johanna,

my maternal grandfather was 100% german american.

george keller, son of gandy mom and gandy pop from ze olde country...

he married a norman/english gal name of helen torrey (yes that's right, people, her married name was [drumroll, please.......................] helen keller!) she died, sadly, at the tender age of 34 of TB, i think it was. my mother was a small child of only 4. she (my mom) had horrible "back problems" from what little i remember of her (she abandoned ship in 1961, i'm sorry to report).

everyone else on both sides were a bunch of interbred puritan WASP's going back to the mayflower.

boy, there were a lot of people on that boat. (everyone from back east claims to have ancestry going back to that ship! no small wonder it didn't sink mid-crossing.)

they were all certainly uptight enough to have had major neck, shoulder and back issues. would have totally lied about any german blood, though, because that was neither patriotic nor fashionable in new england where we hailed from.

i think their bodily issues could have been from the sticks up their arses, however .

hardworking puritan ancestry, fleeing from the anglican church, survivng that brutal first winter on the cape, quite a visual i must say. thanks for that.

the german side all immigrated to rochester, NY. judging from the given name of the patriarch, which was jean baptiste, it was probably an area of germany geographically close to the french or belgian border (or swiss?) i am bad at geography and too lazy to get a map out right now. anyway, rochester used to be the "flour" capital of america and subsequently became the "flower" capital of america. jean baptiste was a florist by trade.

most of his 5 sons became engineers; they all went to cornell - wasn't an ivy league school back in those days, just where you went to become an engineer, johanna, and ithaca of course is not too far a stone's throw from rochester (i don't think it is anyway, but i'm a linquist, not a geographer).

thought you would appreciate the engineer thing anyway.

my dad and two of his three brothers also went to cornell for engineering. which is neither here nor there as far as the german thing goes.

now there's a WHOLE thing about PA and german american immigrants we could get into, if you really want to get weird and eerie in respect of TOS! but i'm not goin' there today.

i'll leave that for mark and/or dimarie...

thanks for this thread. it is very interesting and something i hadn't thought about in years, actually. one of the first chiros i went to back in the mid-70's when this TOS monster first struck me was down on the subject of a genetic connection in terms of the muscular bracing, the amount of physical activity our "stock" was designed for, having to work to survive the hard life of a farmer and stuff like that there.

it must be a terrible burden on you being the smartest person in the room

i'm just kidding, you know i love you,

alison