DAR

I am proud that a part of my family was instrumental in the formation of this country. My father's ancestors came to America in 1710. They arrived in Philadelphia and made their way to North Carolina to claim land and build a homestead. When I think of just this one pursuit, I realize that I come from sturdy blood and we are not afraid to take chances.

We left Europe (either Switzerland or Germany) for a reason I am yet to find out, and came to a land that was completely foreign to what my ancestors knew. And they fought against the British when the time came, and they won, and built a mill, and they believed in education and church, and in one generation, when the patriarch died, the family split and headed west. The split was due to greed, and the story continued into Tennessee before settling in Illinois.

My older sister and I started the genealogy search in the 1980s when we visited the Library of Congress, and we followed it for a bit, then she became too busy and I became too busy and all was put on the back burner until she retired when she finished the lineage. We saw life differently -- she was interested in the lineage, I am interested in the stories. Now it is my turn to be retired, and I will continue and find out the whys and hows.

And I am going to start another line, my father's maternal side. In other words, I want to follow my paternal grandmother's father and mother. I think there are good stories there as well as my father's paternal side where the lineage is complete. The stories are good, and since I like to write, I am pretty sure I will be attempting a couple of historical fiction pieces.

At this moment, though, I need to start the network of fellow patriots -- people who have ancestors who also fought to win our independence from the Mother Country.

Today's presentation included a woman who spoke of historical based books, specifically one about George Washington's spies who were instrumental in knowing when the British would land and where so he would know where and when to attack. No one knew about the spies until years later, and even today, the historians know that there was one woman who was a spy, but no one knows her name. Hopefully, one day there will be someone interested in their ancestral line, and maybe there will be a letter, a note indicating who this woman was. Without these spies, the presenter said, the war might have gone another way and today we would all have a British accent!

I am still struggling with transferring the pictures from my smartphone to the pc. I will learn this. I knew how to do it from the iphone, it's just the android that I am trying to figure out.

Until tomorrow....have a great day