Written By Leah M. Brown

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Leah M. Brown is a freelance writer and novelist.

Comments

ParisMaddy said…
Some great tips for parents in your articles.
August 21, 2009 at 10:13 AM
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My Norman Roots - Part I

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Leah, on a tidal flat near Mont St-Michel When I first visited Normandy in 2005, I already knew my family had strong ties to the region...    My grandfather was one of the 160,000 Allied troops to storm the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.  Although Gramps wielded the most influence on me in my formative years - I even lived with him for awhile - I know very little about what he experienced that day.  In truth, he only spoke to me about it on one occasion; an off-handed remark that has burned itself into my memory and haunted me for over thirty years.  I am sorry to say that w hat he did tell me is not available for public consumption.  What I can tell you is that it left such a powerful, indelible mark on my psyche that when I visited Normandy all those years later, I felt a powerful connection with the place.   But this is not a travelogue about the battlefields and blood-tinged beaches of Normandy; it is about the p...
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Am I Related To Marie Antoinette?

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I have often fantasized that a long lost relative would bequeath me an old chest crammed with treasured family documents.  Hidden between a stack of love letters and a scrapbook filled with momentos would be the document that would provide the irrefutable proof linking me to my idol, Marie Antoinette .    So when I saw an advertisement from the DNA Ancestry Project promising to trace my genetic history I became crazy excited.  "With a simple swab of your mouth, you can be compared with Marie Antoinette and discover your relation to her. You will be able to trace your heritage back to times of grandeur, to times of kings and queens and royal balls, and possibly even to Marie Antoinette." Although I am not convinced that reincarnation is anything more than a fantastic theory, I have considered the notion that I might have once lived at the court of Versailles.  Perhaps I was one of Marie Antoinette's most tr...
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Serendipity and Scarlet Ribbons

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If you are a regular reader of my blog, you are well aware of my ardent belief in the power of serendipity. In Serendipity and the Boob Tree I wrote about my unexpected encounter with Marie Antoinette’s tumor-riddled tree. In Serendipity in a Prison I told you about a chance encounter I had in a chateau prison deep in the heart of the Loire Valley. Today, I would like to tell you about a frighteningly-fabulous serendipitous encounter. Five years ago, I read about an event that occurred during the French Revolution which captured my imagination. At the height of the Reign of Terror, the bloodiest period of the revolution, a black hearted official came up with a new and thoroughly dishonorable way of executing enemies of the Republic. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, an especially cruel member of the new government, gave the order to have 90 prisoners placed on a flat-bottomed barge, taken to the middle of the Loire River, and drowned. Thousands of people, most of them innocent of any real c...
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