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birdlike_ancestors_in_flight
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epitome of incomprehensibility
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My father moved from Maine to Montreal when he was 18 and learned French by exposure/necessity - but both places have English in common, and in global terms it's only a slight hop. It would be harder coming from across the ocean, speaking a different language. My European connection is also fourth-generation, the great-grandparents on my mother's side coming from Scotland, but Scotland's been speaking English longer than Canada's existed. If I look to further branches of the family, there's war and birdlike names. A great-great-uncle called Something Falconer was a pilot in WW1. He had a first name, and I keep thinking it's William, but that's because we were talking about William Faulkner. Another bird family is the Fogels (Jewish-German; Fogel is the Yiddish version of the German Vogel, meaning bird) and it's a good thing they didn't stay in Germany, because WW2. Grandpa, my mother's father, had a boring Scottish surname, but he went overseas to fight either before or after his engineering degree, and they put him to work fixing things and he didn't die (well, not until 2002). When I was a kid I used to think he was a train engineer because he had an old-fashioned conductor hat and a whistle. Before I knew about the atom bombs (fifth grade history was a bit of a shock) I used to think of the Allies as the good side instead of the not-as-bad side, and thus Grandpa was all-around awesome: train engineer, war hero, owner of a TV with more than three channels...
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131101
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ever-evolving e_o_i
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Saying "also fourth-generation" doesn't make sense here by itself, does it; I started out by answering raze about ancestors emigrating from Europe in reading_now. But anyone who has birds in their family can contribute. Even those crazies who think they're descended from mammals.
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131101
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e_o_i
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Hm. Ever-evolving, perhaps, but it strikes me that I'm still a mammal. In some ways I'd rather be a bird. For the sake of other women, if not myself necessarily, it would be much easier to lay eggs than to be pregnant for nine months. And flying would be fun. But anyway.
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131101
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e_o_i
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Grandpa was in the war before he studied mechanical engineering. I was asking my parents about this in August, when my student was doing her history unit on WW2. Anyway, they speculated that his mechanical knowledge led him to get less risky tasks. And Mom remembered he'd been involved in the liberation of the Netherlands, that he'd been to a veterans reunion there years later (50th anniversary?) and the Dutch treated his group like heroes, or at least like people who deserved to have a dinner in their honour. Maybe I'm being too dramatic by rounding the number to 50. Maybe it was a less notable anniversary. But he was active and traveling until a couple years before he died. He could have easily gone to Holland in 1994. He died at 81 or 82 in 2002. I think it was 81 because the year of birth I remember is 1921. 2001-2002 was a stressful time for me: grandfather hospitalized, father hospitalized, friend's parents divorcing, getting suspended from school for three weeks, grandfather dying. Add 9/11 to that and remember that my frame of reference for war was the worst war in history. But also that my everyday concerns were more along the line of "do I look weird in this shirt, are these shoes cool enough, I think other people have cooler shoes, why can't I finish my 'goals' at school (we had a goal chart)" and so on.
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191012
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e_o_i
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Correction: L's grandfather came from Poland and not Germany. Just because the Yiddish name is close to the German name doesn't mean they came from Germany. Past e_o_i was making assumptions and not doing research. This particular research: asking L. But yes, his parents moved with him to Canada when he was a kid. I don't know the exact date, but it was clear by then that Jewish people weren't safe in Poland. And his immediate family was able to escape (from likely death - Poland was one of the worst places in the war). And L's grandmother was already in Canada...meaning that none of her close relatives died in the Holocaust, but why do I care more about historical happenings based on their proximity to me? That's just selfish.
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191029
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what's it to you?
who
go
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blather
from
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