2023 onward

2023 onward

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Back again. Many changes since the last time so decided to, perhaps backtrack a bit and also start adding my thoughts. Since the early stage of the pandemic of coronavirus, I have been self-isolating within my quite uncommercial neighborhood, shopping only a couple times a week, double masked, of course. When 3rd son and family come they stay outdoors and to talk, I, too will distance outdoors. With my over the ocean other kids it is video chatting. So what do I do with my lonely self. Reading and reading and using Facebook sites for added knowledge and thinking. Woe is I. Waiting to get the vaccine, Aril it seems here in Japan.

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Too long silent. Writing other places. Press myself to write more often on the blog.

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Writing my ancestors and others

I have been hopping around these “old people”,researching and writing – some articles finished, some not, and a few published.

The last published concerned, not ancestors, but a very interesting couple in northern Ohio way back in the early 20th century and on to the 1940’s. Who would believe it but I found  Japanese male, Mamoru Okagi (b 1880) and his French (via England) wife, Marie Gris?Grey, who married in Lorain, Ohio and then opened what became a very well-known American style restaurant in Vermillion, Ohio (maybe 30 some miles from my hometown. A fascinating story but the mystery remains about how they both got to northern Ohio around 1912.

So many more stories begun and waiting to be finished.

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Japan

All dressed up.

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All the way from Baltimore

It’s been a long time in posting.

During August, our  grandchildren and their parents, Loretta and Jamie came across the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean for a visit with us and other Ishida family. Loretta keeps the children, Cary Hajime (10) and Sonya Izumi (8), as close to their Japanese culture as possible, and Jamie, and I as well, to their American and European roots. This was Japan and did they all ever enjoy it. (Their last visit here was five years ago.) Big city Tokyo,  that included staying with Uncle Cary, Aunt Miki, and Zoe, outings with Zoe and cousin Aika and a Giants baseball game and a street festival. Nearby, making their own designs of Japanese paper (washi) and soba (buckwheat noodles) and bathing at an onsen (Japanese hot spring). Visits to other historic places, old town Takayama and off to Hiroshima and the the famous island of Miyajima. But school and work called for the family and back to Baltimore.

And okiipapa (grandpa) and grannyhaha back to researching and writing, he, theology and I, ancestry!

 

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Grannyhaha

Why “Grannyhaha”? I have five married children and am old-fashioned enough to discourage any of their spouses from calling me by my given name. A couple do use the same appellation as their partners do, others the Japanese term, “okaasan”. Other term in Japanese is “haha ue”, that would only be used very fromally with one’s own mother. When our only daughter married, I jokingly told her husband he could call me that as so he does. Somehow when their chldren came along, I became “Granny” “Haha”, Grannyhaha to them – a kind of hybrid term for grandmother. But never, never for my children and their spouses to call me that directly, except when the children are involved.

No laughing matter.

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Before and Now

Being interested in history and genealogy and what goes on now, I have created this place as a “catch all” for my thoughts, interests and news.

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