Lineage

On my father's side I can trace my lineage back as far as 1580 in Switzerland. So we were Swiss German Swiss. I think they were Protestants and since many wars were fought back then 6 brothers of my lineage eventually came to England and then to the United States in the 1720s in something like the Mayflower up the Philadelphia River to Pennsylvania. Eventually my ancestors on my father's side wound up in Kansas after my Great Grandfather was a Captain in the Northern Army during the Civil War. In the 1870s he started a Drug Store in Kansas and the drugs were primarily supplied by Native Americans (herbal remedies) from a nearby Indian Reservation. He owned this drug store in Kansas until around 1925 when he sold it and retired. My grandfather grew up on a ranch and farm in Kansas with 4 other brothers and sisters and eventually became a Baseball pitcher named "Pinky" because of his red hair. Then he became an Electrical Contractor working in Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon and finally bought a house in Seattle around 1925 or 1930 where my Dad went to High School. My father's mother came from Williams, Texas and had two sisters. One came to California and bought a hotel there. The other moved to Flagstaff and married and owned a gold mine in Arizona that my father worked at when he was 18. He said he loved the deserts around Gila Bend, Arizona where the mine was. I think my grandmother's uncle was one of the World War I  U.S. Army Generals in World War I in Europe.  My father had two brothers and two sisters. I also was born in Seattle and moved to California to San Diego with my father, mother and her mother in 1952 when I was 4.

My mother's family are from Scotland. So, I am half Scottish. On my father's side they have been here in the U.S. since the 1720s. My Mother's father was born in Boston where he got ill at age 8 and when his father went to get medicine for him one cold winter day, his father got ill and died. This caused the mother to go back to Scotland where she was from to Ayr near Glasgow. Then my grandfather married someone else and American by birth from Scotland and moved back. My grandmother (Mom's Mom) was born in PHiladelphia and had 11 brothers and sisters but when her home burned down around 1900 they were forced to move back to Scotland back to Clydebank near Glasgow as well. So, the disasters helped my grandparents meet and marry in their lives because they both were born in America but had to grow up some in Scotland because of family disasters in the U.S. Then my grandparents married because they both had American citizenship from being born here and moved to Nebraska where many of my grandmothers siblings worked on the main newspaper there in Omaha. Eventually, my grandfather bought a model T Ford and drove his family to Seattle where my mother grew up after being born in Nebraska. In Seattle my parents eventually married in 1946 and I was born in 1948.

I took my mother in 1999 to see where her parents had grown up in Scotland in Ayr and Clydebank. However, when we flew to Germany she had a problem because of friends who had died in World War II in France. My mother passed away in 2008 here in California. However, I felt very at home (like coming back home) when I went to northern Scotland and Switzerland. It would be easy for me to live either place because I could feel my ancestors and likely relatives also there today in my ancestral homes.