmer I think, gave her to the nuns to raise when her mother died. She was three. She stayed with them for ten years, but then, when she was 13, they told her she had to become a nun or leave. She left and took a job at a tavern in Baden-Baden as a waitress. She slept above the tavern, as did the family who owned it. For six years she saved her money for passage to America, and rhen, when she was 19, she left and came to NYC. She didn't speak or read English, but in 1865 there was a German quarter there, and I think she had a friend or two who had also made the trip. I often think about what spunk she must have had.

[Andybev01]

I'm sure, given the circumstances, that you could rally yourself.

I'm not a traveller so things would need to get pretty bad for me to even think about that.

[Murfreesboro]

I love to travel, but being rooted is important to me, too. I think that may be a defining characteristic of Southerners. One of the things that distinguishes Southern lit is a powerful sense of place.

Honestly, I don't know if my kids feel that way. Maybe my second son feels Southern. My older boy has been ready to hit the road since he was 5. This winter he's moved to Chicago and has a lakefront apartment. He is in love with the Great Lakes, which he discovered when he moved to Ohio in 2017. I'd never thought about Ohio for five minutes. I thought he'd moved to the dark side of the moon, and was genuinely shocked when I realized that Lake Erie was the only thing between him and Canada (where I've never been).

[Andybev01]

I've never been either.

Although my folks are all from the u.p., my brother and I were born here on the left coast.

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, the UP. My sons and I spent 3 or 4 days up there in '22. I loved that place. I'd never before felt I was so much in the true North (not Civil War North, but North Country) as I did up there. So exotic to me. On our last morning, we stopped off at a place called MI Dogs. It was a kennel of Alaskan husky sled dogs, run by a young woman [26 at that time) who had completed both the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest twice each. She wasn't selling the dogs, but breeding them, and inviting tourists in to play with the puppies and hear her stories. She said it was helpful to socialize the dogs. Her whole life revolved around this subculture of people who participate in those races. I think both my sons would have married her on the spot, lol.

We happened to tour Michigan in late July, which was cherry season. I hadn't even known they grew cherries up there, but they were selling them everywhere, by the roadside. I had been even more ignorant about Michigan than I'd been about Ohio. It was my older son's idea to go there.and tour the coasts. Two weeks before, I hadn't even known which lakes it bordered, so the whole place was a real discovery for me. I loved it. I don't think I'd love the winters there, though.

The only thing that bugged me was how some stores, etc, referred to the Great Lakes as the "Third Coast." That's a term we in the South reserve for the Gulf. I preferred Ohio's term for the Lakes, the North Coast.