You Are Related to Whom?

I have written before about my husband and my interest in genealogy.  We only research our own history as a hobby, not as a business.

Being of Eastern European Jewish descent, although I love finding new family links, there are no well-known, famous or infamous people in my family tree.

My husband’s family, on the other hand, is amazing.  We have known for a long time that he was distantly related to the actor James Dean, Daniel Boone, one of the “Manson” girls (if you are unfamiliar with the name, you are fortunate), Abraham Lincoln, American pioneer, explorer, and frontiersman and Robert E. Lee.  It is exciting to make these discoveries.

Over this past week or so, we began tracing another of my husband’s family branches and found that he is related to far more prominent and legendary people.  It has been such fun!

Among the kin to my husband are the American actor Humphrey Bogart who was his 13^th cousin, once removed, privateer and pirate Sir Henry Morgan (his picture is on bottles of Morgan’s Rum), and the late Princess Diana Spencer and her sons Harry and William.  Diana was my husband’s 14^th cousin, once removed.  Other historic figures who are related are U.S. President Millard Fillmore, and Miles Morgan, a Pilgrim whose statue was erected (and still stands today) in Springfield, Massachusetts to honor his services in settling the town, governing the colony, and fighting the Native Americans during the King Phillip's War. 

On the subject of wars, John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate general and cavalry officer in the American Civil War.

Also related is J.P. Morgan, a powerful American banker who financed railroads and helped organize U.S. Steel and other major corporations.

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III, the playwright who wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” “The Night of the Iguana” and many others, was a distant cousin as well.  “Speaking” of writers, the poets John Robbinson Jeffers and Archibald MacLeish were also cousins of some sort.

Genealogy is a fascinating, frustrating and amazing hobby.  Going back another generation is always exciting to me, and when we discover names we know from history, it adds to the excitement.

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To learn about Julie Klein and the Xpress Healthcare Business Opportunity, please visit http://joinxpresshealthcare.com.  You can work from home and earn residual income.

For information about how you can Save Money on Your Health and Dental Costs AND Save on Hearing, Vision, Prescriptions, Roadside Assistance, Lifelock™ and much more, please visit http://ibourl.net/XpressSavings   (NOT insurance)

It is so cold… How cold is it?

When most people think of Arizona, they think about the hot desert.  While Phoenix and Tucson and a few other cities have extreme heat, such is not the case where I live.  My town is at 4900 feet elevation. The next town is a mile high.

This past Thursday, we woke up to lots of snow.  We only get snow here two or three times a year, and it is never so deep we have to shovel a drive way.  Even so, we got six inches of snow on Thursday, and it was beautiful to see – from inside my house!

My husband and I woke up this morning to find our house really cold!  We played with the heater, and it simply would not go on.  It was 26 degrees outside.  It was very early, so we planned to wait a couple hours before we called a plumber.

When we started to make oatmeal for breakfast , we discovered that the stove wouldn’t go on.  Light bulb moment!  There was nothing wrong with our stove or heater.  We were out of gas!

We must use propane gas where we live.  For convenience and financial purposes, we are on auto payment and a level pay plan all year.  We also are on auto fill, which means that the propane company tracks the level and fills the tank when necessary.  When we checked the tank, it was at ZERO!

Still very early in the morning, we called the propane company’s “emergency” line. We tried repeatedly and tried a couple other numbers for the company, but no one answered.  Great!

Finally at 8 AM, we made contact with our local propane office. A receptionist answered, but she was alone in the office and could do nothing.  She called their regional office and the General Manager called me. 

Apparently they use a formula of sorts to determine when we will need gas.  It is based on the size of the home (ours is 2250 square feet) and the number of gas appliances in the home.  Although we’ve been with the company for years, for some reason those numbers were not in their computer.  She informed me that we had no delivery since APRIL!

Within an hour, the manager had arranged for someone to deliver propane to our home and relight all the appliances.  She said we would get 50 gallons free due to the inconvenience.  Our tank took 212 gallons to fill. If we weren’t on the level pay plan, it would have cost $742.57!

So, here I sit in my home office wearing a jacket, a wool scarf around my neck with a blanket covering my legs.  I am drinking hot tea and holding the cup to warm my hands.  It will take a couple hours to warm the house up.  I realize that am fortunate compared to all the people who lived in much colder weather for a long time after Hurricane Sandy and other storms.

The moral of this story, we are looking for a new propane company.

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To learn about Julie Klein and the Xpress Healthcare Business Opportunity, please visit http://joinxpresshealthcare.com.  You can work from home and earn residual income.

For information about how you can Save Money on Your Health and Dental Costs AND Save on Hearing, Vision, Prescriptions, Roadside Assistance, Lifelock™ and much more, please visit http://ibourl.net/XpressSavings   (NOT insurance)