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family history

Some Family History



My mother sent me an e-mail of stories and pictures from a website detailing the V-bomb attacks on Antwerp late in World War II.

Imagine this: you are a fourteen year-old girl. It's a couple weeks before Christmas and all your friends want to go to town to see the new movie. They want you to come too. You say you can't afford it and want to save the money for Christmas. They plead with you and try to get you to come along and won't take "no" for an answer. You have a hard time convincing them (and yourself) that you don't want to come, but eventually they give up trying to drag you along and go without you.

The cinema gets hit by a bomb and all your friends die.

That's one of my mother's stories. This is the cinema:



The Rex Cinema, Antwerp, Belgium. December 1944.





Happy birthday, Dad.

Wherever you are. I miss you.

(Today would be his 75th birthday if he were still alive)

Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/34024.html


Genetics

Interesting. As I shed my work clothes for a pair of ratty black jeans and a Skinny Puppy t-shirt old enough to get into the bar on it's own I remembered my mother telling me about my grandfather changing into his scruffiest clothes after finishing work at the bank. Yes, my grandfather worked in a bank. I never knew him. He died in 1948 at the age of 48. Men in my family don't live long. This is part of my concern about wasting my life...

Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/31390.html


Damn! This is funny.

Well, I got off on one of my little information collection tangents, looking up some information on the area my father's family comes from. He told me long ago that the area, which is now part of the Ukraine was controlled by the Austro-Hungarian empire at the point his four grandparents emigrated. Looking up the overlap that places the village in the eastern part of Galicia. Why is that funny? Because this area was the western extent of the Goths at the point where the tribe/kingdom split in the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. That puts me on the Visigoth side.


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