Happy Thanksiving

[Richard Crowe]

Happy Thinksgiving Everybody...

I have so much to be thankful for that I cannot even begin to make a list of those things of which I am thankful. Good health, a terrific wife, a great family, fine friends and a wonderful relationship with our Goldendoodle Holly and the Maltese we own and those that we have been fortunate to have the ability to rescue.

I don't just think of what I am thankful for on Thanksgiving Day; I am always, during the other 364 days of the year, aware of how fortunate I am .

However, on this most American of holidays, I have been thinking this morning how thankful I am that my ancestors were brave enough and astute enough to leave their home countries and to travel to this continent to establish and maintain the United States of America as we know it..

My maternal grandmother traveled from Germany in the 1880's as a 15-year old girl with just her 17-year old sister as company. Another ancestor traveled from Ireland in the 1820's as a ten year old girl and settled in what is now Texas on a Mexican landgrant. Her uncle signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Goliad.

My people have been coming to the New World since my first Irish ancestors arrived in Virginia in 1634. I also have some Native American ancestors who were living in the New World and whose people suffered greatly from the influx of my European ancestors.

The brave and wonderful people in my background and in the backgrounds of most Americans provided us with a wonderful place to live. I cannot help but be thankful to them for providing me the opportunity to have been born in and to live in this great nation of ours...

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

Well said!