Ancestral Musings

 Still playing catchup.  If my descendants read this, today is the day that all of the major American news organizations called the 2020 election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  It's going to be interesting. So, week 44's theme is Scary Stuff.  Looking at other people's stories of phantom ships, being shot at, or being a "spook", I really don't have anything comparable to offer.  My mother once told me that an ancestor thought to have been killed during the Civil War actually returned (alive) to his family that Christmas Eve but I suspect embellishment at best and have found no one who would fit the bill of missing soldier in my researches.  That doesn't mean that he didn't exist of course!  But I will instead offer my view as a seven year old of a particularly scary period of modern American history: October of 1962 saw the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding.  My parents and I had spent four months, April to August (Dad actually got there in Februa...

Cecil Prewitt at S'dom, on the Dead Sea, winter 1963-64                 This was meant to be for the week of October 21 to 27 so I am going to play catch up for the next few days.  I've been looking at Ancestry's DNA results and going down a few rabbit trails from there but mostly I've been taking care of our elderly dog, going to Seattle once a week for detailed lessons on the sewing machine I bought just as the pandemic hit (literally), and trying to keep up with laundry and other cleaning.  Last week we sent out our annual letter which usually goes at Christmas but we decided that the way this year was going, it might be a good idea to just send it out before anything else could happen.  I notice that the asteroid missed us at least. There are a number of characters on the family tree, on both sides.  I will say right here that my dad, Cecil Prewitt, was a character and a half.  He was a teller of tall tales, ...