America – What a Wonderful Country

Our story is not dissimilar from millions of other hard working Americans.  Our great and great-great grandparents arrived from Europe with a suitcase, wallet and the clothes on their back.  The image of young teenage couples saying goodbye to their families, while climbing aboard the giant streamliner ocean going ships of the day, for what they must have thought was the very last time, is almost incomprehensible today. Especially with all the luxury technologies and travel opportunities we now afford.

Best we can tell, they either landed in upstate New York and started to farm lands for others while slowly migrating towards South Bend Indiana where our grandparents ended up as the first to attend college with careers in teaching and farming.  Which then led to our fathers career in aviation and direct sales which led to our interest in entrepreneurship too.  Of course, farming by nature is the ultimate career in being an entrepreneur.  Talk about battles with Mother Nature – pfew!

On the other side of our lineage it appears folks landed on the south side of Chicago and integrated into directly into the booming manufacturing industries.  Our grandparents ended up breaking out of that hard labor work and built and ran a family corner grocery store for four decades just on the south tip of Lake Michigan in Hammond Indiana. Our mother was another first in that lineage to attend college and was a teacher, homemaker and Diamond Direct business builder with Amway.  As you can see, like most others in America, our family also has worked hard to take advantage of what our founding fathers created.  And with hard work, slowly but surely, we have been part of the entrepreneur spirt cultivated over a few hundred years that continues to inspire people from across the world.

Some of the photos below are snapshot images of our own family tree, it’s good for us to reflect now and then upon the hard work generations invested into making America a great country.