#52ancestors: Multiple Moves and Schools

 Spring is coming!  This morning the sun is out and even though it's chilly, the claim is that we'll get into the lower 50s today.  My husband and I are both fully vaccinated, just waiting for one more week to allow the vaccines to reach full effectiveness, and it will be possible to see our children this summer if all continues as it has been.  So, reason for optimism!  

I think we had a topic like Multiple last year, but most people concentrated on things like multiples in the sense of twins or triplets, or multiple marriages.  I'll have to look at what I did then before I publish this but I just finished reading a couple of other peoples' entries and it was really interesting.  One woman whose great(a few times) grandfather had 29 children by three wives and her quest to track down all of those children (still missing about 8), a woman whose grandfather had multiple jobs during his life and had left a written and recorded account of those jobs,   I do not have anyone with that huge of a family that I've found, my own father and many of his jobs have already been a subject here, and there are no twins that I've ever heard of on either side.  No, the one thing that might be a little unusual that I've thought of is the really quite large number of schools I went to by 8th grade.  Nothing record-setting, but it did involve a lot of moving around and travel.

So, when I started Kindergarten in 1960, my classroom was in the basement of Central Elementary School, in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.  First and Second grade were in Mary Purcell Primary school across the street, a more modern building for the time and all above ground level!  Third grade was when things went a little wonky and we lived in Israel while my father worked on a construction project on the Dead Sea.   The American (more or less) community working on that project hired a teacher for a one room class that had two first graders, two second graders, and four third graders.  Older children had another teacher and met separately.  After a few months of this, it was clear that neither I nor the other girl in the class were thriving so both sets of parents took us out and we started learning at home (separately).  Our books and other materials came from a school in Baltimore, and the program was known as Calvert Courses.  I still have my ruler, almost 60 years later.  My mother was ultimately very pleased with the results of this experiment in homeschooling but when we returned to the States, she enrolled me back at Central Elementary again for fourth grade.  By now it was apparent that there was no building going on in our immediate region and at the end of that year they sold our little house and took off for California for the summer.  Dad worked, and we lived in motels for the entire summer. 

Fifth grade was actually the hardest.  I ended up in three different schools over the course of the year, in Olympia Washington (near extended family), in Concord California (for almost five whole months!) and then in Pullman Washington for the last school quarter.  And then we moved to a suburb of Seattle, Kirkland, for sixth grade.  Junior high started in 7th, and we actually were still in the same town!  But, in 8th grade it seemed best to my parents to move back to Olympia, and that is where we went.  I graduated from high school there, and my parents lived there until the end of their lives.

This little essay is mostly for my children who I made sure only changed school districts once!