Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: Never a Step Backward: A Family History

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Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum", or, in English, "Never a Step Backward", is a history of six families and the circumstances that led to their displacement from the Old to the New World. The Latin motto on one family's crest provides the theme. The origins of these families covered Northern Europe from West to East. Some arrived in America early in the 17th century, others did not make the journey until the dawn of the 20th century. For most, religious persecution dominated the early years here recounted. This recurrent tragedy of human nature extended from the Reformation-spawned religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries in Western and Central Europe to the sanctioned bigotries of Czarist Russia 200 years later. Political and economic repressions in their homelands were close companions. In many respects, the peripatetic lives of Alan and Janet Davidson reprise their family histories: Never a Step Backwards. Alan, born in Connecticut, and Janet, a Californian, first glimpsed life's possibilities as undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. Marriage, childrearing, and Alan's graduate education in medicine took them to San Francisco, Denver and Palo Alto. In the decades that followed, Alan's positions in academic radiology established the family in Madison, Connecticut, Marin County, California, and, lastly, as empty-nesters in Washington, D.C. When an unlikely opportunity arose to retire on Orcas Island, in the San Juan Archipelago of Washington State close-by the Canadian border, the authors made the Pacific Northwest their home. For more than two decades their island life, dominated as it was by nature, proved to be a transformative idyll. Recently, Alan and Janet have settled in Seattle where they enjoy that city's urban pleasures.