A Year of Blogging: July 28, 2011

July 28 was 'National Milk Chocolate' Day. I have found we frequently have repeats of days. Earlier this month, we celebrated Chocolate Day. I'm a chocoholic, but I don't think we need to celebrate each type of chocolate separately. Dark, Milk, White, Baking: it can all be celebrated at the same time. There are a couple of notable birthdays on July 28: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was born in 1929. Jim Davis (the creator of Garfield) was born in 1945. Beatrix Potter, author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was born in 1866. July 28 is also the birthday of my new cousin, Emily. Well, I guess she's not a new cousin. She's a couple years younger than me. But we just discovered each other about a month ago. We're actually second cousins- her father and my mother are first cousins. Her grandmother was Grandpa Wager's youngest sister. She married a man from North Carolina, and has lived there since. So Emily is kind of my Dixie cousin, too! We met through Ancestry.com - I've met so many cousins that way, it's almost as interesting as learning I'm related to most of the county where I grew up! When we look to this day in history, in 1868 the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution was adopted. The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship and all it's privileges to African-Americans. Yet, 100 years later, the Civil Rights movement fought to gain equal footing for African-American citizens. Sometimes it's easy to forget change doesn't happen overnight. Now a tidbit for my non-US readers. On July 28, 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. One month earlier, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was killed by a Serbian nationalist. I actually remembered that part from my eighth grade social studies class. And so, on July 28, 1914, World War I started. Until 1939, it was referred to as the World War or the Great War. After WWI, it was thought WWI had been the 'War to End all Wars'. How quickly that changed, and just twenty short years later the world found themselves engaged in another World War. Some generations saw two very devastating wars. As I work on the family history, it is not uncommon to find men who were drafted for both. They were young men (and sometimes boys) for the first one, middle aged or old men in the second. I can't help but think they were extraordinary people.