Let's gather for family history time.

Happy Friday! The weekend is nearly here. This is my last full week in my current job and I've been running low on tasks left to clean up the grant work. Waiting on aged servers to upload things, etc. Lots of downtime. I've been watching a variety of things this week. Our office is home to the statewide coordinator for National History Day, which is a national program promoting the study of history in middle and high schools. Students make exhibits, documentaries, websites, write papers, and create performances around a central yearly theme and then they are judged on them in three rounds of competition. The statewide competition here was several months ago but the national competition was this week in D. C. The final awards ceremony on the last day is broadcast on The History Channel, so we were all watching it yesterday morning to cheer for the Missouri kids who won. It was a long ceremony, but really kind of nice to see these kids winning and being recognized on this kind of a stage. There were several winners from Missouri, including a surprise win by a middle-schooler from Joplin who created a website on Iran and it won the overall best website! Woooooot! It was really fun to watch and I wish more schools took part in the competition. These kids can win full ride scholarships to universities, several of them (including the girl from Joplin who won best website) won $5,000 dollars for their winning entries. There are a lot of home-school programs that take part, but sometimes the public schools don't participate. It's a shame, I think. I would have liked to have taken part in this if it were offered at my school when I was growing up. Creating an exhibit on a historical theme? Hello? I would have loved that! I've done that as part of my job now! Nobody ever mentioned this program to any class I was ever in, and it's been going on for 30+ years now. Still, NHD is growing and there were schools from every state + D. C., American Samoa, Singapore, and China this year. This was the first year that some of the International Schools took part in the competition and they won some awards for their entries, plus one of the teachers of the International School in Shanghai won an award for outstanding teacher. It was very cool. I've assisted with NDH at the state level in Missouri and Texas, but I'd never seen their broadcast at Nationals before. It was nice.

I've been watching the Euro Cup, too! It's been cool to see the teams playing and the fans cheering and the cities that they're playing in, as well. The Irish fans have made headlines for being awesome, while their actual soccer team has made headlines for being terrible. But, I was impressed by the Irish fans who sang during the entire second half of yesterday's match against Spain. They lost the game 4-0, and it probably could have been worse than that, but the fans were singing and cheering like they were winning. It was really kind of inspiring and beautiful. They were singing an Irish folk song called "Fields of Athenry"; it was really beautiful to hear it in the stadium yesterday. While the English commentators did not stop talking during the match, I heard that on the German and French broadcasts, the commentators did stop and just let the television viewers hear the Irish fans sing for several minutes. This is just a video from someone who was in the press box at the game in Gdansk, Poland.




Interesting personal sidenote about Gdansk: My family hails from there. Along one side, my family comes from the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland (County Kerry), but mostly, we're Prussian, and came from Danzig/Gdansk. My college roommate went home to Ukraine once and made a point to go to to Poland and see Gdansk and take pictures to bring back and show me. I knew it was a pretty city, but I've enjoyed seeing it on tv through this Euro Cup, too! Both Ireland and Poland are on my short list of places to visit.

Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland. Yay for color!

Gdansk at night. Pretty!

Sometimes, when you see the cities and regions that your family comes from, you wonder how bad it really had to be for them to leave there and come to wherever you've ended up, you know? Like, why would someone leave a place like Gdansk that's beautiful  and has a beach and seaport, and come to the USA and go to the middle of the country where there's no seaport within hundreds of miles? In my family's case, like a lot of others, it had to do with religion. So, boom. Next thing you know, the family has moved to Protestant-friendly middle America. I recently learned that Omaha is where my family first settled because there was a big Bohemian settlement in Omaha back in the day, so they were able to keep ties to their home culture and community (but practice Luther's teachings without being chased about and killed). I only really learned this because I decided to go to Omaha for the London Olympics Swim Trials and when I mentioned it to my Dad, he said that Omaha was where the family initially settled. I had no idea Nebraska was a part of anything in my family. I don't know if I just didn't pay attention when people talked about it or what, but anyway, while it's not the reason I'm going, I'm going to snoop around and see what I can find about the old part of the city and see what's what. The vacation bug has gotten me pretty badly lately and I'm getting antsy to get going. I've been looking forward to the Trials for months now. I love all things Olympics and this is the closest I've ever gotten to actually going to the Olympics. There are swim trials in the morning (mostly the prelims and some semi-finals) and then they do the prime time stuff in the evening like you would see on tv. So, I have the middle of the day between sessions to explore Omaha and see what's what.

Ireland is a different story. The family didn't have to leave Ireland because of religion, but rather because they couldn't behave themselves. They managed to piss off everyone by fighting a lot. You can only be kicked out of various places so many times before your reputation precedes you and people start to not want you around. They managed to get themselves kicked out of Ireland and then Scotland and then Ireland again, and finally just had to come to America. The family has enough of a reputation still that when my cousin went to the British Isles a few years ago and was visiting a family in Scotland, and he mentioned the family that we come from, the older woman took his knife away and said nobody who came from that family was allowed to have a knife in her house. I don't think she gave it back, either. He had to eat knife-less. From what I've heard, I gather they were still kind of into the rough stuff here and were involved in the Irish gangs in St. Louis in the early 1900s. Somehow, somewhere along the line one of those Bohemian Lutherans took a liking to an Irish Hooligan (or Hooliganess?) and here my family is today! But, still, I think both Gdansk and the Dingle Peninsula are much more picturesque than central Missouri... I would go back and happily live in either place, I think.