As a member of the IEEE, I participate (loosely) in a a couple of societies: IEEE’s Computer Society and the Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). I was reading SSIT’s magazine this weekend and ran across an article on Amish technology (no jokes please). The article was particularly interesting to me because my grandmother’s mother was a Mennonite and her father was Amish.
While reading the article, I ran into a sentence that caught my eye. The article noted that Issac Glick in Lancaster County Pennsylvania was the first Amish to use electricity in 1910. He hooked a generator up to an electric light. Shortly after that, all of the Amish communities banned the use of electricity except in certain controlled circumstances. What caught my eye was the name and the place. My great grandfather was named Glick – in fact, both my father and I have the “Glick nose†(what can I say, it’s somewhat unique 🙂 ).
When I called my parents last night, I spent some time talking to my mother about the Glicks. It seems that the family legend is that my great grandmother (Minnie Mae Miller) left the Mennonite community to marry my great grandfather who had been expelled from an Amish community in… Lancaster Pennsylvania. Now I’m wondering if and how I’m related to Issac Glick?
Apparently, there’s a biography about my great grandmother that was published a few years ago. I need to track down a copy and see if there’s a mention of her in-laws.
