Little Indian Angel

Tisra and her family have found their daughter and this little ray of sunshine has found her family. What a glorious day when families come together. Tisra, I am so overjoyed that you have finally found who you have waited so long for. I wish you every bit of happiness and a very fast road to Your first Family Adoption Day. Hallelujah Chorus!!

Now what has Sara been up to: Friday last week I had a melt-down of crying... I knew that was the last day we could receive word about our final before Chinese New Year and everything closes down for a while. One wonderful thing about that day... I found out Tisra had found who her family has waited so long for. We started this journey almost at the same time 3 years ago... it took us many places (over and through the woods) and now it is finally starting to come full circle... right at the time we will both be 30! We were waiting to age to 30 so we could go to China when we first started... now Taiwan and India later... we're turning 30. he he

After a good cry... I channelled my energy into something productive. Searching down my lineage... well technically, my husband's mother's side of the family. I love genealogy. Finding ancestors means a lot to me... I never want my children to not know what their ancestors struggled for to get their grandbabies to where they are today. I want them to understand that most of the people who immigrated to America came here to find "freedom" of some kind. Whether religious persecution, pogroms, famine, to find land, etc. were their reasons , they came here through great perseverance and struggles. The ones who didn't come here of their free-will found it through their children when the African American slaves were freed and later unsegregated, when those people who were banished here as punishment for crimes in other countries, and even the Native Americans needed some saving from basically an invader. I hope this country will always remain somehow a land of freedom.

Okay on to the show: We found some interesting names in the line such as Crapo, Shatz and Pinhas... that last one is Hebrew and was translated from my husband's great-grandpa's tombstone. Jewish names written in English are quite interesting. I'm still laughing that if the Crapo's and the Shatz's got married, they could have hyphenated something lovely.

Pinhas is from Odessa (his wife from Poland), but not the Odessa Ukraine we know today, the Odessa, Kherson, Russia, Soviet Union where after Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, the Jewish community was basically looked at like this, 1/3 convert, 1/3 immigrate, 1/3 be exterminated. These relatives escaped a deadly fate by basically hiding, changing names, leaving family & all possessions behind, to survive. I have no idea if I'll ever find many of their names or stories, but they will not just be names on a paper; my children will know their story. We have family from Ireland, Scotland, England, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, Nicaragua, African American and soon to be Taiwan and many more unknown places that need to be remembered. My Aunt is actually visiting Scotland right now searching through cemeteries and records. One day, I'll find Nudelman and Lieder, Herz and others on some piece of history and they will no longer be a name on a paper, they'll have found their family.

This is what I was raised on... my grandmother loved searching and in turn her son; we spent many hours "going for a quick drive with dad" searching out old cemeteries in the middle of nowhere looking for names. We never told anyone when we were kids because we thought they'd think we were nuts. ha ha Now I don't care if ya'll think I'm nuts. =0)

Okay, so that is what I have been doing. It does (to a point) keep my mind off the fact that we are still waiting for a judge to say okay ... and my children have been learning a bit about history in the process. We still have yet to celebrate CNY ... Vegas always does their CNY the last day with dragon dances and basically a party so maybe we'll have final not so far off from CNY.