call me crazy

or not!

After recent conversations with my father regarding my my "birth place confusion" mentioned here, I have decided that I must not be as crazy as I thought. I am completely and totally not responsible for lying to people about my birth place.

My parents are directly responsible. Let me explain...

I have been deeply confused about my birth place my entire life. I was told, or I heard my parents telling other people, that I was born in Savannah, Georgia. Made sense to me! A namesake.

At some point in my life, probably around the age of 14 or 16, I saw my birth certificate said I was born in Fort Stewert, GA. Then again in 2001, I was filling out a passport renewal application and had to put Fort Stewert, GA as my birth place...(even though I could have sworn I was born in Savannah, GA, right?)

I decided to continue telling people my birthplace was Savannah when asked (or when flirting with international studs).

To make this even more confusing, sometimes when my parents would talk about our years living in Georgia, they would talk about Hinesville, GA. I was an adolescent and decided not to ask questions. I just remained confused.

In 2009, as Ian and I were driving down to Florida from Pittsburgh, we passed signs for Savannah and Fort Stewert pointing in different directions. I also saw a sign for Hinesville along the way, and that got me thinking...


That's weird. Maybe I was born on a fort in Savannah? Wait, Hinesville?... that sounds familiar too. 


I was way too focused on getting to Florida (starting my vacation, and being annoyed by the $250 speeding ticket we got hours later) to figure out why all these locations circling around my birth place didn't make sense. (I didn't have a smartphone to check Google Maps. And nope, no paper map to look at either. We were navigating our way to Florida with written out directions from MapQuest and a Garmin.)

This year I had to renew my passport again, so my confusion was renewed as well. I listed my birth place as Fort Stewert, GA and I moved on..... until I wrote about my "birth place confusion" in my blog post in March.

After I wrote that post, my father called me to clear up this issue. He (laughed) and told me that he used to tell people that my birthplace was Savannah because it was close enough to Fort Stewert and it wouldn't require further explanation. No one would know where Fort Stewert was located. But, most people have heard of Savannah.

However, during this conversation with my dad, he also kept mentioning Hinesville and Fort Stewart, interchanging them, as if they were the same place. I left this conversation with a some clarity, but I was still a little confused.

So, I did what I always do when I need more clarity. I Googled it.

Fort Stewert, GA and Hinesville, GA are essentially the same place.

Next, I went to Google Maps to get the whole picture.

As you can see, Fort Stewert, the red pointer on the map, is in Hinesville.

Hinesville is a hop, skip and a jump from Savannah.

Thank you Dad and thank you Google for the clarity. I probably should have looked more carefully at a map of Georgia at some point in my life before now. But, I can rest easy that my three birth locations are close enough that maybe you could say that the big lie was just a white lie? 

However, Dad... I didn't need to know even though I wasn't actually born in Savannah, that I was conceived there. Still a namesake :(

XO