Hello, Heather. Welcome to the Mender Room.

Ola!

Ola!

My family started the IRA, which is not something that is in any of the books.

You will never see them being like, this is where this started.

But my great aunt was one of the first women to ever have a gold claim in Alaska. Her name was

Bridget Elwood, and she mined a bunch of money out of Alaska and lived in Seattle through the

20s into the 30s. And while she was here, they funneled all of the money that they raised through a

small school in Rosemuck, Ireland, and funded the first wing of the IRA. My family was

the raw family. What was that? The raw family. See, when you said IRA, my mind is in two places.

It's in Ireland and it's in a savings account.

Right.

So when you say she went to get gold in Alaska, I'm thinking to myself, wow, so she came down and figured out a way to put this aside and tax deferred.

She was the Yessler family.

She came out from the East with the Yessler family and lived

with them initially here in Seattle and then ended up with boat passage and made it up to Alaska.

And she was there for four and a half years and came back with a husband and more money than she could count.

I mean, that kind of makes sense. She's talking about the Irish Republican Army.

Yeah, right? So you're fighting against Northern Ireland. But that, or for independence, right? Yeah. But that makes more sense because... What's that? That there's some connection with Seattle and the IRA, because I'm not going to say the places, but there's certain bars I've been to, people were like, they used to, like, you'd meet members here and they'd have like what you call like a clandestine meeting yeah and kind of

plans certain bars I've been to, people were like, they used to, like, you'd meet members here.

And they'd have, like, what's called, like, a clandestine meeting? Yeah. And kind of plan stuff. And I was always like, Seattle's so far away from Ireland. How does that work? But when she's- They started with the unions, too. A lot of these guys came over and they were unions. They worked for the Besselham Steel Mill and the Jorgensen Steel Mill,

and they also started the school union, the non-teachers union for school laborers.

...