Gosh! Yumi and Stuart have neat family histories!

I am just a boring little WASP. And my family has been just boring little WASPs for as far back as we can trace them.

We came over on the Mayflower and occassionally thereafter from England and Scotland and once we even mingled with a Frenchy. I believe there was also one German Hessian soldier, we have his coat encased in glass and displayed in someone's home. We helped to destroy the native Americans, enslave the blacks, take land and money during the Great Depression, and for one brief moment we attempted to rescue the Mormons (aka LDS) from sure fire Hell by forcing converts (it was some looney great-etc. aunt who traveled to the Great Salt Lake to make those poor misguided people proper Protestants).

The family is full of bankers (sigh, the "family" bank, Texas American Bank, in Fort Worth went under recently with the oil depression and poor loans to those South American countries), lawyers (David R. - a circuit court Judge in Utah and Wyoming who had some small doings with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang), writers (John Crowe Ransom, Robb Forman Dew), artists (Benjamin West), and the usual middle class this and thats.

The stock is good. We seem to have fairly long lives. It is not unusual to have relatives who pass the 80 and 90 year marks. There are no records of heritable diseases. No diabetes, few cancers, and no heart disease. Smoking (cigarettes, pipe) seems to have done in a few relatives.

Recent history shows my parents living in Idaho; a brother with wife and two kids near-by (Idaho); maternal grandparents who are still traveling at 80+ years of age from Estes Park, Colorado; deceased paternal grandparents (we tend to have families later in life - my paternal grandfather hit the 90 mark); one aunt who lives in an ashram; another aunt still climbing the grand Teton at 60. A normal WASP-type family, although the "P" seems to be fizzling out. Very few in the family still attend Protestant churches. Soon we shall be WAS.

I suppose this family history is an important part of me. I never thought about it. But then, maybe that's part of being a WASP. We came to this country, we looked, WE TOOK, and we didn't give a second thought about it. Snotty little creatures, aren't we!

WASP = White Anglo Saxon Protestants.