Food for Thought

In 1920, the 19th amendment was finally ratified, granting women of the United States the legal right to vote.

 This is my Grandma Fern. I've talked about her before. She was born in 1902, when women couldn't vote.

 This is my grandma Minerva. She was born in 1879 and married in 1901. She raised a family and lived in a country where she had no power to choose the government she was living under. When she died in the early 1950s, women had only been able to vote for a mere thirty years.

This is grandma Leah with her chickens. She was born in the 1850s and married around 1883. Like Minerva, she lived and raised a family in a country where she had no right to vote. She died in 1936, when women had only had that right for SIXTEEN years.

Many of my favorite ancestors never had the right to vote -- pioneers Mary McNeil Ewing and Elizabeth Curtis Hollingsworth. Grandma Mary Fox that died in a flash flood in the late 1800s. Just to name a few.

I also have ancestors that fled here seeking freedom -- the Puritans (Brewster), the Huguenots (Dupres) and more than likely the Quakers (Hollingsworth).

So please, just remember that today is a day when we exercise our hard earned rights. We have the right to vote in this country, a right that many of our ancestors were denied, a right that millions around the world don't have even today. We have freedom. Use it.