The Wonderful Beach Family

Chapter 1

When the word "Beach" is used the first images that come to mind are sunshine and sandcastles. For some people "Beach" brings romantic scenes and flaming orange and red sunsets. Only the very most dark minded people will have images of Normandy on D-day come to mind. When you meet the Beach family you first think happy.

My family name, Beach, is actually more of a quality check oversight than anything, and not at all correct. When my Great-Great Grandfather arrived at Ellis island there would be an immigration official who's job it was to complete the complicated and often times tedious task of cataloging each and every single individual that stepped foot off the boat. If it was a family each member had to be recorded with name, date of birth, country of origin, sex, race...you get the picture. It was even required that you provide whether you could speak English and if you could read and write, which many could not thus leaving it all to this unfortunate underpaid and over worked government employee. Millions of people from all corners of the globe left their homelands in search of the American dream and they arrived in droves. Imagine the chaos, groups coming hundreds at a time, often speaking in a foreign language or broken English at best, all needing to be examined, counted and documented. Some had the official paperwork needed to move the process along as planned but many did not. Mine did not. They were English, which did help, but in the all the commotion upon their initial arrival made the simple mistake of accounting for the Beech family, all nine of them, as Beach. The story goes that being unable to read or write my Great-Great Grandfather assumed that while Beech was how the family n "Beach" was the correct spelling of the family name in America and so Beach it would be.

The wonderful Beach family had arrived and can you believe it, when first hearing our name it would be those dark minded people who got it right? My family isn't about Volley Ball and surfing, we are all about blood and death. In the Beach family we like to kill each other. Not just once or twice did it happen that a family member would lose their life at the hands of their own flesh and blood, it happened all the time. Every single time. Each death a murder.