An article earlier this month in which Governor Pat Quinn is urging people to talk as they did in Shakespeare’s time brought a couple of thoughts to the front of my brain.

My mother had relatives near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.

Here's the April 23, 2010, Sun-Times article that got me thinking about my Quaker relatives.

Their last name was Walker and they came over on land developer William Penn’s second ship.

At least, that’s the family tale.

They were Quakers, probably escaping religious persecution in England.

They bought land where Valley Forge is now.

One of Washington’s officers stayed with them during the Revolutionary War.

I think I visited it when the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree was held there when I lived in Middletown, New York, in 1957.  (I see Vice President Richard Nixon spoke, but I have no memory of anything but the natural amphitheater.

In any event, when the government created Valley Forge as a National Monument, the farm was sold.

You can find Walkers in the area still.  Undoubtedly relatives.

During the summer my mother would go north to visit them and they would come south to the family farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland near Barclay.

She called them “the thee and thou” relatives because those were the pronouns they used.