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Maria

Maria      Hurricane Maria tore through the Eastern Caribbean as just one of many storms in the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. Back in my home in midwest America, the news was centered around the ruination of Puerto Rico. The loss of electricity. The audacity of America to not care for the people there, the lack of water and food, the scarcity of resources. Much quieter was the destruction of the small island country of Dominica.       My grandfather and I arrived in Dominica a year before Maria hit, on the sixth of June in 2016. I was nineteen and had been out of school for exactly a year, which I’d spent working, saving, sleeping. I accompanied him out of both curiosity and boredom. It was grandpa that got us there, inviting himself and his Minnesotan granddaughter along on Mark Hauser’s excavation in the Caribbean. Mark was a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, and Grandpa knew him through a friend of friend, though the two had never m...
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Notes from Mike

Horace S. Springer, Sr. 1872-1946 grandfather; Jacob M. Springer 1827-1909 (great grandfather); Mathias Springer, Jr. 1783-1860 (2nd great grandfather); Mathias Springer, Sr. 1743-1804 (3rd great grandfather); Johannes Philip Springer 1700-1774 (4th great grandfather). Note:  Johannes Philip Springer at age 43 emigrated from Palatine region of what is now Germany to America with his family via an English Ship “Loyal Judith” arriving at Philadelphia on September 2, 1743.  This much is well documented.  His wife was Catherine (maiden name unknown). With them came six or seven children.  Family lore says Mathias (7th? child) may have been born at sea or awaiting landing at Philadelphia - but this is disputed.  Various census records show Mathias as “from” PA (Lancaster County) but this is not otherwise verified.  A local resident of New Lisbon, Ohio, who wrote a genealogical history of residents of New Lisbon a generation after Mathias’ death, knew about the f...
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Paddling to Serenity          Although I am 36 years sober I am not serene every day. So, I go to meetings daily.        I was born in Biloxi Mississippi in 1933 and moved with my parents to Englewood Florida as age 3 and have since lived in Homestead, Stuart,   Gainesville, and now Ormond Beach for the past year with my son Saint Micheal.         I was active in Gainesville AA but only entered Alcoholics Anonymous because I was told to go to daily meetings or else. I did not think of myself as a low bottom alcoholic and therefore through faulty reasoning remained on the sidelines for far too many years.         To this day I firmly believe that the average man in the street understands alcoholism far better than the average psychiatrist. Most psychiatrists avoid the issue of personality, but AA directly recogniz...
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