you are very luky to live in a country like ireland maybe you have some photos from that camping in belfast to send to me......

@jenniferbeaty I came across this thread because there's actually a discussion about it today in one of my Facebook groups. One of the members relayed the following though I'm beginning to doubt the correctness of her information: "i found this little note a few years back ... the daughter of the man who ran the Ireland's Chili and BBQ empire out of Wichita Falls has a family restaurant (Odom's Old Town Smokehouse BBQ) in Burleson, TX, where she cooks all of her Dad's old recipes. The website says that Ireland's sold out to Ranch Style Beans of Fort Worth. Looks like a very roadfood-worthy place to dine." I imagine @Carolyn Ireland could confirm or deny its veracity. Regardless, the place is no longer in business. In regard to the flavor of Ireland's canned BBQ my memory is that it was quite unique and very smoky — almost addictive.

OMG Marguerite, I have to apologize I have this automatic presumption that everyone on the forum is North America based. I truly thought you were saying that to be funny. These were separate instances over the course of several years of shopping at various locations throughout the country. In a lot of our shopping centers/malls especially in the western states have open areas...the roof is the sky if you will. Many of our lowe's and home depot stores have a huge part of the nursery section outside. I guess that's how "critters" get in from time to time. the weirdest I've heard so far was a bunch of deer that had stormed into a wal-mart and caused a lot of damage. Maybe others here have heard about it, it was on television a while back. a few weeks ago when I mentioned to an employee in the garden center that there were at least 3 rats by the soil area she said, "oh, that's nothing, we usually have a lot more than that." Very non-chalant about it too, lol. Another employee at another location said they had heard owls in the back of the store. "Deer Enter Kohl's Department Store In Iowa Through Automatic Doors, Bewilder Shoppers" That also made headlines as two of the deer exited the way they came in, lol. You can read about it at the link below. And, there's gotta be at least 1 youtube video about the other incident. One of the deer managed to jump halfway behind the cash register area with an employee still in the spot. Luckily for him he got out of the way in time. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/iowa-deer-enter-kohls-store-doors_n_2160110.html

My paternal grandfathers family traces back to the late 1600s. I gather they were quite a prominent family in Maine. I'm not as sure about the other branches of the family. A great-aunt on my mother's side seemed to revel in her Swedish heritage, and I think her parents (my great-great-grandparents) may have been born in Sweden. I think a great-grandfather (my father's mother's father) was born in the Netherlands. Certainly his given name was Dutch and not one I've heard elsewhere. He was active with the Holland Land Company that did a lot of land reclamation in the Sacramento River Delta. My ex-husband is Chinese-American, and branches of his family have been in the US for 5 generations. His grandmother, however, was born in China after her father traveled back to China from the US to find a wife. Thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was unable to return to the US immediately, and my ex's grandmother was not able to come to the US until she was 12 years old.