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.

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.

Yeah, the more I learn about McArthur the less I like him. I read somewhere that Roosevelt and his superiors wanted to fire McArthur but they couldn't because he was too popular back home. (McArthur was finally fired during the Korean war due to his violating orders, an unfortunate consequence of which was bringing China into the war against the US.)

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!

oh, I read these if 5th grade. They were incredibly sexist, though. Not surprisingly.

Yeah, the rape of Nanking is totally ignored in history.

Not in San Francisco, I assure you. It's a big deal to both Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans here.

But since there are more Chinese-Americans it definitely gets a bit more push.

After the internment camps the Japanese-Americans sort of declined to go back and live in easily round-up-able communities. I mean, we have a Japantown, but it's more like the cultural center for all the Japanese-Americans who live in the suburbs.

It's not like Chinatown, or The Richmond.

Correigedor

I swear to god, I recall a song about this. Possibly Baez or Knopfler.

Reading Nevil Shute books has been fascinating. Requiem for a Wren contains what is basically a textbook case of PTSD, with ultimately tragic consequences. It never mentions the term (not coined yet) nor shell-shock (because it isn't shells per se that cause it, afterall the character was female, so what'd she know of..but Shute knew) but it..oh, reading it, it just hit me about halfway through. At that point? There wasn't an official diagnosis, but those who live it, knew it.

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.

I distinctly remember seeing your sister's giant family tree map thing that had taken over her wall, and her thrill over the fact that your mother is a quadroon. I pointed out that that made her an octoroon, which is equally funny in my opinion, but she said it was irrelevant and not nearly as interesting.

I own Tenko. God, for all my war issues, I love PoW drama.

I tried to reassign kids to nameless spouses on my father's side of the tree in the software, and I think all I have to show for it is RSI and a headache. Blargh.

The Ellis Island records were a complete surprise to me, because none of them were for immigrating relatives. Just visiting ones.