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.

Yeah, you need some serious mapping software.

I am worried that family lines may cross 6-7 generations back when people from my mother's side and we think my father's side were in what became West Virginia at the same time.

Sadly, I think I lost a bunch of my stuff (it can all be re-created, but when)because I was using software that I never updtaed and won't even run on new machines. I think the next time I start up I will enter it all online.

The British view of the war...well, I'm a war sap. It's not quite as bad as slavery to make me squirt tears, but it's bad. I'm not rational on the subject. The British view is so fucking tired. Of adults and children and old people having bombs dropped on them all the time, and families fractured so that some of them might survive, and all this pretty damned close on the heels of the last big war, and the Germans are RIGHT FUCKING OVER THERE and...

I have a handful of vaguely pop culture related responses:

1) I'm always fascinated by stories from Brit children who grew up during the war. I love the movie Hope and Glory which portrays the blitz as something like a ten year old boy's paradise of pure anarchy. There's also the recurrent theme of children displaced from the cities and sent to the country, which is the root story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But appears in many accounts of that era.

2) A big part of post-war Britain's response to American Rock and Roll (and jazz before that) was that it was seen as so culturally alive and vivid after the rationing which went on for many, many years after the war. The whole effect of rationing on the British psyche is also reflected in the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. And the book Absolute Beginners talks about it a lot.

3) When the first wave of British punks flirted with Nazi symbolism there was - for most of them - not an identification with British fascism, but a repudiation of the whole "we suffered and beat the Nazi's you ungrateful bastards" myth.