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My father's people came from the Neckar Valley in Germany, I recall a village near Stuttgart being mentioned. His mother's people were Joneses from Wales. My mother's people were some of the earliest settlers in NE Tennessee, there is a restored fort/settlement called Rocky Mount about halfway between Bristol & Johnson City that one of her ancestors had something to do with, he was a big muckety-muck of some sort. Wished I'd paid more attention to my granny, she was forever babblin' on & on about it...My mother's dad, Bill Wolfe, killed a guy when Bill was a kid & working in a railway office...Fella come in to rob the office, Bill pulled a derringer out of the desk drawer he was behind, & plugged the guy. I have the derringer, a letter from Southern Railway, & the watch they gave him for "Upholding Railroad Property at the Risk of His Life, April 1896." Mama never knew him, he died when she was 3.4...All she remembered was his funeral. My other grandad knew the Wright Brothers, he bought bicycles from them. Dayton was a small town, you wanted a bike, you went to see the Wrights. He washed the plane for them, & to pay him, they took him up & flew over the farm he lived on...They later built part of Wright-Pat AFB on that farm...His brother, Karl, worked for Frigidaire, got into a cussfight w/one of the money men-None of them old Germans had any money, but most of 'em were pretty bright when it came to mechanical stuff-and he ended up working at Wright-Pat on their HVAC system.
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