My family is originally from Germany - Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) to be exact, and most of my family is still there. The story of how my parents came to be Americans is closely tied with why I'm a Republican.

At age 20, my father found a way out of his impoverished German town by joining the German merchant marines. In so doing, he not only found a job, but a way to see the world. It was a decision that would have major consequences not only for him, but for his future family.

If you spend any time in the towns along the Elbe River, you can see a never ending stream of cargo ships heading to and from Hamburg, one of Europe's largest ports. Everything from cars to chemicals, fertilizer to farm equipment, heads through this passageway to and from points around the world.

As a sailor in the merchant marines, my father had the opportunity to see the world. My most valuable possession is his old log book and atlas, showing where he visited, and recording the journeys in his own hand in a book.

During his six years on board ship, he had the opportunity to see and experience all kinds of different societies - Soviet bloc, South American, Caribbean, American, and more. When he finally decided to leave the merchant marines and take with him the skills he had learned working on massive diesel engines down below deck, he had to decide where to settle.

The easy, and typical, decision would be to settle back home in Germany. He knew the language, the culture, and the entire rather large family was there.

But his experiences gave him the taste of something different - something special. He chose that of all the places he had seen as a sailor, he wanted to go to America.

Freedom, he told me, was what drew him to America. The freedom to plot your own destiny, and to reap the fruits of one's labor.

So in 1960, at age 26, he met my mother, got married, and the two of them boarded the S.S. Hanseatic bound for New York.

Seven years later they became Americans. I still have their citizenship certificates framed in my home. They both valued their American citizenship as something very, very special.

As an American, my father took his freedom, and his responsibility, very seriously. He voted in every single election once he became a citizen - the first time in 1968. I remember going with him has a kid to the polling place at the local junior high school. There, the poll workers would open the book containing each voter's original voter registration card, and I could see the card on which my father had signed in to vote, going back years and years. It would be wonderful to get that card back, but I imagine those records were destroyed after he passed away.

My father took voting seriously, but he would never tell me who he voted for. To him, the privacy of the ballot was important, as it prevented the state from favoring or disfavoring voters based on which candidates they preferred.

To this day I remember my father telling me stories of how people in his town during the Second World War would disappear if they had voted for the "wrong" candidate, or had the "wrong" opinions about the government.

Nevertheless, my father was a Republican because he saw the Republican Party as the party best suited to preserve the freedoms that brought him and my mother to this country in the first place. He saw little difference between big government liberals in this country and socialists back in Europe.

I share my father's passion for limited government, lower taxes, and a strong national defense. I watched the Reagan-Carter debate in 1980 at the age of 10 and rooted for Ronald Reagan. I suppose that made me a Very Young Republican at the time.

I remain incredibly grateful my parents had the courage, vision and fortitude to make it to this country.