Australia: Vegemite-flavoured beer

Good lord. Who out there thinks that

a) we need the encouragement, and
b) that constitutes encouragement?

I do not think my dad ever met all of his first cousins. I know that he has non-first cousins with my name that we have never met. I lived in the same town as one of them for a year, but still didn't call her up. Seems odd to be all: "we share realtives, wanna meet up?"

ION, I need todo some work, but I'd rather just go to sleep. It is not deadline work, just dig out from piles and hopefully catch something from slipping through cracks work. It can wait til the morning, right?

I had no idea that the US view of the War was "wrong", but it's true that war before Pearl Harbor gets short shrift in American culture. I don't know how concerning that is, given how little it involves the US. In fairness we have no understanding of the Asian side of the war, compared to our inkling concerning Europe in the late 1930s.

I have a half-uncle I've never met. Paternal grandfather didn't marry his mother because he immigrated and she was not interested in that. My paternal grandmother had a first husband she divorced because he gave up on the immigration thing, and she wasn't interested in going back to Sweden.

I didn't find most of this out until...well, it was 11 and 16. And the 11? Was just before my grandfather died while I was visiting.

In other fun facts, there is some question as to whether my parents are technically married. There was some confusion about county authority, date of issue and that sort of thing. However, the IRS hasn't come after them in 39 years, so we're probably legit, now.

On the WW2 thang, I got the sanitized version until 11th grade US History, with Mr. Smith. That set us straight. Isolationism ahoy! And I'm amused, or rather heartened as bad as that sounds, that The War is openly portraying the US as inept as it was at the get-go. Honestly, I recall Mr. Smith mentioning McArthur's freezing up at the Phillipines, but he still gets lauded for the post-war Japan thing. But he really fucked up.

Funny thing is, it is reminding me of the Cherry..Adams? books I read growing up. All nurse-mysteries, set in WW2, for the most part. Sanitized, sure, cause they were written for pre-teens of the time. But I still remember bits of one set at the Midway battle.

What brings me to my knees it the mention of the US internment camps. I still can't accept that. So fucking wrong. And yet.... Guantanamo, and I'm not at the gates.

I wish I had thetime to start up with the geneology stuff again.

I wish I had the patience. My family's execrable. They're all mad at me for not writing it down, but I'm mad at them for not telling me info to write down. So I threw my hands up in the air and walked away. It was cool up until the pain, though. Even found Ellis Island records and everything.

Just looking at the family tree stuff now, and my paternal grandmother had six other kids than my father, and my paternal grandfather had four others.

And then home called, and I doublechecked, and Miss Di had kids with 5 men and never married, and Ba Pa had kids with 4 women, one of whom he married.

We're Jamaican.

That's how we roll.

My father is related to two of his brothers twice, but we try not to think about it too hard.

Funny thing is, it is reminding me of the Cherry..Adams? books I read growing up. All nurse-mysteries, set in WW2, for the most part

Cherry Ames!

There's a great lesbian knockoff of her...Cherry Aimless...

Yeah, the rape of Nanking is totally ignored in history. All we usually hear about is Pearl Harbor, and the invasion of Singapore, Burma, etc., and the danger of imminent invasion of Australia might as well never have happened. Unless you watch Bridge on the River Kwai or managed to catch Tenko on PBS, like I did.

This morning on the radio, people were calling in to discuss the Ken Burns doc, and many of them were saying how they had no clue about Bataan and Correigedor, and MacArthur's abandonment of the troops. This is where my romance reading came in handy--I read one set in the Pacific theater, starting with the retreat to Correigedor and going through the return to the Phillippines. It's not a bad romance, and does a decent job of covering a lot of the Allied battles there, from Guadalcanal and New Guinea to Okinawa.

My paternal grandmother was the eldest of six. When her dad died, her mother married a widower with six kids. Then they went on to have three more together.

My dad was born just a year or two before his mother's half-brother, the youngest of the fifteen.

It would be monumentally weird to be having kids at the same time your mother is.

Ames! That's it! I read just about every serial in the local library.

ita, I can also find my g-parents' records at Ellis Isle. Or rather, my grandfather, and then my grandmother and her parents (she immigrated at 12- her parents only married to make that easier.)

It would be monumentally weird to be having kids at the same time your mother is.

My mom and her mom were pregnant at the same time.