I am grateful for my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Richardson, giving me a love of history. She was so passionate about it and she helped instill a passion for it in me as well. I remember acting out various segments of Ohio history in her class with forts behind desks and Indians attacking.
More than that, I am grateful for that love of history because it gave me a way of connecting with my grandfather Brooke. Until I was about 10, I don't think that I really connected with him. Then one day at lunch, I was talking about learning about Zane's Trace in Mrs. Richardson's class. He said that Zane's Trace (the first road through the wilderness) was right outside the front door. Indeed, he took us down the road a piece to a marker that marked where a lodge had been built on that first road through the wilderness.
He began showing us arrow heads he found working the fields and telling us all about his little piece of Ohio. From there it grew to sharing about family history. He had a great love for genealogy that had been passed on by his father. They could trace the family tree all the way back to the 1500's in England and the first Brooke (Robert Brooke) immigrant who came with his family to settle in Maryland.
So, why the love of history was nice, the connecting point with my grandfather was even sweeter.
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