America is justly known as a “melting pot” where immigrants from a host of countries mingled and intermarried

Thus, when I was growing up in Erie, I had a good number of acquaintances who were products of these unions.

While Southwest Erie, where I lived, was an area of mixed nationalities, much of the rest of the city had more specific nationality ties … Italian or Slavic. The well-to-do west bayfront and the southern area held more of the original Erie settler stock.

Of my southwest Erie acquaintances, Lowell was German and Greek, David was German and Swedish, Ted (later, Mt. Jewett’s Rev. Benson) was Swedish, and Harry was German.

Sylvia, the daughter of my half-sister, Marie, was of English, Swedish and Irish descent, and she married Bob, a fellow of German ancestry.

And my half-brother, who was of Irish and Swedish heritage, married Mildred , who had Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.

I could go on and on about the diverse ethnic ties of so many Erie acquaintances, as well as how my family members could cite the same diversity in their ancestry.

Personally, my heritage reflects the Erie milieu, as my father was born in Sweden and my mother was of first generation Scandinavian heritage.

There is a caveat in my heritage however. According to 23 & Me, I am of 17 percent Finnish stock, and I can only conclude from this that my Norwegian grandfather was part Sami, or Laplander.

He came from Tromso, a city in northern Norway which my mother called “the land of the midnight sun.”

(The Samis are a Finno-Ugric speaking people who inhabit the northern reaches of the Scandinavian countries as well as part of nearby Russia.)

The nationality mixtures represented by the people I recall from my early days in Erie (and in my own family) was the result of European immigration to the city in the late 1800s as employment was available there in a wide range of industries.

In contrast with the nationality hodgepodge I had become accustomed to in Erie, I happened to marry a woman whose American heritage doesn’t go back just decades, but for many generations.

The fact that our marriage has endured despite my wife’s American heritage being so much stronger than mine indicates that there was a strong leveling influence on my life prior to our marriage.

Just as Judith’s ancestral background is of basic early settler stock, the Richmond area where she grew up in Indiana is of the same nature, where the surnames don’t reflect much ethnic diversity.

Many of Judith’s mother’s ancestors came to America before the American revolution, mostly from Great Britain, although a few came over from Germany.

Three of her mother’s third great grandfathers were recognized as Revolutionary War veterans, with Daughters of the American Revolution tombstones still marking their graves.

One was a soldier named Benjamin Bishop of New Jersey whose father had served in the British navy before the War.

The British impressed him as a British naval subject and kept him sailing on the high seas for 17 years after the end of the Revolution, a problem that helped start the War of 1812.

Meanwhile, his son, Benjamin, and his family left New Jersey to make their way eventually to eastern Indiana where the Northwest Territory was opening up in the early 1800’s after Indian tribes there had been subdued by Mad Anthony Wayne.

(Running through Wayne County was the National Road, now Route 40, that connected the area with the vast region to the west.)

Everyone who traveled west in the late 1800’s rode their wagons through Centerville, the hometown of Judith’s mother, Esther.

Judith’s maternal grandmother was a great grand-daughter of Benjamin Bishop.

She married a man named Solomon Duke, who had arrived in Indiana in the mid-1800’s from the Deep South.

(On arriving from Germany (Saarland) in the 1700’s, the family had changed their name from Schunck to Duke to sound more American.)

Naturally the family still uses the name Duke. The oldest son of the Bishop-Duke marriage was Benjamin Duke, who enlisted in the Union Army and was captured by the Confederates at the end of the Battle of Gettysburg and sent to Andersonville, the infamous Confederate POW camp.

This uncle of Judith’s grandmother managed to survive until the end of the Civil War, and lived back home in Indiana until 1920.

Also in Judith’s background is the King family, whose antecedents had arrived in Virginia in the 1700s from England and remained primarily in the area around Washington, D.C.

Some of the family members stayed on in Virginia and others proceeded west from there into Kentucky.

It was from there that other Kings moved on into Indiana in the 1820’s.

The King family history includes another Revolutionary War veteran, John B. King, whose service is also recognized by the DAR.

It was in Indiana where a King family daughter married Charles A. Meek, whose family had also come into Indiana from Kentucky, settling in Abington, a farming hamlet south of Centerville.

His ancestor, John Meek, born in 1754, was the third distant relative of Judith’s who served in the Revolutionary War.

Thus, in Judith’s mother’s ancestry, a Bishop married a Duke and a Duke married a King, and then a King married a Meek.

All worthy folk, she says, with names representing “wealth and high class.” (And The Bible does say that the meek shall inherit the earth! she says.)

(However, Judith’s mother married a Brown, a name about as ordinary as Smith.)

The Meeks who settled in Indiana also include a co-founder of Richmond, which is the county seat of Wayne County, and is located just west on the Ohio state line.

Richmond is the site of Earlham College, a Quaker institution which both Judith and her mother attended, and where her mother was an honor student.

As the son of a Swedish immigrant whose first generation Scandinavian mother never completed high school (she had to find work after her father was killed on the railroad).

Perhaps I should feel fortunate to have had a life companion with such a profound background in Americana, and whose respective mothers were not in the same league, education-wise.

However, my mother was fairly sound until her fatal stroke at age 87, while Judith’s mother had senile dementia for two or more years before sadly passing away at age 84.

Just as our respective family backgrounds were widely diverse, the geographic terrain which influenced our early lives is also widely diverse.

The Erie area is characterized by a flat plain along the lake featuring numerous vineyards. This lake plain is cut by deep creek valleys and rises into low hills.

There are numerous small woods of both deciduous and evergreen trees, especially hemlock, and the area’s agricultural harvest goes well beyond just grapes.

In contrast, the Richmond-Centerville area is part of the huge very fertile plain which comprises virtually the entire state of Indiana on which are grown huge crops of corn and soybeans. Most of Judith’s antecedents were farmers.

There are few wooded areas where Judith grew up, and sluggish streams polluted by agricultural waste meander through the area. The highest point in Indiana is located not far from Centerville.

It is Hoosier Hill, which rises to all of 1,257 feet.

Robert Stanger has lived seasonally for over 40 years along the Allegheny River and has the stories to tell about it.