You have questions. I have answers.
This post is in response to the meme I posted yesterday.
I have a lot of great memories of my childhood thanks to the family I was born into. My dad was the youngest of fourteen, eleven of whom lived to adulthood. My mom was the middle child of seven. Needless to say I had a huge extended family. I've found that it's usual to be closer to one side of the family than the other, and in our case it was my dad's family (the Kalwat clan) to whom were most tied. My mom's family (Plitts and Sabos) were divided and dysfunctional thanks to my malevolent maternal grandmother, but I did grow to be very close to my mom's two sisters who both moved back to the CT when I was a teenager.
My dad's parents (Georg and Anna) both immigrated to the States from Lithuania during the late 19th century, although they didn't actually meet until they had each settled down in New Britain, CT. Georg was an ethnic German; the story is that that branch of the family moved from Germany to Lithuania because of religious discrimination. I'm guessing they were Lutherans living in the Catholic southern Germany. For whatever reason, they never gave up their German culture, and making the mistake of asking "But doesn't that make us Lithuanian?" only happened once.
Anna was a Jew, born in Marijampole, Lithuania. I did a bit of research on it. Before WWII it had over 90% Jewish population. After the Holocaust there were just a few Jewish families left alive, and I can't find any information if they might be my family. Anna converted when she married Georg whom she met while they were both working at a local factory.
My mom's parents were more Yankee, or at least her mother, Ida, was. She was a Phillips, and apparently they immigrated to the southern colonies back when the country was just that - a Colony. I've been told that there's a family tree on file in the Hartford library showing that we're related to the Lee's of Virginia. I have no idea if that's true or not. My mom's dad, Elmer Sabo, had been born to a couple who had immigrated from Hungary and subsequently had their name Szabo changed to Sabo at Ellis Island. Oh, come to think of it, Kalwat came out of Ellis Island, too. It was originally Kalwaitis. Thanks, Ellis Island, for taking those liberties with our family names!
Ida and Elmer eloped, which caused a big enough stir at the time to make the front page of the papers. Elmer was, I'm told, a most charming womanizer and con-man. He was also a bootlegger and a rum-runner during Prohibition in Indiana. I remember as a child being delighted to have such a disreputable relative, and one of my favorite stories was how two of his friends, admiring my Aunts Verna and Shirley's Halloween masks, asked if they could borrow them for a bit - and then used them to rob a bank. For which they were promptly caught.
Ida divorced him (big surprise), then married a German immigrant named Emil Plitt and went on to raise a second family with him. Lots of drama ensued, and that's enough of that.
Both grandfathers died when my parents were young. Georg died of some kind of degenerative spinal disease that effected his brain. Elmer died in a car accident. (I'd always fantasized that the Feds got him while he was trying to escape with a carload of moonshine, but I think it was much more mundane than that.)
My brother, cousins, and I are all Baby Boomers. Well, three were born before the war ended, but we grant them Boomer status nonetheless :) We were a very close family. Not only was every holiday celebrated together, but we all attended the same small Evangelical Lutheran church and most of us kids were educated at the Lutheran school that our church ran. A very, very small school. Four classrooms, two grades to a room (1&2, 3&4, 5&6, 7&8). Because there were so many of us Kalwats born in such a relatively short time after the war, we pretty much took over the school. (I was the only kid who did not have a cousin born in the same year as me. Or even a year before me. Before and after that year (1949), there were always multiple births.) The way the school worked - and if you weren't me - you were guaranteed to have at least one cousin in your grade and a couple more in the grade that shared the room with you. Me? Every other year I got to share with my brother, who was just a year younger than me. Which was just fine when it happened, because my brother and I were always close, always good friends. Just to add to the Walton's Mountain/Little House on the Prairie feel of it all, Aunt Helen taught typing, Aunt Emma taught Home Ec, Uncles Maynard and Rudy taught shop, and our eldest cousin's wife, Wendy, was our choir director. Plus the other uncles and aunts who were on school committees. Let's just say that switching to the public school system in Grade 9 was a bit of a shock to the system.
Our cousins were our friends as well as our family. As kids there were constant sleep-overs during the summer. One aunt and uncle rented a teeny (really. teeny. cabin at the beach every summer for years, and we'd all descend after church on Sunday. Fifty plus adults and kids. It was great. There'd be a small fire outside at the end of the night, and we'd sit and sing while Aunt Bertha or Aunt Billie played the ukulele. At Christmas we'd cram into my grandmother's house because there were always guests invited along with the hordes of family. There'd be caroling in German and Santa Claus would come, and really it was just about perfect.
All but one of my aunts and uncles are dead. Both of my parents are dead. The first of my cousins has died. The downside to the joy of being raised in such a large family, of course. The cousins still keep in touch. There's a Yahoo group that one of us created. We have periodic reunions, because our cousins' kids wanted to keep the traditions going, bless their souls. They're all adults now with kids of their own, and I still can't get over my cousins being grandparents :) There are only a couple of us cousins who didn't have kids, but the rest of them made up for it. Even with the loss of the original generation started by Georg and Anna, we're still a huge family. And every generation moves farther up the ladder. My dad's generation were blue collar for the most part. Now we're awash in PH.D.s and professional folk. Where we started out concentrated in New Britain, CT, we're now spread out over North America and Europe. At the last reunion I attended, I was standing with a couple of my cousins looking over the wedding picture of our grandparents while the family swirled around us. One of them said, "I wonder if they ever imagined this when they got married?" Probably not :)
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This will be a lot shorter to answer. I met Dar online at Television Without Pity back when it was still called Mighty Big TV. There was this new Joss Whedon show gearing up - Firefly - and I was dying to see it, so I started posting in the "saloon" where general non-TV gabbery took place, and there was this funny, strong, wise woman named Dar posting there a lot. We chatted, got to know each other a little. She was going to be hosting a Firefly room at WorldCon, which was being held in Toronto that year. And she also had just been in a car accident that left her with a concussion a week before the con. I offered (insisted, really) to drive up to her place to help her get ready for the Con, and that's how it started :)
I've also made a number of very good friends through Firefly and TWoP, people I feel both lucky and proud to have in my life now. It cracks me up when people scoff at the idea of meeting good people online (my brother still jokingly refers to all of my friends as "the internet axe murderers"), because I'm here to tell you - it certainly worked out well for me *g*
I have a lot of great memories of my childhood thanks to the family I was born into. My dad was the youngest of fourteen, eleven of whom lived to adulthood. My mom was the middle child of seven. Needless to say I had a huge extended family. I've found that it's usual to be closer to one side of the family than the other, and in our case it was my dad's family (the Kalwat clan) to whom were most tied. My mom's family (Plitts and Sabos) were divided and dysfunctional thanks to my malevolent maternal grandmother, but I did grow to be very close to my mom's two sisters who both moved back to the CT when I was a teenager.
My dad's parents (Georg and Anna) both immigrated to the States from Lithuania during the late 19th century, although they didn't actually meet until they had each settled down in New Britain, CT. Georg was an ethnic German; the story is that that branch of the family moved from Germany to Lithuania because of religious discrimination. I'm guessing they were Lutherans living in the Catholic southern Germany. For whatever reason, they never gave up their German culture, and making the mistake of asking "But doesn't that make us Lithuanian?" only happened once.
Anna was a Jew, born in Marijampole, Lithuania. I did a bit of research on it. Before WWII it had over 90% Jewish population. After the Holocaust there were just a few Jewish families left alive, and I can't find any information if they might be my family. Anna converted when she married Georg whom she met while they were both working at a local factory.
My mom's parents were more Yankee, or at least her mother, Ida, was. She was a Phillips, and apparently they immigrated to the southern colonies back when the country was just that - a Colony. I've been told that there's a family tree on file in the Hartford library showing that we're related to the Lee's of Virginia. I have no idea if that's true or not. My mom's dad, Elmer Sabo, had been born to a couple who had immigrated from Hungary and subsequently had their name Szabo changed to Sabo at Ellis Island. Oh, come to think of it, Kalwat came out of Ellis Island, too. It was originally Kalwaitis. Thanks, Ellis Island, for taking those liberties with our family names!
Ida and Elmer eloped, which caused a big enough stir at the time to make the front page of the papers. Elmer was, I'm told, a most charming womanizer and con-man. He was also a bootlegger and a rum-runner during Prohibition in Indiana. I remember as a child being delighted to have such a disreputable relative, and one of my favorite stories was how two of his friends, admiring my Aunts Verna and Shirley's Halloween masks, asked if they could borrow them for a bit - and then used them to rob a bank. For which they were promptly caught.
Ida divorced him (big surprise), then married a German immigrant named Emil Plitt and went on to raise a second family with him. Lots of drama ensued, and that's enough of that.
Both grandfathers died when my parents were young. Georg died of some kind of degenerative spinal disease that effected his brain. Elmer died in a car accident. (I'd always fantasized that the Feds got him while he was trying to escape with a carload of moonshine, but I think it was much more mundane than that.)
My brother, cousins, and I are all Baby Boomers. Well, three were born before the war ended, but we grant them Boomer status nonetheless :) We were a very close family. Not only was every holiday celebrated together, but we all attended the same small Evangelical Lutheran church and most of us kids were educated at the Lutheran school that our church ran. A very, very small school. Four classrooms, two grades to a room (1&2, 3&4, 5&6, 7&8). Because there were so many of us Kalwats born in such a relatively short time after the war, we pretty much took over the school. (I was the only kid who did not have a cousin born in the same year as me. Or even a year before me. Before and after that year (1949), there were always multiple births.) The way the school worked - and if you weren't me - you were guaranteed to have at least one cousin in your grade and a couple more in the grade that shared the room with you. Me? Every other year I got to share with my brother, who was just a year younger than me. Which was just fine when it happened, because my brother and I were always close, always good friends. Just to add to the Walton's Mountain/Little House on the Prairie feel of it all, Aunt Helen taught typing, Aunt Emma taught Home Ec, Uncles Maynard and Rudy taught shop, and our eldest cousin's wife, Wendy, was our choir director. Plus the other uncles and aunts who were on school committees. Let's just say that switching to the public school system in Grade 9 was a bit of a shock to the system.
Our cousins were our friends as well as our family. As kids there were constant sleep-overs during the summer. One aunt and uncle rented a teeny (really. teeny. cabin at the beach every summer for years, and we'd all descend after church on Sunday. Fifty plus adults and kids. It was great. There'd be a small fire outside at the end of the night, and we'd sit and sing while Aunt Bertha or Aunt Billie played the ukulele. At Christmas we'd cram into my grandmother's house because there were always guests invited along with the hordes of family. There'd be caroling in German and Santa Claus would come, and really it was just about perfect.
All but one of my aunts and uncles are dead. Both of my parents are dead. The first of my cousins has died. The downside to the joy of being raised in such a large family, of course. The cousins still keep in touch. There's a Yahoo group that one of us created. We have periodic reunions, because our cousins' kids wanted to keep the traditions going, bless their souls. They're all adults now with kids of their own, and I still can't get over my cousins being grandparents :) There are only a couple of us cousins who didn't have kids, but the rest of them made up for it. Even with the loss of the original generation started by Georg and Anna, we're still a huge family. And every generation moves farther up the ladder. My dad's generation were blue collar for the most part. Now we're awash in PH.D.s and professional folk. Where we started out concentrated in New Britain, CT, we're now spread out over North America and Europe. At the last reunion I attended, I was standing with a couple of my cousins looking over the wedding picture of our grandparents while the family swirled around us. One of them said, "I wonder if they ever imagined this when they got married?" Probably not :)
----------------------------------------------------------
This will be a lot shorter to answer. I met Dar online at Television Without Pity back when it was still called Mighty Big TV. There was this new Joss Whedon show gearing up - Firefly - and I was dying to see it, so I started posting in the "saloon" where general non-TV gabbery took place, and there was this funny, strong, wise woman named Dar posting there a lot. We chatted, got to know each other a little. She was going to be hosting a Firefly room at WorldCon, which was being held in Toronto that year. And she also had just been in a car accident that left her with a concussion a week before the con. I offered (insisted, really) to drive up to her place to help her get ready for the Con, and that's how it started :)
I've also made a number of very good friends through Firefly and TWoP, people I feel both lucky and proud to have in my life now. It cracks me up when people scoff at the idea of meeting good people online (my brother still jokingly refers to all of my friends as "the internet axe murderers"), because I'm here to tell you - it certainly worked out well for me *g*