With the 17th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks drawing near, my mind is drawn back to the images of the First Responders, laden with gear, climbing up the stairs at the twin towers as everyone else was coming down to escape. I am thinking about all the lives lost that horrid day, including the lives of the First Responders- the fire fighters who put their lives on the line every day.
I wanted to find a way to connect this week’s blog post with last weekend’s display of hateful bigotry: white supremacists violently protesting the removal of Confederate General Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. Demanding that Confederate symbols remain is another way of saying “We approve of the Confederate stance that blacks should be enslaved; that they are subhuman.” Even if only the most racist of Americans would actually mouth those words today (like the white supremacists in Charlottesville), back in the 1950s and 1960s, whites spoke openly against blacks entering their communities–and thought they had good reason.
The good news is that my book will be published next April-2018. Hooray!! The bad news is - getting a book ready to be published is a grind! I'm lucky to have a wonderful publisher in She Writes Press. @BrookeWarner [...]
Cousin Maria Gärtz and Linda Gartz visiting Gerstheim (May, 2011) a German town and our ancestral home in Alsace. The original church no longer exists, but its records have been microfilmed. So who was the first bold soul [...]
First page of Josef Gärtz’s diary on right; lower left he wrote “Kronprinz Wilhelm” see detail Even handwritten documentation from our ancestors can lead us astray as we search for the details of their pasts. In my case, [...]