How Did She Get In My Posts about the Stephens' Pictures?

Sarah Palin

   Nope! This is not a political blog. I already have my candidate for President, but I do have a remark or two about the Tea Party in here somewhere.  No,  Sarah Palin is here to show you how small a world we live in. Someday you may just be around the corner from someone famous, like the Stephens family was, or you may even be related to someone famous right now. Sarah Palin was on the city council of Wassila, Alaska while the Stephens were still alive, 13.2 miles from their home.

   If you are reading this, and a member of the Stark/Shoemaker family you already are related to someone famous. You are related to Daniel Boone, both the Presidents Bush, President Abraham Lincoln, John Wayne, President Theodore Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, John Hancock (first and largest signature on the Declaration of Independence, not the goofy super hero) Lara Bush, Emily Dickenson, Lucille Ball, Emma Hale Smith, (Joseph Smith's wife), somewhere around 17 Civil War Veterans from both sides, also veterans from both sides of the Revolutionary war ..., and that list goes on and on and on.

My Mother, Eunice Moody Stark - My Father, Thomas E Stark

   Speaking about the Revolutionary war...... My father always drank coffee and my mother always drank tea. In my childhood, I thought that women drank tea, and men drank coffee, but after I got deeper into studying the family I discovered that almost all my father's family fought on the side of the American Revolutionary forces and my mother's family were Loyalists. Most of the Loyalists moved to Canada in the middle of the War. The Americans threw all the tea into the bay in the Boston Tea Party and refused to drink it any more (switching to coffee),  placing as much pressure on the British as they could, but the Loyalists refused, moved to Canada, and passed their tea drinking habits down to their children, including my mother. (Grandma Moody, her mother, was from Canada, and always drank tea).  My Mom still had the tea habit 150 years later, and my Dad had the coffee habit. They probably didn't even imagine they were carrying on traditions from the beginning of the United States Colonists' Rebellion.

Statue of a Miner in Daybrook

   The United States has people of all kinds of nationalities and all kinds of occupations. It looks like the Stephens were miners. In fact they came from Drybrook, Gloucestershire, England, which was a coal mining area.

   I told you that there were two sets of pictures in the Stephens' box about mines.  I was looking up those mines, and trying to find them on the map and guess what? Wassila, the town Sarah Palin lives in, is only 13.2 miles from Palmer, Alaska where Edna and Jim Stephens lived, and also close to the mines.

Jim Stephens (I know his handwriting now) wrote this on the back: "Very Good House at Wasilla Lake."

 

   In fact there is a picture of a cabin at the edge of Lake Wasilla in this box. I think the Stephens once lived in this house.