Taking a Break

 Be back before too long to post and read your blogs.

Family here from Buffalo and life is crazy.

Bern's Democracy Tower

Dan and I spent a day in Bern while the rest of the family went looking to touch a glacier. 

Daughter Sarah who didn't make this trip had asked if we were going to see the tower where our ancestor was imprisoned.  We had that in mind when we came to this tower now named the Democracy Tower. 

It once looked like this:

And yes it was a place where people were imprisoned.

Torture probably used this rack that we saw at the Bern museum later in the day.

No signs of torture machines in the Democracy Tower now just the workings of the clock.

And views of the city.

But this door may have been one my ancestor saw from the other side.

More about my ancestor: Reverend Benedict Brechbuohl born in Transelwald, Berne, Switzerland in 1666. He was a leading teacher and preacher of the Swiss Mennonites. Because of his influence with the Mennonites, the Swiss government more than doubled the reward for his capture.  He was imprisoned in 1709, after being expelled twice from Berne. So he would have likely been in this tower.

In 1710 he was deported along with 58 other Mennonites and was on his way to North Carolina when he escaped to Holland and then returned to Manheim, Germany where he had been residing before his capture. At some point he traveled to Prussia to visit land on which King Frederick wished to found a Mennonite Colony.  That didn't work out and after a conference of Mennonite leaders the decision was made to emigrate to Pennsylvania in 1717.

He sold his property in Germany and sailed with his wife and three children to Philadelphia in August 1717.  He purchased land near Strasburg, PA where he farmed for three years until his death in 1720.

My paternal ancestors also were Mennonite who emigrated from Switzerland to PA in 1721.

[My source for this is genealogy research completed by my uncle.]

Two More NH Historical Markers

Last Monday Dan and I headed north to see the northern part of New Hampshire. We took our passports along because we figured we would cross the border to Canada to return home.

I didn't take many photos but we did stop at two historical markers of significance.

 

I'd never heard of Indian Stream until the guy who wrote the book on the NH historical markers made his presentation and featured Indian Stream. This historical marker was the first to be installed in 1958.  The township is now called Pittsburg and is the largest township in New Hampshire. 

Here's a map from the internet. Our route north took us past all three Connecticut Lakes which are on the eastern border of Indian Stream.

The reason for Indian Stream is that the land was claimed by both Canada and the U.S. You can see by the map that the dividing line could have been along the Connecticut and not Hall's Stream.  While the U.S. and Canada disagreed, the residents of the area took it upon themselves to create their own republic.  You can read more about the dispute here on Wikpedia.

And we did come back through Quebec into Vermont but didn't make any stops or take one photo. 

.

Scam and Action Taken

On Monday Dan and I read this article in the NY Times that relayed the story of a horrible scam that a retired attorney had fallen for.   Here's the article and I hope you can read it for free.

Here's some of the article

For nearly three months, Barry Heitin, a 76-year-old retired lawyer, thought he was part of a government investigation that felt like something out of the movies. He was actually assisting criminals in stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars — of his own money.

Last fall, he spent just about every weekday doing the legwork and making withdrawals from his bank accounts as part of an intricate scam: He believed he was helping the feds safeguard his money and catch thieves who were after it.

“They kept telling me, ‘This is a big case and we are going to stop a whole ring of people,’” Mr. Heitin said. “It was like a rabbit hole. I was going down the hole with them.”

It cost him almost all of his retirement savings: roughly $740,000.

******

Dan and I came away from this vowing never to open up pop up screens, always going to the source using telephone numbers we had and not those suggested in an email or pop-up, and most importantly having a Trusted Contact attached to our accounts. A Trusted Contact will be contacted if suspicious withdrawals appear on our accounts.  It should be someone younger than yourself so we selected our oldest daughter.

We got right on the phone to add a Trusted Contact to our retirement and savings accounts.  We have all those with one big firm and we accomplished that task.  We approached our bank, too but they don't provide that ability and assured us that their fraud department has in place protections that should work like the trusted contact.

As we age we know our ability to judge situations will change.  We already get strange requests through emails and iMessages that we know to ignore.  We don't answer calls that don't identify the caller. And we ignore any pop ups.  But scammers are getting smarter and we're getting older.  I can only hope we'll stay ahead of them.