the next trip

So this blog will shortly become, once again, a travel blog in reality as well as in name.

I will be departing on a cross-country - or rather, country-circling - train adventure.  Yes, indeed, America has trains (True story: I had to explain this to a non-native friend, who was actually under the impression that we had no trains at all).

Along the way I'll be visiting the parts of the country where my family tree is rooted - rural Georgia, the northern reaches of Montana, southern California - and trying to gather some family stories, histories and legends along the way.  And thinking about trains, and immigration, and migration, and rootedness, and why we tell the stories about our past that we do.

That's the idea, anyway.

To prep I've been... well, I haven't been doing much yet.  Reading some Paul Theroux.  Brushing off my voice recorder.  And getting gifts from my father, from a family tree to old letters. A short list of things I never knew before these presents: our last name was originally spelled Demanowski.  My great-great-great-great-grandmother, a short, heavyset woman who immigrated over 150 years ago, had 9 children in 18 years.  Her blue-eyed husband could not read or write - though they arrived in 1852, they weren't the fleeing German intellegentsia we studied in AP US, when we memorized immigration demographics.

***

From one of my grandmother's cousins, a Catholic priest - no, not just a priest, the bishop of Atlanta! - we a letter survives.  He had never met my grandmother, but wrote to congratulate her on the birth of her fourth child, and to apologize for not writing earlier, due to his illness.  He mentioned:

"Let me say here that in every Mass I make a remembrance of "all my dear ones in all sides of the family". And, since I am an Easterner, in order to keep the heavenly record straight, I mention explicitly my good cousins (an ever increasing clan, it seems) in California.  Incidentally, I forgot to tell the Archbishop of Philadelphia, who is of Polish descent, that I have some Polish cousins in California.  However, since three of the children are red-heads, it would seem as though the Irish strain predominates..."

But just how Polish are the members of red-headed Domonoske clan?   When the Demanowskis emigrated from Europe, there was no Polish state - their passports were Prussian.

Time to bone up on my continental European history...?