Category: Adam
My father was an Adam. His father descended from Germans who settled in Ohio. His mother was Scotch-Irish with a touch of English and French Huguenot. Through her line I am related to many US presidents and have a direct ancestry to European nobility, including Charlemagne.
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GRANDMA AND SINCLAIR LEWIS
I was filing away some of my grandparents’ papers the other day when I spotted a short letter addressed to my grandmother, Cecile Belle Adam, in October 1940. It was a simple letter about missing a dinner engagement or similar and it made me start wondering why do we bother keeping such old correspondence. Then I looked at who sent it and immediately thought: Could it be? Could it be THE Sinclair Lewis? The Nobel Prize laureate for literature? Not a chance, I thought, and filed it away. But it was…
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MASSACRE AT MYSTIC
Now that Thanksgiving is over and today is Native American Heritage Day let’s look at what happened after that peaceful gathering in Plymouth in 1621. During my early years of schooling in Wisconsin, I learned of how Native Americans welcomed new immigrants and taught them to plant corn and catch eel and thus survive in the New World. Relations between the Native Americans and the Puritans appeared to be good and the two co-existed. Fast forward a few chapters in my history book and I learned that Native Americans were being…
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DAY 9. St Charles, Illinois
My grandfather was a Methodist minister and preached in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Idaho, Washington and California. My dad was a deep sea diver and brought the family to Southern California and Alaska. My uncle Carl was a journalist and settled with his family near Chicago. Because of these geographic differences I never got too close with the only first cousins I have – Jennifer, Jeff and Lee. About the last time the whole family got together was in Seattle around 1957 a year before I was born as shown in this…
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MY SCOTS-IRISH KIN
St Patrick’s Day is over here in Australia and I didn’t celebrate but I could have. I’m only one eighth Irish but I think that still qualifies me for a green beer. My Irish ancestry is the most colourful part of my family tree and includes a bunch of rough and tumble Scots-Irish immigrants to America. My Scots-Irish ancestors came to America in the 1720s and most likely joined thousands of other Scots-Irish immigrants who made the arduous trek along the ‘Great Road’ from Pennsylvania to the fringes of the frontier…
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