I love reading about peoples' family history. Keep on, please.

Oh, that's right--I remember reading about that fire years ago. Damnit.

My great-grandpa Jesse was born around 1883ish (I think?), and after finishing school went around to logging camps in Michigan and Wisconsin giving a shave and a haircut (two bits) to all the loggers before moving onto the next place. He did that for a few years before getting tired of it and moving to Chicago. He walked into Carson's hair cuttery-beauty shop-barber shop looking for a job, got one, and then fell in love with the owner's daughter. He opened his own barber shop on 95th and Ada, just east of Ashland, which he ran until the 1940s, I believe.

Oh, and I look a lot like Alida, her siblings, and her daughter, my grandma Alice. All those Carson genes are exceedingly evident on my face. When I sent my sister a picture of me pre-hair dyeing but after losing a lot of weight, her first response was "Grandma!!" Yeah, I know.

Ha!

(BTW, "Carson" has been on my list of names to name my if-I-ever-have-a-kid kid since I was wee. And you'll love this: it's a combination of my love for both Carson McCullers and Johnny Carson.)

My cousin Jen named her daughter Josephine in honor of Jo March...and Josephine Baker. Gotta like that combo.

Oh I love that, Scrappy!!!!

I like hearing about people's family histories too.

I think I'm going to ask around at my knitting/crochet group tonight for recommendations about where to get snow tires.

My maternal grandmother's mother traveled by: covered wagon, carriage, car, train, and airplane in her life time. Her family moved from Kentucky to Oklahoma in covered wagon. And then later she made trips by train and plane. In fact when she died she had tickets and plans to go fly and see one of her sons in Las Vegas.

My paternal great aunt (Grandma E's sister) moved to Alaska from Georgia after World War II. She and some of her friends all decided to go to Alaska for an adventure, but the friends changed their mind. Great Aunt C told me that she'd already told her family and all her friends she was going and she wasn't going to back out after that. So she went by herself - she took a bus to Seattle and then a ship from Seattle to Alaska. She found a job and then she met her husband and got married.

Their first year or so of marriage they lived in a hotel and ate room service every night.

My great-great-uncle Gus, the one who came over from Sweden with my grandpa and his brother, had married and was working as a carpenter in Chicago. His wife Vicky died in 1948, and after living with Grandpa and the family for a year or so, he moved to Fairbanks and worked on the military bases up there building barracks and doing other carpentry. He came home briefly in the mid-50s, and then moved back up there until the 1960s. He met his second wife Agnes in Fairbanks.

We visited Gus and Agnes in Minneapolis when I was around 7 years old. I remember being really charmed by this little old guy, who had more energy than all of us kids combined, and he would stay up until 4:00 am playing pinochle and then get up on Sunday morning and watch professional wrestling on TV. Agnes was more taciturn, but Gus was a trip.

My grandfather went to law school in Austria before the war. Their version of the bar exam was a series of six tests. He'd passed five of them before the Nazis barred Jews from becoming lawyers, so he never had a chance to take the last test. His immigration papers when he came to the US said he had the equivalent of a bachelors degree, but most of the jobs he had in the US were sewing handbags in a factory. He was very involved in organizing union stuff, though.

Oh, and sometime in the early seventies, he contacted the Austrian embassy to see if he could get the certificate saying he was an Austrian lawyer. The lack of that piece of paper had bothered him his whole adult life. He didn't actually want to practice law, he just wanted the paper. The embassy said that he'd have to pass that last exam to get it.

My BIL's dad was a rather prominent lawyer in Havana, but he got his family out in the last plane out of Cuba before Castro shut it down in 1962. He never practiced law in the States, but I'm not too sure what he did instead.

BIL's sister is older (from his dad's first marriage), so she was already married with kids in 1962. She lived on the same block as Castro's mistress, so whenever he'd come over to visit/get a little nooky, his security forces would shut down the entire block. She hated it, so she and her family were on the same plane out with her dad, his second wife, and BIL, who was 3 at the time.