Is It Spring?
Author: Janet McKee
I currently wear many hats. My interests are genealogy, history, reading, knitting, and more. I now live in an assisted living retirement community.
Family Photo – Years ago
The little girl holding her dolly just celebrated her 81st birthday. She joins her sister and cousin pictured on either side of her, also in their 80’s. The others pictured, mothers, great aunt, and 2 cousins, are all long deceased.
Photo taken in Belmont Massachusetts, 1940’s
Postcards of my Forebears
Ancestor Count Reviewed
Almost every day I devote some time to my genealogy, mostly adding ancestors to my family tree and trying to find more information on particular ancestors. There’re lot of win goose chases involved in this process but usually it yields interesting information. In March 2019 I had 17,481 ancestors on my family tree. Today, March 1, 2022, I have 23,941 ancestors on my family tree (Janet’s Family Tree). An increase of over 6,000 ancestors. Mind boggling I would say, and fun in the process. Ancestors stretching back to the 14th century. Knights and nobles and ordinary folk through the ages. Most of these people located in New England and their forebears came from the British Isles.
According to Ancestry.com my ethnicity as determined from my DNA is as follows:
England and NW Europe. 65%
Scotland. 15%
Sweden & Denmark. 9%
Wales. 5%
Ireland. 5%
Norway 1%
“Lilacs”
In 1912 my father, Jack (Jacob) Schwartzman, was born in Vinnytsia, a town then under Russian control in the part of eastern Europe that is now Ukraine. In the 1920s his family escaped from the tyranny of the Soviet Union and came to America to be free. Upon his arrival here he spoke Russian but not a word of English. He learned quickly and soon became a craftsman of his new language.
The tyranny now engulfing Ukraine makes this a right moment for a poetic essay that my father published in the spring of 1966, when we weren’t even half-way through the original Cold War. Now that we’ve entered a second one, the essay is as timely as it was 56 years ago. Feel free to repost this in a spirit of solidarity.
Solomon and Anna Schwartzman in eastern Europe in 1923
with their younger son Isidore and older…
View original post 928 more words
Books Read – February 2022
- The King Makers Daughter by Phillipa Gregory
- Gone to Idaho by Enid Haag. (the cover is really not related to the plot, and the book is riddled with annoying errors that should have been caught by the proofreader)
- Gone to War by Enid Haag (cover picture doesn’t seem like my image of the heroine Emma, as in the previous book there are numerous grammatical and spelling errors, it makes me wonder about Enid’s education)
- A Long Petal of the Sea by IsabelAllende
- If I live To Be 100, Lessons from the Centenarians by Neenah Ellis
- Crane Pond, A Novel of Salem by Richard Francis
- The Divers Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida
- The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff
- The Color of Air by Gail Tsukiyama
- Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
- Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
- The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory
Please Take Your Pills
Please take your medication ………..or you could end up on the floor and in need of the hydraulic lift!
Please pray for the Ukrainian president
So brave. He stands with his people. A LEADER.
His last communication with European leaders stated that it might be the very last time he talked to them. Putin has basically put a bounty on his head. Ukrainian President Zelensky doesn’t have any military training. He was a professional comedian before running for president and yet he is showing terrifying courage in the face of the assault on Kyiv. He has donned fatigues along with leading members of his cabinet and has taken up arms with those fighting the street to defend his nation. Today, he refused American offers to evacuate him, preferring to stay to fight for his nation and his people. THIS is a president. #Standwithukraine
Fluid and Flexible
Parcel Delivery
I just liked this image. I wonder if a poem will be forthcoming.
Janet's Thread 2 