Homecoming

On Saturday, the two kids who had been gone both came home.  Iain was back from Boy Scout camp.  He'd had a lot of the adventures you'd expect boys to have at camp,and a few that were a surprise; for example, I was a little surprised that he came home with a zombie survival (spoof) merit badge.  He said it cooled off at night and wasn't too hot in the daytime, and the food was bad but he ate it all anyway.  Lots of merit badge work at camp, besides the zombie survival one; he has a couple of requirements left to do for his Citizenship in the Nation merit badge.

Saturday was also the day that Sarah was due back from Dresden, where she'd been for 7 weeks staying with her friend Mimi and attending school there.   Thanks to email and Facebook, we felt like we'd kept in pretty close touch with her even though we didn't talk to her on the phone while she was gone.  From the sound of it she'd had many adventures, including attending a four day Mexican/Bavarian wedding celebration.  But on Saturday she was coming home, which entailed flying from Dresden to Frankfort, from Frankfort to Philadelphia, and then Philadelphia to Atlanta.  The flight out of Philadelphia was delayed for several hours, so she didn't get back til late.  But U.S. Airways did a good job with the automated flight notifications, and her plane finally arrived a little after 9 p.m.  She got back with overweight baggage and lots of stories, and plans for visiting again.  She said that while she was gone, she'd had two dreams that were in German; one of them was actually in French and German, but she didn't understand the French.

The Rhyne family reunion is in North Carolina next month, so I spent some time over the weekend learning about the Rhynes.  Thanks to lots of work by other people, there's a lot known about the Rhynes, who emigrated from Durlach, near present-day Karlsruhe, Germany (they may have moved to that area from around Zurich, but that's not completely clear - the first records of the family in Durlach date from 1707).  In 1738, my 6th great-grandfather Hans Martin Reinau and his family emigrated to the colony of Pennsylvania.  They arrived in Philadelphia in October on a ship called the Snow Fox.  In Philadelphia, immigration officials kept good records, so unlike other points of entry during the colonial era, there's good documentation of who arrived when.  My 5th great-grandfather, Jacob Rein, was 12 years old when his family came to Pennsylvania.

So I was thinking about that on Saturday, while Sarah was making her way home.  Jacob Rein was Iain's age, when he came here to the country that became the United States.  His family had boarded a ship in Amsterdam, crossed the Atlantic, and settled in York County, Pennsylvania.  Jacob married there, and then he and his family moved to what's now Gaston County, North Carolina, in the 1760s.  Although he did not serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, he signed the petition to nominate the Lincoln County, North Carolina, militia officers in 1779 and provided material aid to the revolutionary cause, including furnishing supplies and provisions.

It doesn't take so long to make the trip, now, even though I'm sure on Saturday it felt like forever for Sarah.  Jacob was born in Germany, but died an American, in a new country that he played a small part in helping to create.  

A lot of things - like travel and communications - are easier now than they were then, but that doesn't mean we all get a free ride on the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.  Our country needs informed and engaged citizens who will constructively participate in civil society and public discourse.  Every day, not just on the 4th of July.