A LESSON IN FAMILY HISTORY FOR GRANDDAUGHTER KATIE

THE HOUSE IN THE AUSTRIAN ALPS WHERE KATIE'S GREAT-GREAT GRANDMOTHER WAS BORN

Saturday,  9:00 AM.  20 degrees F, wind NE, calm with strong gusts.  The sky is completely overcast, the humidity 75% and the barometer still falling, currently at 30.16".
   This is sled dog race day, and we will head out to our favorite place to watch, where the race route crosses Star Route at Butterfield Road.  The races are against the clock so one is really watching one team at a time as they come by.  That said, it can be very entertaining as dogs get tangled up and sleds turn over, and to watch a fine team of dogs driven by a skilled driver is a thing of beauty.
   Granddaughter Katie, 13, in Denver needed an "object of family history" for her social studies class, so I sent her the above photo and the story that goes with it.  I hope Almanac readers also find it interesting and inspirational.

Dear Katie:

This is the house in the mountain village of Virgin in the Austrian alps (the Ost Tyrol) where your maternal Great-Great Grandmother was born, sometime in the late 19th Century.  She was born out-of-wedlock because in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire of those days before WWI only the eldest daughter in a family could marry, while her sisters either had to stay single or could become nuns, but her mother fell in love and got pregnant and couldn't be legally married.  

   Also at that time only the eldest male child could inherit property and marry; other boys in a family had to remain single with no inheritance (neither did the girls inherit property) or had to go into the Imperial Army.

   What was Katie's Great-Great-Great-Grandmother to do?  Neighbors were emigrating to America,and they took the little girl who was to be Katie's Great-Great Grandmother to America with them, pretending she was their child.  Katie's Great-Great-Great-grandmother then emigrated to America afterward, and mother and daughter were united again in America in Wisconsin.

   Those old European laws that seem so strange to us were enacted so that farms and businesses did not become split up because of inheritance; it also kept the population in check by keeping marriages and birth rates down, and it provided lots of nuns for the church and lots of young men for the Emperor's  Army.  

   Every family in our nation of immigrants has its stories of abuse in the "old country" that brought them to America, and if each of us looks at our own history we will see how similar we all really are, and what all of us owe to our adopted land of freedom and opportunity, imperfect as it may have been and may still be.
   As imperfect as we may find things today for many reasons, most of us would  be indentured servants or slaves of one ilk or another if our ancestors had stayed where they were born.

   This photo was taken by Katie's Great-Grandmother in the 1970's on a trip to Europe, and Joan and I visited Virgin in the Ost Tyrol in the 1990's and saw the house where Katie's Great-Great-Grandmother was born, pretty much as it looks in the photo.
   May God bless America, the land of freedom and opportunity.

  Grandpa

THE FLAG OF FREEDOM...RAISE IT HIGH!