Posted on 12/24/2008 3:28:17 PM PST by franksolich
I never met my great-grandfather, the father of the mother of my mother, who died in 1938, long before I was born. All the people and events described herein can be placed and dated in the Carpathian Mountains of central Europe circa 1880-1890, and in northeastern Pennsylvania circa 1890-1940.
One time I interviewed his second-oldest son (i.e., an uncle of my mother; by then a long-retired Ph.D. of "education"), and asked, quite pointedly, if there had been any particular problems or interesting situations for him, given that my great-grandfather, his father, was a dwarf, and by the time his own children were 7 or 8 years old, they towered over him.
(Excerpt) Read more at conservativecave.com ...
It is and please continue it.
It is done, though.
Did you read all two pages?
By the way, Merry Christmas!
Apparently he never did, though; apparently he preferred his own home-made wine.
I say "apparently" because this of course is based upon reminescences of ancients, whose memories might, or might not, have been fallible.
But that he managed to prosper where tens of thousands did not, I suspect it's true; that he wasn't a customer of saloons.
No I will go back. Thought it read to be continued.
Merry Christmas to you too.
It is. I've heard stories of my family similar to this, although lacking much of the tragedy this family experienced. There is another entire side of my family of which I know very little, however. That side immigrated slightly later than this one, but mostly wound up somewhere in Pennsylvania. Germans, they were. I wonder if we have any connections to this family?
What little I know is that my Great-Grandpa Max was the youngest son of his family, and one of the last to move here, in the 1890’s. He was a stonemason, and a hell raiser, partying all over Pennsylvania, according to family legends, with Bob Hope's grandfather. Later they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where the family had a farm, and he supposedly did the stonework at Ohio Polytechnic. If there is such a college, I haven't been able to find out where, and I was a child when I learned this, and may badly misremember details. I was told he died during the flu pandemic in 1918.
Is this your family, by chance?
Well, one never knows what one is going to find, when looking into the past. There's a lot of bad, a lot of good, in all families, including my own.
However, as a nun explained to me when I was a little lad, one should never be ashamed of one's ancestors, even if gangsters or painted women.....because without these people being part of the past, one would never have existed himself. They had to be, for one to be.
Something along the lines of the commandment about "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother."
That having been explained to me at a young and impressionable age, I've always delved into the past without hesitation.....and found, as most who do the same find, much more that is praiseworthy (and humbling to oneself) than worth condemning.
All honor to those who came before us, who made us.
Is this your family, by chance?
There's many institutions that changed names over the years, and Ohio Polytechnic may be called something else now, perhaps one of the colleges or universities there with a strong engineering school?
This story involves the family of my mother, and most of those people, and their descendants, remained in northeastern Pennsylvania.
However, the family of my father was based in northwestern Pennsylvania, near Ohio, but the only Ohio connection of which I'm aware is that my father attended Wittenburg College there, in music, instrumental and vocal.
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