21,517 ancestors in my family tree. Those branches are getting very weighed down. It is exciting though to keep finding new (to me) ancestors. Of course this is more information than I can handle. There are so many different avenues to explore!! And at the moment I am exploring a different avenue altogether – i.e. the genealogy of my neighbors in Belmont Massachusetts in the 1940’s.

Norway was an occupied country for 5 long years during the 2nd World War. This occupation included the far northern area of Spitsbrgen, a very important area for tracking weather in the North Atlantic.

This is a sad one. My childhood friend born about the same year as my husband Ian is no longer alive. In fact he passed away almost 40 years ago. His widow is his high school girlfriend. They were quite an item in high school.

How I would love to share this latest tidbit from my research about my childhood fiends and neighbors. I miss my siblings especially at times like this. In Belmont Mass our next door neighbors on one side were the Ginsburghs. First of all, I discovered that they spelled their name with an h at the end. I just naturally thought Ginsburg – I now learn 70+ years on it’s spelled Ginsburgh with an “h”. It was a family of 4, Harold and Betty the parents and Allen and Ethel the children. What I really want to share with my brother and sisters is that I discovered that Mrs Ginsberg lived to age 103!! Who would have thought!

1. Inside the O’Briens, by Lisa Genova, Avery interesting read about Huntington’s Diseas
2. Iris and Her Friends, A Memoir of Memory and Desire, by John Bayley, part of his recall of his life with his wife Iris Murdoch as she was a victim of Alzheimers, Very well written.

A memory of Marcia McDonald. We were very small, riding our tricycles. I rode ahead down the slight hill to stop at the home of Mrs. Campbell. Marcia came after me and as she stopped her wheel somehow caught the wheel of my tricycle and I toppled over, hitting my head on the sidewalk. The bleeding was profuse. Mrs Campbell came out of her house and carried me up the hill around the corner to my home. She was wearing a white dress – needless to say it was soon quite red. I had to have several stitches in my forehead. I still have the scar almost 80 years later.

My childhood friend Marcia McDonald (and her twin brother Arthur)) were a year younger than me. In the early elementary school years Marcia and I spent a lot of time together. Our houses were near and her home was where I and other children of similar age would hang out,

In the summer the McDonald family went to their cabin on a lake in Skowhegan Maine. One summer in the 1940’s I was invited to spend some time with the family there. It was beautiful and they even had a motorboat.

I was a year and a half older than the McDonald twins, Marcia and Arthur, so I was a grade ahead of them as we grew through the school years. So it was only natural that in Junior and then Senior High we would each develop new interests and new friends.

And then we diverged even more when I left home to go to college. I eventually lost touch completely. Occasionally though my sisters met up with Evelyn, the twins older sister. So I learned that Arthur was married and still living in Belmont. And Marcia had married and was living in Portland Maine.

Now it is many years later and I am searching for information about the McDonald family. I found that the father, called Archie, passed away in 1972 at the age of 68. The mother was Swedish, Hildur. She lived 10 years longer and passed away at age 76. In the early years when I knew the family, the father took the children to the Catholic Church. The mother was Protestant but I wasn’t aware of her going to church.

Their home on Prebble Gardens Road was always open and welcoming. They had several interesting trees in their back yard. These had been brought to the area in the 1800’s when that land was part of the Benton Estate. And they had a brick wall forming part of the border of their property – again another remnant of the Benton Estate.