What I Know Of My Family’s History

Although I was almost named Virgil (after my dads maternal great grandpa), I fourunately received my dads legal name William, which I shortened to Will for obvious reasons. Before my dad, came my paternal grandpa, Terry Birck, which gave my dad and I the last name Birck. My grandpa got the last name Birck from when my great grandmother married Stanley Birck. Not much is known about how we originally immigrated to the US, but my dad did that ancestry.com test and appearantly our family is mainly Scottish, English, and Irish. My family originally settled in Pennsylvania, with some of our family moving to Appalachia and Kentucky. My paternal great grandpa Tom Reed moved to Chicago to find work there. We don’t have a lot of meaningful family legends or anything, but great grandpa Virgil Slone allegedly bootlegged moonshine during the 20s which I think is pretty cool. You could say a family tradition we have is Reed Construction, originally Reed Plastering. The company was founded during the Worlds Fair in 1893, and is owned by my dad, making the company a ‘generation 5’ company. One thing I found to be pretty notable, was that only 3% of family businesses make it to ‘generation 4’ or beyond, making Reed Construction pretty special in my opinion. Terry, my paternal grandfather, faced a lot of adversity throughout his life. In 1940, he was born in Danville, IL, and later moved to Miami, FL. He moved schools a lot as a kid, as a result of unstable family life, and tried to join the army, but he was too young. When he finally reached 18, he enlisted as a flight engineer in Vietnam, and got to travel the world. He moved back to Chicago, met my grandma, and went on to be the 4th generation of Reed Construction. My dad has done almost endless research about our beginnings in America with little progress. In talking to him, I often found that my anscestors often went through a lot to achieve what they did. For example, Reed Plastering was allegedly sold for 1 dollar by Tom Reed. Knowing that makes me proud and of my family and is pretty humbling. Out of all the complexities of my family, one commonality I can find, is that we have historically strived to be hard working and determined, no matter what the circumstances are.