The Mystery Deepens....

Let's take a brief look at Grandma's family.  Now, Grandma was a beauty....albeit a country beauty.  Here she is with her sister Ruth.  Grandma is on the left.  They either loved each other or hated each other - you never knew from day to day and that never changed their entire lives.  Sort of a can't live with her/can't live without her situation.



With this next picture,  I have finally found proof that farming is in my blood and just perhaps......just perhaps....I am related to the Clampetts....of Beverly Hills.



Grandma is the beauty all the way to the right...evidently at some point she was in the "can't live with her" period and scratched her sister's face off of the photograph...I.kid.you.not.  I love how the hound dogs were held by my Uncle Ray so that they were included in the picture with the family.  And these were their good clothes?!  Must not have been wash day! They were dirt poor....back then you gussied up a lot if you were gonna fork over money for a picture.  Frightening isn't it?

The really scary part?.... I'm related to these people.....sssshhhhhhh!

Here's Grandma on a better day....with her husband...not long before his death.



As I began to put all of this information together, I began to wonder about the Thalassemia.  It is not common to people from Germany.  I began to ponder about other possibilities and then began looking into the history of Prussia.

What I found amazed me and I developed a "theory" about where the Thalassemia came from. For years I wondered about my theory...but without any means of proving it...until now!