great grandfather was a legal immigrant from denmark. him and his brother were born in the same house, one was a german citizen, the other danish. it was because of the war. most of my mixed ancestry is danish and german, the rest welsh, scottish. probably explains why i'm such a pest, always at conflict, both with myself and others, and why i'm a recovering sore loser. those scots sure needed the '45 (1745) conflict to get it out of them as far as forming a responsible government and getting on with commerce instead of feudalism. many scots were in george III cabinet, and gobbled up most of the tobacco trade. relatives came from the east. they settled in OK about 1895. grandmother was born when OK was still an indian territory. my mom's side of the family homesteaded in one of the land rushes after the initial cherokee strip which included kansas. man did i not like that tom cruise, nicole kidman movie. i had several relatives die strange deaths, including one in a combine, yes, eaten from the front, lots of yanked fingers. the knabe's wife, she was a smoker, both did pipes. she always took pics with her hand behind her back. they didn't drink, but smoked and lived well into their nineties. no one came out in the dust bowl, kinda hid in texas while that passed. no one in the next generation really had a knack for farming or ranching, so it kinda stagnated and got split up and sold off. too bad. one more interesting thing about knabe, was that he married a divorced women with two kids. the original ran off and she divorced him. they had one more kid, my grandmother, in the pic with my daughter a few years ago on the farm. i cried for about 3 or four days cause i knew it would be the last time i saw her and that kaitlyn would never see her. the other pic is of the water tower in alva, one of the prettiest towers in the land, with or without the horses.