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Reconnecting

Posted on March 29th, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Hobby

Hello again. I called this post “Reconnecting” for two reasons. One, I am reconnecting (I hope) with my readers, and two, I want to talk about what I have been doing to reconnect with some family members.

But first, I need to know if my kick-ass new hat passes muster. Whaddya think? There’s nothing like a new snap-brim German fedora to make a guy feel like Indiana Jones. That’s me sitting in a chair on my balcony. The picture was taken with my iPhone at arm’s length, so you don’t see the glass of wine on the table next to me. The hat was purchased two weeks ago at a bazaar in Ansbach, the community where I worked for the previous two years. We also bought wine there at that time….and again this past weekend in Schweinfurt. Our favorite vintner, Friedrich Daudistel, was there at both bazaars to make us happy. We have been buying his wine for years and are always satisfied. This last purchase was a case of Blauer Burgunder and a case of trocken (dry) Riesling.

I have been away from blogging for a while, and I have missed it…and you! When I was hospitalized, the docs told me that I needed to get exercise, so that’s what I have been doing. I’m enjoying it, but it keeps me from some of my other activities. I have hooked a pedometer to my belt and try to get 10,000 steps every day. Lately, I have been doing that in half-a-day. I also took my bike over to the bike repair shop to get in shape for spring, and I now have it back, so look out pedestrians! I’m ready to hit the bike trails as well.

Another activity has been to get started (again!) with the genealogy hobby. This time, I have invested money and a lot of time. I have purchased the Family Tree Maker program to serve as my database. With that, I got started on ancestry.com, and that allows me to connect with other researchers who are following the same families. One fun side benefit to ancestry.com is the link to find famous relatives. Now, there is a definite caveat to this. The information is only as good as what people submit in their own family trees. Let me tell you, there is a lot of crap out there on the internet. A lot of misinformation that keeps getting passed on. I’m guilty of it too. I don’t always document what I find in other people’s trees. Bad practice! Anyway, I have gone to the link and learned about famous relatives.

First, let me repeat the caveat, this is only as good as the information that people submit. A quick story before I tell you about my famous relatives. I offered to do this for a friend and look up some of her famous relatives. She gave me her father’s name and her grandfather’s name. I think she also had her mother’s name. From that, I could trace her family back several generations. Then I made the fateful click on the “find famous relatives’ button. I gasped when I saw what came up. I quickly phoned her and said, “Debbie, you are related to Queen Elizabeth!” That little bit of euphoria for her lasted about a day until I checked to see just HOW she was related. Supposedly, she is related to the Queen through the Queen Mother. But that only works if their common ancestor was over 200 years old when she had a daughter. I don’t think so! As I said, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

With that in mind, here are some of the people that I am supposedly related to: Francis Lightfoot Lee (signer of the Declaration of Independence), Harriet Lane (niece of the bachelor President James Buchanan, and who acted as his First Lady), author Robert Penn Warren, George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush, William Ellery (the only representative from Rhode Island to sign the Declaration), George Wythe (another signer of the Declaration and later mayor of Williamsburg, VA), First Lady Bess Truman, First Lady Margaret Mackall Smith Taylor (wife of Zachary Taylor), First Lady Angelica Van Buren (wife of Martin Van Buren), Samuel Adams (an organizer of the real Tea Party), John F. Kennedy, First Lady Laura Bush, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, (of course this would include JFK, Jr., and Caroline Kennedy), Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart), Jimmy Hoffa, actor William Holden, L.M. Montgomery (the lady who wrote Anne of Green Gables), Robert Peel (founder of the modern concept of the police force….and he is a direct ancestor…my 21st great grandfather), Charles Carroll of Carrollton (another signer of the Declaration), Lyndon Baines Johnson, author Margaret Mitchell of Gone with the Wind fame, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lady Nancy Astor, Ty Cobb (famous baseball player of yore), actress Lillian Gish, English author George Eliot, actor Cary Grant, and my most favorite: Butch Cassidy. My relatives also include Booker T.Washington, Langston Hughes, P.B.S. Pinchback and Oscar Stanton De Priest. All of them are famous African Americans. In case you aren’t aware, I’m white! In going back through my tree, I have found that some of my relatives found comfort with the slaves.

On my mother’s side, I have no famous relatives….yet. They all came from Germany, and I haven’t yet subscribed to the world-wide access on ancestry.com. I may find that I have some famous German relatives as well. I did find one g-g-g-g grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War. If I could document all of that, I suppose my daughters could become members of the DAR, but knowing my kids, they’d rather spend the night locked in a Taco Bell with no rest room. Ha Ha.

So that’s what I’ve been up to part of the time. I will tell you a bit later about my recent volksmarching experiences. Stay tuned.

Retired-Ed

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Spring paid us a visit….and then left

Posted on March 10th, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Daily Life

Well, I’m back after an absence from the Internet, some of it enforced by nature.  We’ve been having quite a winter here in our corner of Germany. Many would think, “Yeah, so what else is new?” But honestly, our winters have not been all that severe usually here in Unterfranken. But this year has been an exception. I am SO ready for spring. The week before last was wonderful. Spring actually came for a visit. Temperatures were over 10°C (50°F) for a few days and all of our snow melted. But alas, the melting snow produced another perennial problem: flooding. Our village is bisected by a stream. It has a name, and I suppose it is a small river, a tributary of the Main (pronounced like “mine”) River. Our river is called the Wern, and it is really not much to talk about….until it floods. I have some visual effects for you.

This is the view looking down toward the river from my house on January 31st. As you can see, we had had some snow. You can click on the image in order to enlarge it for viewing. By the way, that’s our “Wintergarten” that is shown at the right of the picture. I think that the word doesn’t need a translation; it’s almost the same in English. The river is hardly visible, just beyond that first tree line down in the valley.

So we had snow. Over and over again. I really got tired of shoveling. I had to shovel again last Saturday morning, and I was not at all happy about that. As I said, however, it did warm up for a while, and all of the snow melted over a 2-3 day period. We’ve had flooding in the past. In fact, the flood plain that borders the river has become inundated almost every year since we have lived in our house (15 years+), but this time had some serious consequences. The picture on the left is almost the same view, taken from my house on February 26th. The water kept rising and rising. As I said, we’ve had floods before, but this time it seeped into the underground cables and wiped out our telephone and internet service for the better part of 5 days. It affected the entire portion of town east of the river, and that’s where we live. I had my iPhone for some internet connectivity and email, but writing a blog on an iPhone tries my soul. The Queen said that she thought she was going through withdrawal. There were no emails from the kids, no blogs from Drew and Wendy, and (worst of all) no online shopping was available. Somehow, she managed to cope, but I’m not sure how.

To give you an idea of just how extensive the flooding was, the picture on the right is of the meadow (flood plain) on a normal day. This picture was actually taken from the edge of the river looking back at the Siedlung, or “housing area”, where we live. What is not visible in this particular picture is just off to the right, and it is a religious monument with the date “1685″ etched into it. Impressive. I’ll try to post a picture of that when space permits.

Since my recent hospitalization, the doctors have been telling me that I need to get more exercise. I have obliged them by walking and exercising every day. I am pleased to say that I passed the 23 pound mark this morning, and I am enjoying my walks as long as the weather stays nice. Cold I can handle, but I don’t like to walk in the rain. We’ll see how things go come spring when the rains come. The picture on the left was taken on one of my walks during the flood. This is the view of the valley from the opposite side, as compared to the previous picture. The sign warns of high water. No surprise there, huh? It did recede in about 3 days, but it took a while for the ground to be able to support the equipment from Deutsche Telekom to get in and repair the damage to the cable.

We live in Oberwerrn, or the Upper Wern area (I can’t account for the extra “r” in the name), and just downstream from us, less than 1 km away, is our sister city of Niederwerrn, or Lower Wern. The picture on the right is of a bridge across the Wern, and you can see just how close the water came to flooding the bridge. Once since we have lived here, that road had to be closed because the bridge was flooded. There are other access roads to Niederwerrn, but there is only one access our our housing area, and my landlady (and downstairs neighbor) was joking that she keeps hoping that our bridge will get flooded so she won’t have to go to work. Great idea, but the Queen had another thought. She was afraid that our bridge would get flooded and she wouldn’t be able to get home from work. That’s a scary thought, but there are some farm roads that I know of and I’d be able to get into and out of the village. Right now, we are down to one car because mine is in the shop and has been there for three weeks. I blew an engine while driving on the Autobahn almost a month ago. The Queen is certain that it was caused by a sudden stop that I had to make to avoid hitting some obliviot in the next lane who decided to pass while I was passing her! Seriously, I doubt if a sudden deceleration would cause such damage, but one never knows. Perhaps it was because the old engine had more than 340,000 km on it! So I would be driving the Queen around even if our bridge had flooded. Lordy, I hope to get my car back by the end of the week!

This final picture represents something of a novelty, at least for my American readers. In the background is a sports field that was flooded This field is used by the “Jugendsportverein“. Here in Germany, kids don’t get involved in organized sports through their school. Instead, their athletic competition is provided through “sportvereins” or “athletic club. Almost every community has one. This field is used for korbball, which is sort of a cross between team handball and basketball. I have never seen it played in the States. But the really interesting part of this picture is in the foreground. The plowed area is for flowers. This is a pick-your-own flower plot. You’ll find them all over the place. The blue drum in the foreground is for payment. Later in the spring, various flowers will be blooming, and customers will come and cut their own flowers and leave the required amount of money in the bucket. That’s something else I have never seen in the States, and I doubt if I ever will. Maybe when hell freezes over and then thaws, causing a flood.

Retired-Ed

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