The weekend has rolled around once more and Tucson is truly in the sog days of summer as it’s been well over 100 and the monsoon rains have eluded my neighborhood!
However, Marian B. Wood provided Randy Seaver with this week’s topic for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun on Genea-Musings:
1) Did extreme weather or a natural disaster ever affect you or your ancestor(s)? In what way(s)? How did you find this out?Describe one or more of the extreme weather experiences in your own life or in your ancestors lives.
I don’t know about any natural disasters that affected my ancestors’ lives, but with many living in northern New England and Canada plus quite a few mariners, I am sure that they were affected by extreme weather more than once in the shape of blizzards and hurricanes.
Personally, the only extreme weather that I remember was Hurricane Donna, which hit New Jersey on 12 September 1960. That was just six days into the new school year when I lived in Passaic, New Jersey.
Everyone was talking about how bad the hurricane would be, as it came up from the South. All the students walked home for lunch at my school and, although I remember being sent home with my classmates, I don’t remember if we were sent home early in the morning or just told school was cancelled for the afternoon session.
In any case, there was no school and I remember sitting on our front porch watching the rain come down. I remember thinking it wasn’t much of a storm compared to what the adults were all worried about and, as I looked up its history, my memory is correct. While Florida and North Carolina really got slammed, by the time Donna made it up to the middle Atlantic States, there wasn’t much punch left in it.
I’m pretty sure we were back at school the next morning!
Thanks to Marian and Randy for an interesting topic this week.
I remember that hurricane…it was supposed to be a whopper but mostly only had a bit of rain and some wind. Classes let out early in the Bronx but teachers were reluctant to let me and Sis walk home alone. Neither parent could pick us up (both worked) so we went home alone in galoshes and hats, no problem.
We don’t have extreme weather in the west coast but do have earthquakes and the one in 1989 (the World’s Series) was the hardest I felt. I grabbed my 10 month old off the floor and ran outside until I saw all the power poles swaying and thought it safer inside. Luckily, we were a bit far from the fault and just felt some shaking–no damage.
I’m happy your experience with a hurricane was so anticlimatic. I’ve been in two, one whose name was retired, and I never want to be in one again. I’ll take earthquakes any day of the week.