When I was a little girl I remember my mother working on her family’s genealogical history. She would bring back rolls of paper from the butcher shop and carefully diagram her parents and siblings, their parents and children, and so on. She would write to and receive books and papers from libraries and archives and sometimes take me and my little brothers with her on quests at the Oregon State Library where she would pour over little drawers filled with index cards and then copy dates and events from big, heavy books into her little notebook while we were admonished to “be still.”
When we went to Texas to visit her family, her brothers and sister would share their charts and notes and talk about their family’s history, stories filled with pioneers who sailed to the New World with little more than the clothes on their back to start a new life in this place called America. There were stories of heroes who fought in the Revolutionary War, in the Civil War and in the Alamo and tales of ancestors who were the first Texas Rangers. We grew up with these stories of our ancestors who scraped out their living in the American frontier fighting Indians, Mexicans, disease and famine. If we complained about how tough things were going at home we were reminded that we came from a long line of pioneers who never said “can’t or try” but did.
The lure of family genealogy was lost on me in my younger years and more of an annoyance to me, with my mother who was determined to trudge in the rain with her children in tow through a cemetery to look at a tombstone of someone who died a hundred years ago. But as I grew older and had children of my own the stories took on a different look. The faded photos carefully saved took on a different light and their stories began to feel as much a part of me as my own blood. These were MY people, MY family and it’s where I come from.
When my mother passed away my siblings insisted that I become the keeper of all my mother’s photographs and notes and I began to undertake the task that she had worked on when I was a little girl. Only I now had the advantage of the internet and thousands of genealogists, distant relatives, all doing the same! In my initial enthusiasm I joined Ancestry.com and my trees began to grow with the vehemence of Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but wisdom overcame giddiness and I began to focus on the trees, one at a time, beginning with my father’s.
I began my more focused research on my father’s family tree of which stories had been told but really little was known. As anyone who has researched family history will tell you, you never know what you will find behind the cobwebs in the closet. What we found were German immigrants who left their families behind to start over only to find themselves in the grip of war and having to start over yet again.
They were farmers, laborers, husbands and fathers, wives and mothers. They fought for their families, their land and their country. And the stories of their perseverance and tenacity have been inspiring.
This collection of stories is the sum of the research and stories of other distant branches of our tree that has been collected over the centuries. It is a gift to our children, who I hope will one day realize (as I did) that they are more than just stories: They are the path from whence we came and what made us who we are today.
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