ROOTS                  °

HONOR YOUR PARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, BEYOND! Companion PHOTO-PAGE here.
Best page on website?

*Peter d'Errico:
Mother: Margaret Keller, born 1918 in Parkersburg, WV, an identical twin daughter of Josephine Claire van Gordon (half-Dutch, half Scotch/Irish/German) and Samson Thistle Keller (probably German). She had five older brothers, most of whom died relatively young. Her father died before I was born. At my birth, she was a secretary at Parkersburg Rig & Reel, where my father was an oil and gas equipment engineer.
Father: Thomas d'Errico, born 1913 in San Severo, Italy, son of Pietro Paulo d'Errico and Maria Giovanna D'Errico. He was the eldest son among eventually seven siblings. When my parents married, he was chafing under the status of a man exempted from the WWII draft because his engineering work was considered crucial to the war effort. He bolted Rig & Reel and joined the Navy, just in time, as he put it, to "fight the battle of the Great Lakes" in Navy boot camp.
Me: I was born in Parkersburg in 1944. My mother was pregnant with my sister Nancy when my father joined the Navy. A decision was made for me (at 13 months old) to move to his family in Worcester, MA. I lived there for two different periods between 13 months and 5 years of age. My father embarked on a career change from oil and gas engineer to civil engineer, entailing more graduate study, followed by teaching positions, first in upstate Potsdam, NY. We returned to WV (Morgantown, where my sister Lisa was born) for 3 years; then moved to northern Ruston, LA, for 3 years (in the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, which exposed me first-hand to racial tensions of the first order). The next move was to the relative oasis of Fargo, ND, for 4 years of high school, after which Bates College in Lewiston, ME (where I was a philosophy major because they had the fewest mandatory classes, giving me space for debate and the college paper). New Haven came next, I tried to abandon law school, exploring a few weeks of exile in Edinburgh, Scotland, before hauling myself back. After Yale came Shiprock, Navajoland, where I experienced an indigenous non-Western culture that has illuminated my life ever since. The next move was to Western Mass., where I helped create a Legal Studies curriculum at the University of Massachusetts / Amherst exploring the liminal space between professional and academic perspectives of law. I retired in 2002, having moved to nearby Leverett, where I'm in my 5th 3-year term as an elected member of the SelectBoard in a town soon to celebrate its 250th anniversary. The repeated moves and new beginnings over the course of decades taught me how to navigate widely divergent local cultures, a skill that stands me in good stead. As to my surname, here is some interesting back story.
DNA: Not yet.
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*Mark Schantz:
Mother: Ann (Annabel) Cundy. From southwestern England, Cundys emigrated from Cornwall/Devon area in 1830--1860, probably because tin mines were closing. Came through Canada, eventually becoming immigrants in Darlington, Wisconsin. Farmed in SW Iowa.
Father: Gilbert Schantz (Tschantz). His parents: Margaret Rich (Rychen), C.K.Schantz. Margaret from Ostend, Alsace, C.K. from Basel, Switzerland (not far from Ostheim, just across the Rhine). Schantzes were Mennonites residing in Doubs, France and in Basel. When Prussians attempted to "impress" the males, the family went out the back door. Emigrated from that vicinity to PA. area in 1820-1850 and worked their way west to find land for next generation. This may connect to the Eastern Europe % in my DNA.
Me: born in Cedar Falls, IA. After WWII lived in Wayland (Pop.600) moved to Wellsburg (Pop. 800) -- then Iowa City for college.
DNA: 35% Northwestern Europe; 28% Southwestern Europe; 26% Eastern Europe; 8% Diaspora; and 1.5% Neanderthal
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*Mel Masuda:
Mother: Setsuyo Ono was the eldest daughter (of seven children -- two sons and five daughters) of an immigrant couple, also, like my father Tatsuo, with Fukushima Prefecture roots, she was born on August 25, 1916, in McGerrow sugar plantation village in central Maui and went through the eighth grade at Puunene School. Then she was apprenticed out as a seamstress. When she was told by her parents that she had been "omi-aye"-ed -- promised -- to Tatsuo, according to my aunties, she threw a fit. My Mom had been known as the sugar plantation village "bijin," beauty, and she said: "He's ten years older -- and he's shorter than me!" But, of course, back in those tradition-bound days, she had to acquiesce. (And it's nice to note that my Mom and Dad actually did fall in love, for life, after the "omi-aye.")
Father: Tatsuo Masuda made it to the Territory of Hawaii in 1919 -- a scant five years before the immigration gate slammed shut with the Japanese-And-All-Other-Asians Exclusion Act. His family -- the Amano Clan -- samurai retainers to the Tokugawa Shogunate -- chose the wrong side in the struggle between the Shogunate (which ruled Japan for 250 years and had made the Emperor a figurehead) and Mutsuhito, the Meiji Emperor. If you saw the movie, "The Last Samurai," you know that the Meiji Emperor won and immediately dispossessed Shogunate retainers. This bankrupted the Amano-Masuda. When recruiters from the Territory of Hawaii came a-calling in my Dad's hometown of Namie and offering work contracts on Maui Island, my Dad's parents signed up. They couldn't afford his passage to Maui, and so they left him in the care of an uncle -- for 10 years. Tatsuo was age 3 when they left. In 1919, he and his grand-dad, a Shinto priest, finally got to Maui.
Tatsuo had been promised an education, but was sent immediately to work in the fields, digging, planting, and harvesting sugar cane. Five years later he learned that a fellow worker had gotten a job as a waiter in the plantation’s hotel. My Dad went straight to his friend: "When the next job opens up for another waiter, please 'shimpai' [ask for] that job for me!" And, luckily, he got that next job opening -- and that started him on his life-long career.
Me: I was born on New Year's Day, 1943, in a small temporary clinic in the sugar cane fields next to the irrigation ditch on Hansen Ave in Puunene, Maui. (See Long Format for why we were not in an internment camp.) By late 40s, the sugar plantation began to falter; in '52, the plantation hotel closed -- and my Dad lost his job. Luckily, he was able to get a job as waiter at (the original) Waikiki Halekulani Hotel. We stayed with my cousins when we "country hicks" first arrived in the Big City of Honolulu -- that was the first time I had ever seen television, and my cousins will never, ever let me forget that, because "you threw up!" My Mom got a job as a "pineapple trimmer" (donning protective gear, she sliced off the poke-y tops of pineapples as they tumbled down the canning assembly line) at Dole Cannery.
We three sons were latchkey kids -- Mom would leave at 5:00 AM to catch the bus to the Dole Cannery and then return home about 4 PM and cook dinner for us. My Dad took the bus home from the hotel at 10 PM and never saw us in the mornings because he slept until 9 AM when he had to catch the bus back to Waikiki. Hawaii's public school system was segregated according to speech. When the soldiers and sailors began being sent to Hawaii around 1920, many of them then moved their families here. They and their spouses were appalled when their children, in the public schools, came home speaking pidgin English. The military convinced the Territorial government to set up a separate track, the "English standard" system: If you were shown a picture of a cat and asked, "What is this?," and you answered, "That's a cat," you passed the entrance test, but if you said, "Dat one cat" in perfect pidgin, you flunked. Being a "goody two-shoes," I passed the test and attended the set of public schools that embodied legal segregation based on speech! The system was phased out, but I was in the last "English standard" graduating class of 525 at Honolulu's Theodore Roosevelt HS.
From there, I was fortunate to be able to achieve my ice-hockey-style hat trick of higher education -- Princeton, Yale, and Harvard -- through scholarships, loans, and work-study (busboy in the Princeton dining halls, freshman-dorm counselor at Yale). But it wasn't easy -- I suffered terrible culture shock in my first two years at Princeton (I had never, ever been away from Hawaii before), and I flunked out. Luckily, Princeton welcomes back its prodigal undergrads if they make up the credits elsewhere during their "year(s) in the wilderness." I spent my forced "year off" working as a full-time news reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser daily in Honolulu -- and honed my writing skills to the point where I was able, later, to write my way on to the Board of Editors of the Yale law Journal. More in 50th reunion book.
DNA: Not yet.   Mel's Long Format here.
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*Max Gitter:
Mother: My mother came from Międzyrzec ("Mizrich" in Yiddish), a small Polish city just east of Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, and with a little money from her mother and a brother-in-law, she fled east to the Soviet-annexed Brest Litovsk. Despite escaping Nazi rule, my mother was not safe. Soon after arriving in Brest Litvosk, she was arrested as part of a Soviet campaign to handle the influx of “illegal” refugees who came from German-occupied areas, spent a month in jail, and was soon sent to a slave labor camp in Siberia.
Father: My father—who was from a small, impoverished shtetl in the Soviet-annexed eastern Galicia—was deported in June 1940, along with his parents and older brother. They were packed in rail cars for three weeks and taken to a timber-cutting camp in Siberia. My father was forever haunted by the clang-clang-clang of that rail journey.    My father’s brother and father, like many thousands of deportees, perished from the hard labor, cold, and hunger. My father and his mother survived only because, after a full day in the snow, cutting down trees, my father spent his nights restoring shoes in exchange for extra food. When the Soviet Union finally released Polish nationals detained in Soviet jails and labor camps, my parents were sent to separate cotton-producing collective farms near Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan. They met in 1942 while picking up relief food packages sent by the Allies. That year, they married in a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony.
Me: I was born 15 months later, on November 17 or 18, 1943, my parents aren’t sure which. Life in Samarkand was hard. Food was scarce, living conditions appalling. My father’s mother died three weeks after I was born. My mother contracted typhus some time later and sent me to another family to be cared for while she was hospitalized. When she came to take me home six months later, I did not recognize her. As I did with any stranger upon meeting them, I begged her for food.     After the war ended, we traveled through Poland, often by foot, searching for surviving relatives. The Nazis had killed my mother’s parents and five of her siblings, but her sisters Cela and Itka, as well as Itka’s husband, survived. In my father’s case, there was no one—not his five sisters and half-sisters, not an aunt or uncle, not even a distant cousin or an acquaintance. No one he knew before the war survived. We spent four years living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, with my father scavenging for food and my brother Marty, who was born in a camp in 1946, constantly ill. One of my few happy memories is of my fourth or fifth birthday when I received my first present—a bar of soap. In June 1950, when I was six, we were finally able to immigrate to the U.S. The former troopship was crammed with refugees, and everyone was seasick all the time. My father, accustomed to surviving by paying bribes, had me wear two Swiss watches on my upper arms, hidden under my shirtsleeves. He feared that if they were found, they would be seized. I was terrified that my smuggling would be discovered that I would be punished and the watches would be confiscated. My family was very poor, but we had enough food to live on and a small apartment in the Bronx. I went to a yeshiva nearby where I spent mornings devoted to religious studies in Yiddish and afternoons on secular studies in English. While I spoke Yiddish and German, and a little Russian, I knew no English. I learned quickly.    As the first in my family to learn English, I helped my parents travel on the New York City subway and get through their evening language and citizenship classes, and I filled out forms from the government and other organizations for my family. Often the forms contained a question about the country of citizenship. Our response was “stateless.” This term, stateless, evoked such a sense of not belonging that it still stirs up feelings of anxiety.    Growing up in America, I often felt like an awkward outsider. My clothes seemed wrong, my manners unpolished. In many ways, I was a displaced person once again.
DNA: . . . .
Max continues: here.

The above is taken, with Max's blessing we hope, from a page he produced for YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, YIVO.

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*Tom Grey:
Mother: Aileen O'Connor. Born in California. Her mother had an apple farm near Sebastopol in Sonoma Co where we spent every summer and many school season weekends. I have a memory of taking part in the greased pig contest once, but it could be a false memory based on imagining the experience. I certainly watched it several times and it was always a highlight of the county fair in Santa Rosa. Both grandfathers came to this country as young adults from Ireland in the late nineteenth century. Grandpa Grey’s family was Scots-Irish and Methodist from the northern counties but had lived in Ireland for at least a century or more, and Grandpa O’Connor was Irish Catholic from County Kerry.
Father: George Grey. He was a department store manager in San Francisco (Hale's). He also was a native Californian. When I was about to go off to boarding school, he was moved to Pasadena to run a Broadway (which had acquired Hale's; Broadway was acquired by Federated, which is now Macy's). Grandmother Grey was Canadian of Scottish origin and our maternal grandmother was Irish Catholic (O’Hara) but her family had been in the US for several generations. We do actually have one Mayflower ancestor since our Canadian roots went back to the 1700s, and a member of that family had married into a Mayflower family. And Grandpa Grey made his money (after stopping briefly in Philadelphia before going on to the Yukon) in the Klondike Gold Rush of ‘98, eventually settling in Southern California. My American grandmother’s forebears came from Connecticut, although she was born in Virginia City, NV where her father was a supervising engineer on the Comstock Lode silver mine.
Me: I grew up in San Francisco; both my sisters went to school in Pasadena, but I never did because the move occurred just as I was going off to Exeter. Except for that, YLS, two years at Oxford and three in DC, I have lived in the Bay Area my entire life. ADDENDUM: Thanks to my sister, Alison, who knows more of family history than I and who supplied most of this information, as well as the picture. Thank you, Ali.
DNA: Not yet.
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*Chris May:
Mother: Virginia Newton (1915-1971). Her ancestry has been traced back to William Newton, who was a stone quarry mason in Portland, Dorset, England, born 1779 or 1783. He and his wife, Ann, had a son, Luke, who married Charlotte (Lottie) Whitelam. These two were both born in Lincolnshire, had six children. In 1851 they moved their entire family to Bloomfield Township in Oakland County, outside of Detroit. Their son Isaac (b. 1837) married Marcella Carey (b. 1841, Ireland). They had seven children, one of whom, Thomas (b. 1873), married Matilda Susan Poull (b.1881, Wisconsin). Thomas and Matilda had seven children, one of whom was my mother. She attended Mundelein College in Chicago for two years before having to drop out during the Depression. She was a secretary at Montgomery Ward when she met and married my father who who was also working at Ward’s at the time.
Father: Robert L. May. His ancestry has been traced back over two centuries to his great great grandparents, David Mai and Regina Steifel who lived in the Kingdom of Barvaria. We know that their son, also David (b. May 1807) was from Zeselberg (now Weselberg), in Wallhalben, Rhine County, Bavaria. He married Eleonore, and they had four children, the youngest of whom was Isaac (Isak) (b. 1842 or 1843, Zeselberg), who spelled his last name with a “y” rather than an “i”. Isaac married Helena and they moved to Atlanta, Georgia. They would have five children, one of whom, Milton, was my father’s father. Milton married Jeannette Sampter Simon, a union that produced four children, my father Robert the oldest of them. The rest of my father’s story is told on the Reindeer page.
Me: I was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, one of five children my father had with my mother, whom he married after his first wife (and the mother of one) died in her early thirties of ovarian cancer. I went to Evanston Township High School and then to Harvard, where I first majored in engineering and applied physics but then switched to general studies when going got too rough. From there it was to YLS. After Yale, I spent several months with the Peace Corps in Nepal, dropping out when it turned out no one in the village to which I was assigned spoke either of the two languages I had been taught. I then went into legal services, spending a year with NIELP, a poverty law institute in Chicago, and then three years with a neighborhood legal assistance program in San Francisco. I married Barbara Cattarini McGraw, half Italian and half Irish as her name fully reveals, whom I had met in SF back in 1967, the summer after my second year at YLS when I went there to to clerk for what was then Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro. Barbara and I then moved to Los Angeles where I would spend the next 34 years at Loyola Law School (Loyola Marymount University), teaching first in a clinical poverty law program, and then in the areas of Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law.
DNA not yet.

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*Jonathan Shepard:
Mother: Maiden name Aaron. Her parents and grandparents were from that large class of Jewish people who came from Europe and Russia. That’s what Ancestry.com tells me about my heritage, which I knew in any event. Almost entirely Eastern European Jewish. Russia, Austria, Lithuania and the US. My mother profited from this exodus and obtained a degree from Hunter.
Father: Same story as with my mother. He, too, profited, at CCNY. My father changed his name to Shepard in the 1930’s to go into radio and television.
Me: Lived in the Bronx; I was born next to Yankee Stadium, moved to Central Park West and then to Hartsdale. Later back to NYC. Ultimately, we moved to Scarsdale. I went to Scarsdale High, but ultimately graduated from The Peddie School.
DNA: Until 2018 I thought I had two children. I discovered then that I have another child, a 54 year old woman born in the US but living in Basel, Switzerland. She did Ancestry and began to ask her family questions. The answers led to me. Now, that’s an interesting story. I consequently have two more grandchildren (I have two in Le Chesnay [adjacent to Versailles] and one in Brooklyn) and a great granddaughter in Switzerland. The Swiss-American grandchildren (females born in Florida) are American but the great-granddaughter is not. Vagaries of our odd citizenship laws. My French-American grandchildren are dual citizens. Has to do with how long my daughter-daughter (as I think of my “original” daughter, my true love) Lindsay lived in the US before she married in France and had children. So I have two European-American daughters and a son in Brooklyn.
But wait, there's more. I spent the weekend in Boston in 1969 when I took a break from my VISTA job in NYC (that’s a whole nother story) to visit my former girlfriend. The girlfriend introduced me to her four year old daughter. That was obviously my daughter. Did her mother know she was introducing father and daughter? Today her mother is a recluse, and no one has been able or willing to speak with her and ask her. Which leads to this: how exactly was my daughter able to determine that the man she thought was her father, who died when she was young, was not in fact her father, but I was/am? I’ve spent time with my new daughter in Basel, Nashville, and here in Boca. She lives three hours from my daughter-daughter in Paris, but they haven’t met nor spoken. And last, DNA is powerful. My Basel daughter of course looks like we are related but, more interestingly, in many ways she is very much like me.
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*Zyg Plater:
Mother: Born May 30, 1914 in London, Griselda Marie Deringer. Both her parents were born in Niagara Falls, NY. Her father worked for a graphite company and stayed in London during the years of German zeppelin bombing; he was an emergency responder whenever the bombs dropped. For safety, my mother was shipped out into the country with other children. She came back to the US for college, Smith, and casually met my father at a consulate party.
Father: Konstanty Marja Hr. Broël Plater. Born in Bialaczow Poland, September 19, 1909, raised in a chateau, studied law at U Warsaw, entered Polish diplomatic service until the post-Hitler Soviets took it over, joined Free Polish Army training in Windsor Ontario, but because of TB was not allowed to ship off to Italy to be killed in their assault that breached the fortifications at Monte Casino so the British forces could enter and claim the victory. So, he joined the French Foreign Legion and was about to sail out of Philadelphia Navy Yard on a French supply ship, but because of a death threat abandoned ship, and because all his papers had been canceled for departure he had to sneak through a sewer past the naval guards and called the young lady he knew who came and got him and became my mother. (In other words, my father was an illegal immigrant.) The chateau became the German Army headquarters in southern Poland for several years, while my grandmother and three of her six daughters lived in a shack nearer to the town. My uncle Ludwik, a cavalry officer, was in a concentration camp but survived until liberation, at which point he killed himself, making my father through primogeniture the chef de famille, though he was never able to go back to Poland until the Russians left -- by which time he had become an American, and the way of 19th-century life that he had lived existed no more. The chateau became a hospital and then a hospice, run by an order of nuns. It is visible as a backdrop in the recent award-winning movie Cold War by Pawel Pawlikowski.
My parents moved to an old farm straddling a hilltop in the poor northern part of Bucks County Pennsylvania and tried to farm, but the soil was thin, so father worked in a paper factory and then sold real estate. Over a number of years, they rebuilt the farmhouse into a nice home. Mother, raised to be an executive spouse, got used to country living, initially with a privy and little heat, became a champion bridge-player, with a ritzy circle of friends and parties in the nearby city of Bethlehem, died of cancer in 1986. Father continued to live on the hilltop farm until just before he died in 2007.
Me: Born blue, 20 October 1943, with umbilical cord wrapped tightly around neck, in Manhattan's Harkness Pavilion Hospital. The doctor quickly dipped me back and forth in cold, then hot, water. I don't remember this very well so cannot tell you how that felt, but it apparently got enough blood flowing back into the brain to let me become a fly-fisherman. Family moved into the Pennsylvania boondocks in 1947 -- RFD 1, Upper Black Eddy, PA; phone number 18R4 -- line 18 ring 4 times on the party line. Local schools till 11th grade, then a venture into the over-privileged prep school culture at The Hill School, then Princeton where I don't remember much about my American History major but took a great public speaking course that gave me a little confidence and an opportunity to prepare a couple of talks on pollution -- and that started a whole lot of life-shaping, even though the word "environmental' was then unknown. Jack Tate and I had a great talk about Tom Jones, and so he invited me to Yale, still a child, but when Ford gave the law school $2m to create an "environmental law" course, I jumped on it. Clyde Summers volunteered to teach it (more about this on the A2 page here). To avoid Vietnam I followed Quintin Johnstone to Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa where he had been appointed dean, and with John Marshall LLM '68 I taught there for three years, at first with Peace Corps (not an automatic draft deferral, but they sent a card to our draft boards introducing "Zyg Plater, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia where the following diseases are prevalent -- smallpox, leprosy, elephantiasis, diphtheria, bilharzia, plague [a. bubonic, b. pneumonic], dysentery [a. amoebic, b. bacillary],..." etc. and General Hershey did not draft any of us into the Army.) I taught administrative law and statutory interpretation, worked for the Imperial Wildlife Conservation Ministry helping to write their national parks law, loved teaching, and jumped at the chance upon returning to the USA to get a doctorate in environmental law at UMichigan with Joe Sax, the pioneer in the field. Everything I've done since has been Saxist. See goo.gl/ecQ158, plus his snail darter book.
DNA: Not yet.
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*Michael Chabot Smith:
Mother: Elizabeth (Betty) McCarthy. Born in Rochester, NY, 1916, and grew up there. Received BA from University of Rochester (majored in English) in 1937. Met my father in New York City, where she worked for advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, in 1938 or 1939. They were married in NYC in 1940, where my older sister Betsy was born in 1941, who went on to become a gifted, if unheralded, sculptress prior to her untimely passing in 1999. During the early years of their marriage, my mother was fully occupied by the responsibilities of child rearing and household management during our many moves (described below). When we finally settled in CT, she was able to pursue a part-time career as free-lance writer, contributing numerous items to the Westport Town Crier and organizing fund-raising events for clients such as Save the Children.
Both my mother's parents were of Irish descent, both born in the US. Their parents were also likely born in the U.S., but their grandparents are believed to have emigrated from Ireland during or shortly after the famine of the 1840's.
Father: John Chabot Smith. Born in Croydon, UK (a part of London) in 1915, at the home of his grandmother during one of the early air raids in the First World War. Thereafter, the family relocated to Australia, where they remained until 1920, when they emigrated to the U.S. He grew up in Connecticut and went to prep school there, the Loomis (now Loomis Chaffee) School in Windsor, CT. Majored in history at Princeton, earned Junior Year Phi Beta Kappa, graduated in 1936 and did grad studies at Cambridge University. He started as a journalist at the Washington Post, but soon switched to the NY Herald Tribune, first as White House correspondent, then overseas as war correspondent during 1944-45 (was the first Western journalist to come upon the upside-down hung bodies of Mussolini and his mistress in Giulino, Italy, in April 1945), and returned to London to cover the post-war period until 1947. After returning to the US, still with the Herald Tribune, he was stationed in NYC. There his career ultimately became entwined with a different McCarthy, one named Joe. He provided coverage of both Alger Hiss perjury trials -- coverage which was praised by AJ Liebling for its thoroughness and objectivity, but earning him denunciations from Westbrook Pegler as a "fellow traveler." (He ended up writing a book about Hiss, published in 1976, often said to be a sympathetic one. Hiss appeared with my father at a press conference to promote the book, held at the Overseas Press Club. Allen Weinstein was pushing his own book in '76 and attacked my father's in the NYRB. My father's reply is on the website of the NYRB. After his journalistic career cratered, he became head of Public Affairs for the American Red Cross during the Korean War, living on various US army bases in Japan from 1951-53. After returning to the US, he pursued an unhappy career in corporate public relations for about ten years, before signing up as a correspondent teacher with the Famous Writers School in Westport, CT. He also authored another non-fiction book published in 1977, "The Children of Master O'Rourke," intended as a kind of "Roots"-like account of multiple generations of an Irish family, but which enjoyed somewhat less success than Alex Haley's effort.
My father's parents and grandparents were both from the UK, but his mother (Christine Chabot) had roots tracing back to the French Huguenots.
Me: Born in DC in 1944 and spent my first nine years moving frequently, to NY, London, NY again, CT, Japan and back. After we settled in Weston, CT, in 1953, went to local public schools, then to prep school at Loomis (now Loomis Chaffee), followed by Princeton and YLS. My time at YLS and after is detailed in my page in the 50th reunion book.
DNA: Not yet.
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*Hardy Wieting:
Mother: Euneece Crowley originally, born 1915, then Larsen, then Whalen -- all before getting married. Larsen is her mother's maiden name. Mom was born Crowley because Harriet Larsen had married Irish Catholic. Divorce followed when my mother was a toddler (no contact with dad until once or twice after she married, then only by accident). (She did, however, remember a visit with him, age 3. Also reciting a poem for some lads in MI, off to fight in WW1: "I am a little girl/ I have a little curl, right in the middle of my forehead/ When I am good, I am very, very good/ When I am bad, I am horrid.") To keep her from her father, she was sent off to be raised much by her Norwegian-born grandmother (Petersen) in Clintonville, WI (grandfather half Norwegian, half Swedish, died young). Attended Lake View High School (Ashland Ave, Irving Park intersection) as Euneece Whalen because her mother had remarried, to a Canadian who died youngish. Top student, but denied college because uncle who was to finance it (advertising exec who started the IGA food stores) got wiped out by the Depression.
Father: Hardy, Sr. His mother, Beatrice, was a Hardy, which is how dad and I got the name. (Her mother was a Dragoo or Dragoux). My guess is Hardy is Scottish (fondness for saving $) or Irish, but could of course also be English -- or even French, beautiful French singer/actress, Francoise Hardy. I'm pulling for French. His father was, I guess, of Austrian descent, since Wieting is community in a town in Austrian Alps. Apparently, emigrated long ago, maybe to Germany before USA. I've recently discovered that father's great grandfather was Dutch-German, Henry Anton Wieting, born Germany 1832, died Louisville 1917. Dad's branch ended up in Louisville, but there's a Wieting opera house in upstate NY, also Iowa. (I love opera). Lots of Wietings in TX. My father's family moved to Chicago when he was a boy. He had three siblings; only his older brother was able to attend college before Depression hit. Attended LV HS. He didn't serve in WW2 through good luck: FDR signed Selective Service Act Sept 1940; my father was in first wave of draftees -- but they deferred anyone married. Second wave deferred anyone with children (yours truly). Third wave anyone with any physical defect -- amblyopia (lazy eye), which I inherited. By fourth wave, war ended. His career was as a photog for the Chicago Tribune.
Me: lived in Ravenswood neighborhood of northern part of Chicago (near LV HS) till 4th grade, then Lombard. Most interesting part of Ravenswood, to me, was nearby Graceland Cemetery, whose brick walls we'd climb over to find ourselves in a green and pleasant land. Only much later did I discover how many famous people are buried there: eg, John Peter Altgeld, Philip Armour, Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick (yes, of reaper fame), Allan Pinkerton, George Pullman, Louis Sullivan, László Moholy-Nagy -- and most amazing of all, Kate Warne. Not yet there when I was stepping on graves: Ernie Banks and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Career at Science Division, The Nature Conservancy, working with Robert Jenkins, Harvard bio PhD, keenly interested in biodiversity preservation and how information management and computers (and ultimately a network of staffed units, one in each state) could achieve that. I worked helping some to design all this but mainly propagating and administering in each of the 50 state governments our data system for determining which species are endangered, where located (precisely, to the inch), and how to protect them ("Natural Heritage Programs"). This involved selling, finding financial support, contractual arrangements, training, supervision, and negotiating a permanent place in state government for each program. With my wife, Susan Lukowski, adopted a baby girl from China, born 1995. What a joy!
DNA: Not yet. One thing adoption teaches about family: DNA of interest, but it's not about DNA. My only sibling, my younger brother, had his done, and was totally surprised to find no German/Austrian, just Scandinavia, Scots, English, Irish, especially as we had just learned we are paternally descended from a Dutch-German, Henry Anton Wieting (1832-1917).

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Note on format:
*Your name:
Mother: [Maiden name, where grew up, what she did, similar about her parents and beyond, if possible.]
Father: [basically, ditto]
Me: [where you grew up, schooled, events of interest]
DNA: no or yes, and if yes, what it showed

HONOR YOUR PARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, BEYOND! Send in your roots.

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