Bazinga!

I was watching a Big Bang Theory rerun recently as Sheldon and Amy Farrah Fowler were recording his new Fun with Flags video series.  A note on the chart behind his head said “Featuring your Father’s Grandfathers’ Flags“.  What a great blog topic!  Don’t click out of here just yet.

My Gloucester great grandfathers were William H. Ryan and William Edward Pierce and somehow I never noticed they were both named William until this blog research.  William Ryan was born in 1862 in Gloucester.  At that time, the United States flag had 34 stars.  This flag only lasted a couple of years before new stars were added and therefore the only President to serve under this flag was Abraham Lincoln.

By the time he died in 1934, the flag had 48 stars.  That flag lasted 47 years until Alaska joined the Union followed a few months later by Hawaii.

William Edward Pierce was born in 1864 in Argyle Nova Scotia Canada.  Nova Scotia had not yet joined the Confederation of Canada, but did so only 3 years later along with the rest of the provinces. This flag was only 6 years old at the time William was born.

William Pierce died in 1942 in Gloucester under a US flag of 48 stars.

Our ancestors lived through very interesting times and the flags of their time on this planet tell this story.  Both Williams were born into political turmoil as their homeland struggled to unify and to create the great democracies now in place.

BAZINGA–got you didn’t I?  It’s interesting, isn’t it? – to think about the history they saw probably without even realizing the impact.