But if all that's true, what about you?

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! I hope everyone who bore with me through the genealogical disclosures of 2019 will have the same patience with my assimilation of the history that the grandmother of my father's father is supposed to have been the first child of American parents born in what was six years off from being the state of California on account of being a department of Mexico at the time. Technically on a wagon train, near the top of the Sierra Nevada. Parents Irish immigrants, like her future husband's family who would move to San Francisco in time to make a killing in dry goods in the gold rush. Her own family had gotten into wheat to the tune of millions. At one point there was a three-thousand-acre ranch. Now it's part of Silicon Valley. America gonif! Half your family is a primer on American colonialism and not two centuries later you're a rootless cosmopolitan. Tell Wittgenstein to call me when the fish people turn up.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

on account of being a department of Mexico at the time

This is sensible, however, the whole thing. It'd only be weird if they'd been in Fort Ross.

[sovay]

This is sensible, however, the whole thing. It'd only be weird if they'd been in Fort Ross.

Eh, it would have matched the Russian theme on the other side!

The amount of continental criss-crossing on both sides of my family stories has really hit home, too. New York and San Francisco are like ping-pong pivots in one generation or another. If I'd been able to go to Berkeley for grad school, I would almost have continued the tradition.

[thistleingrey]

Eh, it would have matched the Russian theme on the other side!

True--for me as reader, that would've been a lot of seeming coincidences :) even though all of it is just how events unfolded.

are like ping-pong pivots

It's lovely that it was possible to do, I think.