Have you ever thought about how lucky we Americans are and how great it is to be a structural engineer in this country? I've traveled extensively on all seven continents and lectured on all but one of them, Antarctica. I know for sure that the world holds countless wonderful places and people.

But there's no place like home, even given the negativity the media showers us with daily. No nation escapes its problems, especially in today's sour economic climate and never-ending difficulties that globalization and an exploding population present. Life is not perfect and nor are countries.

Still, I have yet to find anywhere that compares with living in the United States. If you're like me, you thank your lucky stars that your forebears moved here. Traveling the world or living overseas if only briefly gives us cause to realize how good we have it. From traveling, we learn much about ourselves. I've been told it has made me more patient and tolerant, that I've even learned to endure fools better (something I wasn't known for in my mid-career years).

My clan of Weingardts came from the idyllic wine-growing valleys of western Bavaria in Germany. My grandfather Johannes, a builder, migrated to America as a young man a century ago this year. With just a few tools and the clothes on his back, he and his young wife arrived with their infant son. The child had become deathly ill on the voyage over, so the family was quarantined on Ellis Island for some time. But the boy didn't live through the ordeal. After his burial in the New York City area, my grandparents moved to Sterling, Col., where my father Martin, a general contractor, was born and raised. That's where I was born and raised, too.

Before traveling to America, my grandfather lived in a village along the big, wide Volga River in Russia on land given to German settlers by Catherine the Great in the 1760s. With great curiosity, I traveled there recently. Nothing of his village of Rothammel exists today. Oh, I saw a couple of small, neglected cemeteries and some decaying foundations. A Russian farmer/rancher now runs cattle, sheep and horses on town property. From the crumbling footings of the local Catholic Church, I salvaged a small stone. But all in all, it's a ghost town — a picturesque but haunting spot that feels especially eerie when the wind blows.

My grandparents left shortly before the Russian Revolution and WWI — well before WWII, when their hometown was destroyed. Along with all the other Volga German villages, it was erased off the face of the Earth by Stalin-led Communists who hated the successful foreigners living on Russian lands.

My grandparents never experienced the horrors that Rothammel's inhabitants suffered. Their property was taken, food supplies confiscated, families separated and individuals left to starve. The other option was getting shipped to Siberia and risk freezing to death. Nonetheless, they stayed in touch as best they could, sending money to help, until, suddenly, in the early 1940s, everything went silent. My grandparents heard nothing again from friends and relatives over there.

Today, the closest significant Russian city on the Volga River near where millions of German colonists lived is Saratov, 450 miles southeast of Moscow. I traveled there on less-than-wonderful Russian trains — after experiencing the showcase facilities in St. Petersburg and Moscow and enjoying their world-class opera and ballet. Those two modernized cities starkly contrasted to rural Russia. When the trek that took me back to my roots ended and I headed home, I breathed a sigh of relief, murmuring, "Boy, am I glad Grandpa Weingardt left here and came to America."

The successes my grandfather's American-born descendents (and those of two of his other brothers who also immigrated) achieved — as engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, business leaders, and more — provides a striking contrast to what might have happened had they stayed in Russia or even in Europe.

Whatever your ethnic background, now might be good time to delve into your roots. Find out firsthand what's happening in the land of your progenitors. The travel will be enlightening and might even make you feel deeply grateful they immigrated to America when they did. Because of them, you've had (and will continue to have) the opportunity to be a leading engineer living in the greatest country on Earth.

With so many forces cutting away at the spirit and promise of America — even demeaning and diminishing the importance of engineering — structurals need to step forward and aggressively keep that from happening. First electing, and then supporting, the right public leaders in 2012 will be a good place to start.

Richard G. Weingardt, P.E., is CEO and chairman of Richard Weingardt Consultants, Inc., a Denver-based structural engineering firm. He can be contacted at rweingardt@gostructural.com.