| At the beginning of the movie, we are shown
some of the names of the 10,000 Gloucester, MA
mariners who were lost at sea since 1623.
Naturally, I wondered how many of them I have
already entered into the American & European
Family Forest. As soon as we arrived home I
did a search in Place Contains for
"gloucester ma" (without the quotes and
without the comma after gloucester).
As I was scrolling through the long match
list, I came to Susanna Warner. She lived in
Gloucester two and a half centuries ago, and she
kept a boarding house at the harbor. I wondered
how similar, and how different, her life was
compared to the woman who kept the boarding house
in the movie. Except for high tech weather
monitoring and almost instantaneous news via the
television, I'll bet the similarities out-weighed
the differences.
As she bid farewell to some mariners who would
never return, could she have possibly imagined
that someone would be talking about her 250 years
into the future?
What would she have thought if she could have
known that one of her 4th great-grand-nephews was
going to become Vice President of the United
States (Charles Dawes), or for that matter, that
there would even be a United States?
Other unique attributes of the one specific
spot her life occupied in the unfolding of
history include being a 2nd cousin twice removed
of President John "The Signer"Adams,
and a 2nd cousin three times removed of President
John Quincy Adams.
Even if your life doesn't seem like it could
ever be of major historical importance, 250 years
from now someone just might be talking about the
one specific spot your life occupied in the
unfolding of history.
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