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Although I have written about several of my paternal ancestors, I have said next to nothing about my mother's family; perhaps due to childhood and adolescent animosity between me and the team of Lloyd and Betty, mostly Betty.

  My mother was a first generation American, born to immigrant parents.  Her father, my grandfather, had operated, with his brother, a private detective agency, and during his work in that field, he had the opportunity to meet and have a conversation with John Dillinger, then on the FBI's most wanted list.

  But my grandfather's father, the patriarch of the family who had immigrated from Belfast, Ireland, in the 1890's, had been a welder, from a family of welders.  I was told that a resident of Belfast had, at that time, three employment opportunities:  the bank, the shipyard, or operating a small business.  My great grandfather and his siblings worked as welders in the shipyard---Harland and Wolff, the company that designed and built RMS Titanic for the White Star Line.  My great grandfather had immigrated to Indiana, where he farmed a fairly large acreage, along with his many children.  His siblings in Belfast remained there; they had no desire to follow him into the heartland of America.

   After the Titsnic film came out in 1997, and the internet was in its primitive stage, I emailed Hardland and Wolff, explaining that I was inquiring about the employment of my relatives during the construction of the great, doomed ship.  Unfortunately, the employment records for that period had been kept in the firm's London headquarters, and destroyed in the Third Reich's firebombing of London during Wolrd War II.