Dear Sara; I'm addicted to the fact that using genealogy, one can dig up so much that is co-incidental. My son-in-law say co-incidences are nothing more than simply what we make of them. I'm simply overwhelmed by the number of related incidences in our early days. It's easy for people to pass off these experiences when they don't have the data in their files that I do. Mark Twain used our town in Calaveras County, Ca as a setting for his short story about a jumping frog. Bret Harte wrote his story "The Outcast's of Poker Flat" about a community I was raised in called Copperopolis. President Uylesses Grant stayed in our little community in the past and anytime the folks in the foothill of the Sierra can make a buck from them, they do so. My ancestors rode with one another in the battles of the Revolutionary and Civil (uncivil?) wars and never realized that in the future they would be related by marriage. I have melded a lot of my relatives together through different records I found dated in the 1800's. I never realized in the 1970's when I worked and made millions for Mormon developers, that I was a descendant of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. My connection is through Lucy Mack, the daughter of Solomon and Lydia Gates Mack. Lucy Mack married Joseph Smith Senior. The Developer's thought me odd, but depended on my building expertise to get them started. I have never informed them of this connection, but plan to. On and on it goes and every so often, I'll relieve my tensions by laying a story on you. I have data back to Sturgis the Stout in early Scotland around the year 940 AD. Sturgis was a viking and one of the first of my Harvey clan (Clan Keith of Montrose) to land there. Thank you for the response. Ron ---------- | From: Sara Pyle <sep1@erols.com> | To: Ron Pyle <piguy@goldrush.com> | Subject: Re: The Ronnie Story of the Week! | Date: Friday, September 19, 1997 7:14 PM | | Dear Ron, | | I'm proud that a distant cousin help Mark Twain's father. And most | interested to learn (not having read a biography of him) that Mark Twain | was the son of a Southerner. | | Now, I am a Yankee, but I think the South has produced the best American | users of the English language. And Samuel Clemens is the first among the | best, in my opinion. (I was a French lit. major and trained to see | language as an aesthetic object. And that's another reason why I hope | *you* keep on sending out stories. I'm getting addicted.) ;) | | Sara Pyle (the one in New York)