Today I thought we'd take a look at this auspicious date, ha ha, in history since we can't have full, rounded family trees without it. What's the second word in "family history" after all?
So, Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 - that was the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Aa lot of groups of people were massacred, particularly the Jews (1349, 1391) and the French Huguenots (1572)...
The British invaded Washington D.C. in 1814 during the War of 1812 and burned down the White House. This is where the famous story of Dolly Madison, wife of President James Madison, saving the portrait of George Washington comes from.
Ooh, the waffle iron is invented in 1869!! (Which I guess is why today is National Waffle Day!)
Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly across the U.S. non-stop in 1932, which is pretty cool, because Amelia was totally one of my heroes growing up.
In 1944, Nazi troops begin attacking Paris (wow, this wasn't a really great date for important cities under the threat of being taken over during wartime, huh? First Rome, then D.C., now Paris!)...
...and my personal favorite, Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries Pompeii. In actuality, this event is extremely sad because of the loss of life, although the way the every day life of the every day person was preserved by the ash is beyond amazing - as genealogists, we all know that the further and further back you go in time, the harder it is to find any record of the common man, which is who most of us are and are from. But I like this event because of the symmetry not just with the date (August 24) but also with the year (79), exactly 1900 years before I was born.
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