My Family's Origins

My family originally comes from the northern part of what is now the Czech Republic while it was currently Austria Hungary.  My great grandfather met his wife (my great grandmother) and then moved to Vienna Austria to take a job as a professor for a university there.  My grandpa (Manfred) was born soon there after in 1931, seven years before Hitler would annex it.  As WWII broke out the Nazi party required people to join it or else lose their jobs however, my great grandfather refused and thus lost his job as a professor at the university.  With him not having a job he was soon forced into the Army enlisted as a private in the infantry much to my great grandmothers dismay.  When she found out about this she marched down to the generals office and demanded that he get a promotion as he was a professor and very intelligent man and thus did not belong in the infantry especially as a private.  My great grandfather was soon promoted to a major in the air force where his job was to determine whether or not the geography of certain locations could sustain use as airstrips for planes.  As the war was getting closer to home due to the impending defeat of the Nazis my grandpa and his mother moved to a family farm in what was called the Sudetenland, (an area in Czech that was occupied by Germany at the time) to escape the war.  While my grandfather was at school my great grandfather was driving down a road with some other soldiers when their car was strafed by a British plane which shot my great grandfather in the knee resulting in massive blood loss and as a result died.  A year later when Russia was closing in on Germany my great grandmother was walking down their village street when a truck full of Russian soldier drove by and subsequently dropped a tub of lard which my great grandma preceded to try and help pick up for them when they decided to just give it to her.  As my grandma was telling me this she stressed the significance of this event as lard was extremely useful and valuable in post-war Europe and ended up providing my family with enough money to get by.

After some years passed and my grandfather graduating university he met my grandma in Washington D.C. after moving to the states. (My grandma recently immigrated their from Scotland) and moved to North Carolina to work as doctors as they wanted a better opportunity in life for their kids rather than dealing with  the current condition of post war Europe.  After five years in North Carolina they decided to move to Rhode Island to work at a larger hospital where my grandfather was a cancer specialist and my grandmother was a head Doctor in the E.R..  My dad and my aunt were born a couple years later after and my dad after attending business school decided to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago where he would eventually meet my mom.  After my parents got married they lived in Chicago and had my sister while living in Edgewater.  After ten years or so they moved to Denver Colorado for a change of pace where my Dad lived there on the weekends as he was still working in Chicago.  Shortly after I was born at the Saint Josephs Hospital there and after five years we moved to Winnetka and the rest is history.  For myself at least.