This is the second blog of a two blog series about searching for our colonial ancestors during a visit to New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. I recommend that you start by reading the first blog at . Before recounting our visits to ancestral sites a little background is necessary. I thought that I would try to follow the various branches of our family tree from the beginnings at the ports founded on the Delaware River, as they would merge with other branches in the westward migration across Pennsylvania. I selected my Ross ancestors as the main family to which other would intermarry. I did so because the Ross family of my great grandmother, Anna Elizabeth Ross, can be traced directly, without going through spouses, to the progenitor, Sir Farquhar MacTaggart (Mac an t-Sagairt Ó Beólláin), ... read more

On 27 Jan 2020 stories were coming out of Wuhan, China about a new virus that had locked down the city. We have friends Tom and Wendy; Wendy was the first Consul General after the U.S. opened the Consulate in Wuhan following its closure during the Communist revolution in 1949. I read that the U.S. government was evacuating the U.S. consulate staff so wrote to them "I bet you are happy not to be in Wuhan now! I hear the consulate is evacuating U.S. employees. When you were stationed in Guangzhou during the SARS epidemic in 2003, you were quarantined there for months. Times are changing." Little did I know at the time how much times were a changing! The world shut down, travel between countries was banned, and my plans for international travel in 2020 ... read more

As explained in my blog the purpose of my trip to England was twofold; firstly, to discover my maternal ancestry in Devon and secondly to walk the last few miles of the Old Way Pilgrimage to Canterbury. This blog covers the second of these two purposes. 1 - 5 May 2019 Wednesday through Sunday. I arrived on a flight from Denver to Heathrow at about noon and was met by nephew Jeremy. We had just a few minutes before he had to return to London for a meeting. We had coffee and talked about his and Nadine's forthcoming trip to Chile and Easter Island and my plans for my time in England. He has accepted an assistant professorship in Economics at Bristol University in the fall, and his wife Nadine, who is a doctor, will be ... read more

At the beginning of each year I look at my wish list of destinations and then decide, based upon circumstances, where to spend my two or three week vacation time abroad. Linda and I will take separate vacations for the fourth year in a row as one of us has to stay home to take care of our dog Bonnie. Linda will take her three weeks or more to visit family in PA and CT after I get back. On 1 Feb I bought a ticket from Denver to London and return to JFK for $368.43...cheaper than flying R/T from Denver to the East Coast! This year I plan to take my vacation in three parts: starting on 30 April, the day after Linda's birthday, I will fly from Denver to London. Once in England I ... read more

For the third year in a row I walked a pilgrim trail. My blogs for the Camino de Santiago in 2016 start with . For four weeks I walked across northern Spain in the footsteps of Roman legions, the early apostles James and Paul, and a million or more pilgrims since then. The movie "The Way" had inspired this pilgrimage as I yearned for the same bonding that took place between the four pilgrims. On my pilgrimage I met and talked to many pilgrims; forming a loose knit family along the way. I was not drawn to this pilgrimage to earn the Compostela, or the certificate for those who walk the last 100 km, which isn't even mentioned in the movie. I only found our about the Compostela when I started researching for the pilgrimage. As ... read more