Are there any elements of your cultural background that you hold dearly and carry as a forward part of your personality?

In a way. I'm of very strong Norwegian decent and I did late in my teen years chose to follow a Norwegian religion. Odinism is a very lifestyle oriented religion and overall I would say though my personality lined up with religion in the first place, participating in it and reading it's legends, ideas, etc has affected my personality.

I am very proud of at least one part of my heritage. All of my family on both my mother's and father's side came from very poor and hardworking backgrounds. They worked hard with their hands at occupations like carpenters, sharecroppers, and eventually farmers of their own land, although this took several generations to accomplish.

All of my relatives were immigrants somewhere between 1850 and 1880. During the early 1900's, my grandmother and her 6 brothers and sisters were raised in a dirt-floored log cabin and one year they could only go to school until the first snow because they didn't have money for shoes that winter. Normally they would buy one pair of shoes each fall and only begin to wear them when the snows started (we are from Michigan).

I still have a picture of my Grandmother and one of her sisters out front of that cabin. Each of them in their one dress and no shoes. My own mother was born in the upstairs of her grandfathers farm house, and rode a plow horse three miles to school on days when there was no plowing to be done.

Otherwise she walked. As in many families, there are many stories of difficulties and tragedies, but we have persevered and stuck together as families ought to do, and here we are, better off for the most part, but still no strangers to hard times, and hard work, but we are survivors. I hope that in a few generations, my descendants will say the same of me, he was a hardworking survivor who helped his family through tough times.

I suppose you may have been more interested in our national or ethnic background, which is English and French, but honestly, we were more involved with feeding ourselves and the survival of our families than we were in re-creating a new England or France.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.