A Word and a Word Portmanteau

60 Minutes recently did a story on Elizabeth Holmes. A few years before the story Holmes was a 19 year old phenom who dropped out  of Stanford and parlayed her "breakthrough invention" that in her own words was "the most important thing humanity has ever built", to start the blood-testing company known as Theranos. The company at its peak a few years later was worth 10 billion dollars. Sadly, for the investors, it was a massive fraud that victimized an array of prominent folks who should have known better. The pages of any book on con artists, charlatans, swindlers and fraud are filled typically with the names of men, hence, con men (derived from confidence and men) who are the typical operators in that field. Elizabeth Holmes is extraordinarily charismatic and her good looks made for a compelling facade  to willing investors.

Theranos - the 10 billion dollar company that is now worth zilch was described in one news article as a portmanteau of "therapy and diagnosis". And where did we first encounter the word "portmanteau" ('port-man-tow')?

From Lewis Carroll's fairy tale, "Through the Looking Glass", Alice asked Humpty Dumpty the meaning of what to her was a nonsensical word.  Humpty Dumpty replied:

"Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”. “Lithe” is the same as “active”. You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word".

The word comes from an old-world hard-sided suit case that opened into two compartments, exemplified by the photo below:

Portmanteau thus turned into a combination of parts of two different words becoming a hybrid species of sort into another word. Two compartments of a suitcase melding into one to convey the combined meaning of the two original words. Confidence men to conmen.

Smoke and fog became smog. Using that as an example, we are too familiar with words like motel, brunch, and most recently - Brexit. Some of the words are literally taxonomic combinations, as in liger ("progeny of a male lion and a tigress" and you can deduce where a tigon comes from). A labradoodle and a puggle can only be familiar to certain pet owners. Fruit tree grafting also gave us another literal combinations: pluot (plum and apricot) made possible by combining closely related plant species that also gave us parsnip, peacherine and a 3-combo of fruit tree - peacotum (peach apricot and plum). Technology has become the mother of portmanteaus: this blog comes from web + log  but words we take for granted are modem (modulator + demodulator), favicon, Skype (Sky + peer-to-peer, bit (binary + digit), phablet, emoticon, pixel, and on and on.

Now there are hundreds of these words. Humpty Dumpty, or rather Lewis Carroll would be proud or utterly surprised, if he were alive today, by what portmanteau has generated. The word may not be familiar to some but perhaps meld is. Well, meld showed up in the 1930's and although its meaning is unmistakable, its origin is hazy. Popularly, it is the combination of metal + weld which makes sense but we really don't know. 

The evolution of language has and will always have a compelling path to changes as the evolution of species had but the former is easily understood while the latter is cloaked by eons of history or surmised by the unearthing of fossils. Language, which came much, much later in our development, has left us with a trail of  archived records of its development.

Words that are the basic components of language have a way of existing as stand alone units or combined to take on similar, completely different or modified meanings. 

The English language is good at creating hybrid words to describe what would have taken two or more words to explain without losing the meaning. On the other hand, Germans just love to string together entire words to make a compound word, often a compound noun from two or more nouns.

In Götterdämmerung they combined the plural of God which is Gott and dammerung as twilight, hence the twilight of the gods, or to describe the collapse of a kingdom or regime. That is how they described what happened to the Roman Empire. In English we just say The Fall of the Roman Empire.

When East and West Berlin were re-unified, it ushered the Gotterdammerung of Communism. German is so explicit as to leave no room for confusion even if it means creating a fiendishly long rail car of words only a tongue twister of a monster locomotive can pull:

Schweinefleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. 

It means a “legislative law for the monitoring of pork-meat labeling.” That is a real German word, mind you.

No offense to a few of my German readers - there's just a handful of you - but Johannes Gutenberg will have had a much higher degree of difficulty if he were to print the Süddeutsche Zeitung today, using his invention that first printed the Holy Bible. But, I must admit there are a few exceptions.

Back in my chess-playing days I found myself many a time in a zugzwang - one word, surprisingly, that defines a situation when one chess player is forced to make a move he or she would rather not do, but must, even when it will only result in a weakened position or eventual defeat. So there, a German word that would take one long explanation in English. There might be more but I don't know German.

Many languages from Arabic to Swahili have their versions of portmanteaus. The Philippines was a U.S. colony for 50 years and Filipino has the most inventive and creative of portmanteaus. Tagalog is the national language, so Taglish are words or sentences used when they combine Tagalog and English. Dishes have become notoriously inundated. SPAM - a popular U.S. canned meat - has now become a culinary breakfast item. SPAMsilog comes from the canned meat combined with fried rice (sinangag) and egg (itlog).

The obvious question is how did I find myself running a serpentine path from Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos to zugzwang to Taglish. The idle mind found another opportunity to lavish praise on the English language, that's all. I have mentioned this once before - English is the most efficient from all of 6500 spoken languages. But there is fear that like Latin it may one day meet a slow demise. It will be a shame that when the information highway has now become a rushing waterfall, technology might just make us shoot the rapids at breakneck speed texting our way to monosyllabic expression of our ideas. I try to get them organized but ideas often defy herding, in a world where my thoughts come out no faster than 25 words per minute on a keyboard - slower if I use only my thumbs on the 5.7 in screen of an LG V20.  So, the words come out in the order the synapses generate them.

Civilization, lest we forget, was built by language, language populated by words. Words can destroy civilization as well. Fiery words from a tribal leader, rhetoric from dictators and emperors have launched armies across lands and seas to conquer and pillage. Fortunately, hordes of invaders had also been stopped on their tracks by rallying words that kept nations together to resist the rampage. 

Words can soothe but they can also hurt. What we say can be misunderstood but what might be unclear can be explained, the ordinary can be made beautiful, sorrow can be assuaged, words can be that powerful.

Words can be overwhelming, can be sickening as expressed by Eliza  from "My Fair Lady" lamenting first against Henry Higgins then to her suitor, Freddy Eynsford Hill.

Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! 

I get words all day through;

First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do? ...

Never do I ever want to hear another word. 

There isn't one I haven't heard. 

Here we are together in what ought to be a dream; 

Say one more word and I'll scream! 

Haven't your arms Hungered for mine? 

Please don't "expl'ine," Show me! Show me! 

Don't wait until wrinkles and lines 

Pop out all over my brow, 

Show me now!

But, as we all can see clearly, as much as she "hated" words she best  expressed her thoughts, her feelings and frustration with what else, but with words.

Painted Churches of Schulenburg, Texas

Everywhere people had established a community we find small pockets of history. It is the collection of all these micro stories that make up the entire history of a nation. No matter how small or large a state in these United States, its people and its culture are a collective patchwork of many. Texas is no exception. Fredericksburg - you've read about two musings ago. A much smaller patch has a similar but different story to tell.

About 95 miles from Houston is Schulenburg, Texas, part of Fayette County. It is a small city of under 3000 people in slightly over 1,000 households, tiny by any measure of population standards, and tinier still, geographically speaking - under 3 square miles (6.5 sq. km) of land. Within this area had stood Four Painted Churches. That they still stand there today is testament to a group of people whose story goes back to the mid-1800's; and further back in time if we were to look at where they came from. 

Tourists or tour groups who come to visit are under no illusion that they are visiting the grand cathedrals in Europe. These are not super structures built by kings and emperors but they should loom large because what physical grandeur they lack can easily be ignored if we focus on the courageous and noble stories behind the stories of how the churches came to be and the people who built them.  

The churches stand for much more than a particular religion but rather as a collective symbol of every struggle known to man, the triumph of the spirit and unbridled determination to survive and prevail over unimaginable adversity. The U.S. is what it is today because of the many number of these kind of struggles that make up its whole history. Lest we forget there was a time when people came not by large steam ships or later by jumbo jets or by border crossings today that is dividing the country. There was a time when the bell toll of freedom and opportunity were heard  from half way across the world in another continent by a band of people willing to take a chance at the unknown. Schulenburg has such a story.  The painted churches and the cemeteries that adjoin each one of them are testimony to generations of families driven by courage, skills and the indomitable human spirit. 

Their story began with the collapse of the Austria-Hungary empire after the First World War. Prior to that, for centuries, tribal factions comprised of Celtic, Czech, Slavic, Germanic and Slavic ancestry, doubtless all genetically related. But human conflict was, as always, a prevailing theme that divided people. In the middle of the 19th century the economic and political conditions became unbearable for many. A band of families from two primary regions that were Moravia and Bohemia, predominantly Czechs, boarded a hundred foot ship towards a place they heard was the new promised land. They were on that ship for thirteen weeks. Imagine sailing for that long. Sleeping accommodations were the least of their problems since food, water, sweltering heat during the day and cold winds and rough seas at night probably kept them from thinking about sleep. 

Their port of entry was Houston, TX. The year was 1856. Sick, tired, hungry and weak with little money and not speaking the language, their situations were dire, to say the least. But they somehow managed to put together provisions into horse drawn wagons to complete their journey to a patch of land almost a hundred miles away. At that point a hundred miles must have felt like a few steps compared to where they came from but it still took them a whole month to reach it. Today, Schulenburg is about an hour and a half from Houston by car.

One group of several families found a land teeming with giant oak trees, a river and grass land. The prospect of a climate warmer than the winters of Europe was shattered almost immediately by an unexpected winter storm. The families huddled under the canopy of oak trees where they built fires to keep warm. As Texas winters go the weather came and went like ocean squalls they had gotten used to in the thirteen weeks they were at sea. They then built little huts that later turned into permanent homes, using timber from the plentiful oak trees. This is important to make note of because in one of the painted churches oak leaves, acorn and oak tree branches were dominant themes. Even the shoulder ends of the church pews were shaped like half an oak leaf.

They worked hard. They helped each other and they prayed together. They believed that it was their faith in providence that guided them through and nothing was more unifying than a place of worship. They were grateful for the new land but they were not about to forget or relinquish the memories of their homeland. Most were of Czech and Austrian descent so their culture was a cross between the two. There is much evidence of that culture in the form of polka music and dance, kolaches (Czech pastry) among many. The painted churches no doubt stand today to remind us that these people relied and believed in the divine intervention of their survival.

The building of the churches was proof of their resourcefulness and their skills and that of their pragmatism. They were determined to build them but they were not about to splurge or recklessly spend money just for the sake of grandeur. The structures were going to be places of worship that reminded them of the old homeland but they were going to be austere, yet pleasing to the eyes of the God they worshiped. They skillfully painted the interior of the churches. The paintings had themes that portrayed their culture and symbols of their experiences. These early immigrants, like all  the others who came during that era, were not only resourceful and determined, they were skillful craftsmen, artists and scholars.

The Painted Churches are more than just symbols of their faith. They used paint to make wooden columns look like marble, flat surfaces to stand out as three-dimensional pieces, stained glass and statues can be museum pieces. Today these churches still conduct regular services but  funds for the costly maintenance come from donations and proceeds from group tours since the local congregation, still small as it had always been, cannot provide adequate financial support.  Even from their early beginnings the churches never received funds from the bigger national church chapters, least of all from the Vatican or international organizations.

One does not have to be affiliated with a particular faith or religion to appreciate what these four churches stand for.  The narrative they tell may represent little significance to the larger history of the country but we should not forget that it is the little stories that are closest to our understanding of those who lived before us. Years ago I met someone who told me she was of Czech descent. I assumed then that she was a  child of a first generation immigrant. I was surprised when she told me her ancestry went way back to an earlier era in Texas history. I didn't pay much attention then but now I understand. 

The photos tell the story a little better. One church was rebuilt after it burned down. There had been renovations but much of the interior paintings were preserved as they were originally. Some captions add a handful of footnotes.

Each church had a cemetery nearby. Imagine the number of generations that were added to the citizenship of the country and their contributions to the nation as a whole.

The stained glass were such that allowed for sufficient outside light 

Note the Czech writings on this "Station of the Cross"

Those metal clips at the back of the pews used to hold the hats of the male congregants. The early churches had men seating on the right side, so the left pews where the women sat did not have these clips (The clips today remain but they are obviously not for holding hats anymore).

The columns and arches are all wood

The two photos below show how the paints were skillfully done to make wood look like marble. One had to knock on the columns to realize they're wood.

Acorns and oak leaves were part of the theme in this church.

Our guide explained how in this church the male statues were on the right while the left had the female images. The placement indeed dictated where the men and boys sat separated from the women and the girls who sat on the left. I did not know this before then but our guide explained why in weddings the groom's side sat on the right and the bride's side sat on the other. Who knew?

The end of the pew in one church had half of an oak leaf as a theme 

Note again the recurrent theme of oak leaves and acorn on the stained glass.

Visit the Chamber of Commerce for more information. Check out the Stanzel Model Aircraft Museum. In 1925 Victor Stanzel started building model airplanes that he sold nation wide. A converted spare bedroom in their Schulenburg farmhouse started a model aircraft manufacturing business that later became wired and remotely controlled model aircraft.

Snake Oil Salesmen Redemption?

I ran into a Smithsonian Magazine article while waiting at the doctor's office. You'd be surprised what strange insights you find when whiling away the minutes, or hour, or what feels like an hour, thumbing through one of these doctor's office magazines. You are intrigued by the title of a little story. You read it to pass the time and to momentarily forget the burning itch of poison ivy. 

As often happens, you shelve what you just read when at last the nurse called you in. You went for something miraculous to happen but, unfortunately, the dermatologist told you it will take time for the treatment to provide full relief.  There is no cure for poison ivy and the treatment of Prednisone and some creamy ointment are to provide relief only from the discomfort and that poison ivy dictates the time line when you can get back to feeling and looking normal again - free of the reddened pimply blisters on your forearms and legs. Since this is the second time I brushed upon these seemingly innocuous looking three-leaf ground dweller, its effect gets worse with each contact, the doctor counseled. Her advice: outsource the gardening to someone immune to the pesky plant; or, alternatively, put on a Hazmat suit in doing the chore.

So much for dwelling on my predicament. There was nothing I can do the rest of the day and days following; so I mentally went back to the article I just read. I can't get it off my mind. Painters were working around the house, I can't do anything at the workshop, so I was going to read some more on the story from the internet. I was surprised how much there was on the subject that goes generally with this theme, "Snake oil salesmen may have been on to something". It is amazing to find out that in addition to The Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American devoted an article, A Royal Pharmaceutical Publication had one and a few other reputable articles. What gives?

"The term “snake oil” is used to describe any worthless pseudo-medical remedy promoted as a cure for various illnesses. By extension, snake oil salesmen are charlatans who sell such fraudulent goods".

Featured in "Huckleberry Finn" and western movies, snake oil salesmen were backdrop character spices, thrown in as subplot diversions but hardly the main story but almost always unsavory. But not so anymore is what was so surprising. The Smithsonian gave a time line of the history. Native Americans were known to use snake oil for various ailments. Soon the East-West transcontinental railroad tracks had to be laid during the last decade and a half of the 19th century. Over 4000 railroad workers built the portion of the rail system over the Sierras starting in 1868, almost 70% of whom were Chinese immigrants. Along with their culture, were their own Chinese medicine, salve and potions. Snake oil from Chinese water snake was the go to medicine to deal with aching muscles and feet. It didn't take long for snake oil to attain the cure-all reputation. 

The Chinese laborers seemed to easily overcome, or get over quickly, sore muscles and blisters and fatigue despite the long back-breaking hours under all kinds of conditions. Many took note of the "wonder potion". And inevitably observant scalawags turned into scoundrels for easy-money flimflam schemes, hawking colored fake liquid in fancy-labeled bottles from town to town. But snake oil salesmanship was not a 19th or early 20th century phenomenon limited to America because there were international versions of it though not exactly patterned from the American West model. Just when snakes were already undeservedly much maligned throughout history, snake oil salesmen dug deeper into the deep recesses of human primal loathing of these most useful of all reptiles. (I'm sure I'll get a lot of push back on this but let's be objective about the ecological benefit snakes provide. Look up how disruptive and destructive the effects were to the ecosystem in many places where snakes were hunted down to total or near extinction).

Let's get back to snake oil. Well, well, now there is incontrovertible data from areas of research and studies that snake oil is after all a wonder cure-all. Below are two quotes from many published reports:

"According to a report published in the Western Journal of Medicine, the oil of the Chinese water snake is an excellent source of the omega-3 fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). This compound shows promise as a nutritional supplement and holistic treatment for several conditions".

"According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) omega-3 fatty acids, including EPA, can relieve symptoms of stiffness and joint tenderness in people suffering from rheumatoid arthritis". 

Other ailments or conditions snake oil may provide relief are summarized in an article from Scientific American on the benefit of snake oil:

"Research since the 1980s has demonstrated the necessity—and efficacy—of omega-3 fatty acids. These acids not only reduce inflammation, such as arthritis pain, but also improve cognitive function and reduce blood pressure, cholesterol and even depression. "Because of their chemical structure, omega-3's behave very differently in cell membranes than any other fat," says Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them. "They're much more dynamic, they move around much more, so they allow a lot to happen in the cell membranes. And that's where enzymes do their work. So these fats allow enzymes to work."

There you have it. However, don't just immediately go out and buy snake oil. As always and so humanly true wherever and whenever money can be made, greed, fraud and deception are so well represented, even encrusted harder than barnacles, as to make salvaging the reputation of the snake oil salesman a quest in futility.

Now, this takes us to California:

"California judge rules coffee needs cancer warning label. Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle has ruled that California law requires coffee companies to carry an ominous cancer warning label because of a chemical produced in the roasting process. ... One is acrylamide, a carcinogen present in coffee".

Coffee has its own story. It was good, bad, good, now back to bad (at least in California). We know Coca Cola and Dr. Pepper used to be sold at the pharmacy, ketchup started as a medicine, and if aspirin were to go through the FDA approval process today, it may not make it as an approved drug. These are just a few from stories of good and evil among human consumables.

Today researchers are in the jungles of the Amazon Rain Forest and other places around the world looking for plants that have medicinal values or collecting anecdotal endorsements from locals and indigenous people who use "naturally collected cures" from leaves to stems to tree barks, etc.

The first time I encountered poison ivy two years or so ago our local pharmacist advised me to get two boxes of baking soda (87 cents per pound - one box) from the grocery. As instructed I poured all the contents of one box into warm water in the tub. I soaked myself for 30 minutes. I repeated it a couple of hours later. That took care of it. Well, I got lazy this time, even over confident, so I merely rubbed baking soda over what I suspected were the affected areas. The price was a session with the dermatologist I described above.

Now we know baking soda like vinegar, is just one of those remarkable go-to stuff in our household that do wonders. 

Now, if I can only lay my hands on some really genuine snake oil.

I hope someday, scientists will find something potently medicinal from poison ivy.

Meanwhile, a rhyming quote: "Leaves of five, let them thrive. Leaves of three, let them be". (Don't touch them!)

Ancestry. Fredericksburg, Texas

The interest in genealogy is gaining popularity. The fascination with ancestry has yielded surprising results for almost anyone whose past is dug up through the genome's four-letter combinations of A-G-C-T. I got to be friends with a Taiwanese gentleman where we both swim at the same  fitness gym. One day he showed up with a grin on his face. He had some interesting news to tell me. His wife sent his DNA sample for testing a while ago and the result just came back.  He couldn't wait to tell me the fascinating news that he is 3% Filipino. Apparently, the technology is so good at breaking down the make up of our ancestry as to identify which attributes come from which parent. He was tantalized to find out that the 3% came from his mother's side. Of course, the odds for this ancestral connection is not that far fetched, considering Taiwan and the mainland of China are in close proximity to the surrounding areas in Asia. The Philippines and Taiwan are separated by a mere strait - the Luzon Strait - an overnight voyage even by wooden-hulled sailing ships of centuries ago.

Fredericksburg, TX is a small town in the hill country, west of Houston and Austin and north of San Antonio, that has a fascinating history. We went there last week for an overnight sojourn, part of a group that visited  a couple of museums and took part in a little wine tasting. Not quite well known, yet surprisingly true, there are vineyards in Texas that produce good wine. Then there is the story about how the town came to be which was intriguing in itself. But why is one of the most extensive Museum of the Pacific War located there? And it would take more than a day to view all the actual (not copies) artifacts and read the well crafted narratives, documents, and historical footnotes housed in a huge indoor and outdoor facility right along the middle of its main street that is much too wide for a town of a little over 11,000 people. Story was that the street was designed to be wide enough for a wagon train to make a u-turn on it. The latest data recorded that English was widely spoken by 73 per cent of the population, 15 % Spanish, but that 12% spoke German at home. A German tourist visiting today would surely be fascinated by that and if he or she took a trolley tour of the town would be thrilled that Betty the tour guide spoke fluent German.  Thus I must muse about how this little nuggets of history came to be.

I mused about "As Luck Would Have It" last year in May where I wrote about ancestral "entanglement" - a phrase I made up to describe that at some point in the very distant past people had to have come from a narrow band of ancestors if we dig long enough. The analogy I use is that every living person today had to have come from an unbroken chain of cell divisions that went on for millennia; otherwise, if there was even one break in your ancestral chain, you will not be here. Imagine an extremely huge pyramid where we, the current living population in the whole world, are represented at the base of that pyramid. Going up the pyramid would be akin to traveling back into our past and it would appear that, as we keep moving up, our ancestry narrows to a handful of people as we get near the tip. We can make up a few pyramids -  say the pyramids of the various races, and it is conceivable that it will take a mere two or three separate pyramids to get an entangled relationship with someone now living at the opposite side of the globe, or even at places we cannot imagine to have any ancestral connection.

It is said that DNA of Neanderthals are identifiable in a lot of folks' ancestry predominantly in people of European descent, but not precluding the other races. Ancestral entanglement could be a ball of strings collected over eons of time where the outer layer and the core may have come from just a handful of original yarns made with strands of particular dyes that leached into every section of string in myriad degrees of tint and coloring.


Let me get back to Fredericksburg, TX. The town's elders first proposed a museum to honor the famous World War II admiral - Chester Nimitz. Nimitz who was then retired and living in California at that time was asked about the idea but he refused; that is, to call it the Nimitz Museum. He countered that it should be called the Museum of the Pacific War. And so it was built. But also alongside it today is the Admiral Nimitz Museum. Admiral Nimitz's ancestry, like every person living today, began from far away - a very long unbroken chain of cell divisions.

I asked Betty - our German speaking tour guide - if she had looked into her genealogy. Actually, she said her father did exactly that. Their ancestry was traced back to a village in Germany that no longer exists.

Mid 19th century Europe was a period of discontent with the political climate and economic conditions that were pretty much held over by monarchy and nobility. Many Europeans, Germans included, heard of a new system that was growing out of a former British colony, where the hopes of ordinary people were lit by a new political experiment - democracy. One German nobleman denounced his nobility to lead a group of German immigrants to resettle their lives at a place called America.

That nobleman, Baron Otfried Hans von Meuseback, who later changed his name to John O. Meuseback, was credited with founding the town by keeping the German settlers from falling apart from despondency, discouragement, hunger, diseases and death as they faced unimaginable hardship in a hostile and unfamiliar land. Meuseback named the town after Prince Frederick of Prussia.  The human spirit and will to live and flourish prevailed.

Chester Nimitz was born in a hotel owned by his grandfather in Fredericksburg on Feb, 24, 1885. His father died before he was born. Much of what he learned in life came from his grandfather, who was a retired German sea captain. After high school he got an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he  graduated 7th in a class of 114 in 1905. He commanded and led to victory the Allied forces in the Pacific during WWII.

Imagine this. His father lived just long enough to have sired him to keep the ancestry chain going. It could easily have been broken had his father died before he was conceived. His career too could easily have been broken when he was court marshaled and reprimanded for running aground the Navy Destroyer, Decatur, while under his command in the Philippines. That would have been a career ending episode in a young naval officer's professional life. He was relegated to commanding a submarine, then almost a career dead end, but he excelled in four consecutive submarine commands. WWII in the Pacific theater cemented his place in history. He commanded the Pacific fleet that won the pivotal Battle of Midway. The Japanese surrendered, formally signed on the deck of the Battleship Missouri to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Admiral Nimitz later signed the peace treaty with Japan - the formal end to the entire war.


History is indebted to the unbroken chains of ancestry. The world today would be so different if not for the continued survival of ancestral chains - both famous and the not so famous lives that are linked together, transcending eons of time over landscapes from across the world. But for every linked chain we also must acknowledge the broken ones. Those who saw the movie, "Saving Private Ryan", would have recognized a fictional attempt to keep one chain to continue after Pvt. Ryan's brothers were killed in separate theaters of war. A much truer story, a very sad and tragic one, was that of five Sullivan brothers who served in the naval cruiser, U.S.S Juneau. All five brothers perished when their ship sank in 1942. The only sibling spared from that tragedy was a sister. The loss of the five brothers all at once was one huge broken chain. 

Photo of Mrs. Sullivan holding a copy of the letter she sent to the U.S. Navy inquiring about the fate of her five sons.

The letter should be read by everyone. It is a profound expression of courage and patriotism from a mother who clearly tried to suppress her grief.  No mother should be asked to offer such a heavy sacrifice.


Upon hearing the story, Pres. Roosevelt wrote to Mrs. Sullivan (below)

Below: A most painful episode in American military history was Gen. Wainwright's surrender of Manila Bay. That and in countless tragic moments throughout history millions of ancestral chains were broken.

More pain had to be extracted in the island by island re-taking of the Philippines.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur's famous pledge to return after leaving the Philippines to re-group and re-strengthen his forces in Australia was fulfilled when he did return to liberate the country.

That Admiral Nimitz, of German ancestry, must fulfill a destiny to play a role halfway at the other side of the world from where he was born but whose ancestry originated from another is indeed such an ancestral entanglement that is hard to fathom, but worth knowing.

Below is a photo of a wagon train. That is what Fredericksburg's main street should be able to accommodate if it must turn around.

A footnote to Fredericksburg history is that at one time, while it was struggling to survive a group of 150 Mormons on their way west stopped by to rest and recover at an area four miles away. The Mormon community of Zodiac constructed a water wheel to harness the energy of flowing water for a gristmill and a lumber mill. This helped Fredericksburg greatly which was, in a way, a just reward for their inherent tolerance of other people, particularly those who fled persecution. The Mormons did eventually move on. At the town plaza is a replica of the water wheel to commemorate the Mormon's contribution to their community.

Among the other challenges the German emigrants had to deal with were the indigenous Native Americans. This statues, located in the town park depicts John Meuseback accepting a peace pipe from a tribal leader.

This is Betty, our German-speaking trolley tour guide, in front of John O. Meuseback's bust, explaining his life and the history of Fredericksburg.

 Ancestral entanglement reminds us all that as large as the earth is, it is a world that is just the right size as to allow, over time, the inevitable connectivity of humanity. Decoding our genealogy seems a tantalizing chapter in our quest for knowledge but perhaps, more importantly, it is a signal that beacons us to look back at our origins because if we do not, the fate of humanity will not only be uncertain, it is going to be fraught with peril.