The Baboon Congress

Traveling with Relatives

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Today’s guest blog comes from Jacque.

My husband Lou and I both read John Berendt’s 1994 book about Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, with pleasure and disbelief.

“We must check this place out!” we said to each other.

But we were slow to act until I learned my family had a connection to Savannah. A distant relative gathered and published her grandfather’s Civil War letters to his wife, a Jewish-to-Christian convert named Tobitha Klein Hess. This soldier, German-born Frederick Christian Hess, was my Great-great Grandfather. He toured Savannah on Sherman’s March to the Sea, spending time there as part of the occupying forces. His gracious granddaughter, Muriel Primrose Baron, made the transcripts of these letters available to all of this soldier’s descendants—about 2000 people at last count.

The spellings and capitalizations here are his, a mix of English and German. When he wrote this on Christmas Day in 1864, he had only been studying English for nine years.

The City is full of Cityzins fore they didn’t have time to run off this time. There is lots of Jews and they are very strong Sesesh. (Secessionist and pro-Confederate) But the most of the Citizens are wealthy that are living in this City.

We entered Savannah on Highways 16 to 17 to Martin Luther Drive to Liberty Avenue where suddenly a canopy of live oaks and Spanish moss laid before us.

I will send you some moss wich is growing on trees and some rice on the straw and some acorns wich are from a live oak and a magnolia seed. The magnolia is a very nice tree with large green leafs all year.

I expected to see lots of Civil War history, but no. The American Revolution is the war people to refer to in Savannah, where it is heavily memorialized.

“…in one square is the Monument of General Polaski who fell at the Siege of Savannah, Oct the 9, 1779. This is largest Monument I ever seen. It is about forty feet high and about ten foot square at the bottom, with the Inscription, “Polaski, the heroic Pole who was fighting fore American Liberty and fell mortally wounded at the Siege of Savannah, 9 Oct. 1779. And then the General is carved out on horseback wich is very nice work.”

When I first saw this monument, knowing I stood near the place my ancestor stood, I had chills down my spine.

“Now I will tell what I think of the City and give you the Discription of it. Fore yesterday fornenoon I went down in the City and took a good look at it. It is a pretty nice place with some costly buildings in it, mostly brick. It is all level and is close to the Savannah river. The streets are very Sandy and don’t run very strait fore the whole City is laid off of Squares. There is several very nice parks in it and a water fountain….

I took a picture of Lou is standing in front of the Forsyth Park fountain, the very same one Grandpa Fred viewed 160 years earlier, though for us it was dyed green for St. Pat’s day.

F.C. Hess

Though the Civil War is curiously absent from the city’s displayed history, it is alive in people’s minds. During our 2007 visit a lovely Southern Matron who was volunteering at the Visitor’s Center clarified to me, “We don’t call it The Civil War. Here we refer to that as the War of Northern Aggression.”

Hmmm. I thought.

During a tour of Sherman’s Headquarters this attitude was echoed yet again. A very distinguished gentleman lead the tour which was punctuated with resentful comments about “the Yankee Occupation” and “General William Tecumsah Sherman who did us the favor of not burning us out!” Apparently, this resentment has festered for 160 years because Grandpa Fred referred to it as well, on December 29th, 1864:

“And everybody young and old even small Children that cant hardly talk yet are talking about Sherman. The folks down here thinks that he is an awful man. And I guess that they will think more so before he gets through with them. The Citizens say that Sherman has a very good army and that there wasnt as much trouble in town now, as there use to be when there was only a few Companys of rebel soldiers.”

We enjoyed the Savannah Southern Low-Country Cuisine—seafood boils, cornbread, and grits—my favorite is Shrimp and Grits. Grandpa Fred ate some of the same fare:

“I was down in the City yesterday and got something to eat. We can buy rice and cornbread and molasses in town frome the Citizens. Rice is 25cts per quart. Cornbread is different prices but they are big anough you can depent on that. Mollasses is one Dollar per quart.”

I returned to Savannah, at my mother’s request, with my mother and sister in 2008 to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday. During that trip we toured gardens and experienced a Southern Tea. Mom was already using a cane and occasionally a rolling walker at that time. The cane and walker caused us to become acutely aware of the brick sidewalks and protruding, bumpy bricks everywhere.

“The churchbells have been ringing this morning and it sounded very much like home. And I should went to Church but I had to get ready fore inspection. And then I was detailed to go on picket.”

Grandpa Fred was more soldier than sightseer. But I find it amazing that I was able to walk in his footsteps 160 years after he viewed many of the same landmarks in this breathtakingly graceful city.

When and where have you traveled to get closer to your own history?

82 thoughts on “Traveling with Relatives”

  1. A cemetery or two is about it.
    Oh, how we loved going to Savannah. Bet I know where you had the Tea. One of the best tea rooms in U.S. I love Teas (but do not tell anyone, J. We walked Forsyth Park every trip, and almost every square. Sigh, for us. Twill never be there ‘gain.

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  2. i love doing the history check in the south. they do it so well.
    i did a little history this weekend. i had an uncle from campbell mn near fargo sort of and on the way to the funeral i i sidetracked and drove through campbell.. it is a little minnesota town about 3 blocks long and there was uncle dicks house right where it had always been. river next door, grain elevator on the other end of town.
    25 years ago i went to ireland on a trip that was a last minute switch when chernobyl blew up. i had no intention of doing any family history stuff but it was impossible to avoid i just loved it. went out of my way to find the little city where one part of my family came from. ballymena was a great stop and a shop with my grandfathers name on it caused me to stop and go up and knock on the door. well the people in side stopped everything had us in for tea and wanted to know everything about that branch of the family and how we all were doing over int he states. they filled me in on all the relatvies we had in common and of those with different spellings who were related to us and famous citizens of the world. i dont know would want to do a lot of family research but it is fun when it pops up and gives you a nice way to touch the past in a moer meaningful way. thanks jacque for the nice reporting job this morning.

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      1. jones is welch but the jones half of the family was settled in cork and claire long before their move to america
        grimes and hines are my republic of ireland families . my moms people are the northeren irish brood (that expalins it) their name is herbison.

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        2. My mother’s family,the Condrons, also the Border Region, County Louth, a town called Drogheda (emphasis on the first syllable).

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  4. Rise and SHine Baboons!

    I am still thinking fond thoughts of our trip to Savannah one month ago. The snow forecast this week might send me back in a panicky snow phobia. In April. Really. HMMMPH.

    We are preparing for another history and pleasure trip to Norway in a year. I have been researching our Norwegian roots on Ancestry.com which I find to be addictive! But I found my Norwegian people which was no easy task. Lou’s ancestry was easy–someone in his family had published a book for the family which details the location of the home farm (Stavanger near Bergen) as well as the boat ride to England. The train ride across England, then the boat ride to America in 1879. No mystery there! My Norwegians are from Hamar, between Lillehammer and Oslo–nearly Sweden!

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    1. Norway is lovely – I have roots in a few spots from different parts of the family. Standing on the (old) family farm outside Kongsberg, up in the mountains, well, that was really standing in history. I was with cousins who live in Norway – they had gotten to know the current owners of the farm (it was still farm – but chickens and grain now instead of our family’s cows) and we had a picnic on the lawn. Standing there, staring out at the mountains my great-grandfather, along with his father and brothers, had walked over pushing a handcart with their worldly goods to get to the fjords to come to America…wow. Just wow. Even the gate to get into the farm hasn’t changed much – I have a photo of my great aunt at that gate to the farm from sometime maybe early 1950s, it is virtually unchanged in its slight off-angle (or at least was when I was there a little over a decade ago now).

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    2. My relatives all come from a strip of northern Germany stretching from Embden to Bremen to Hamburg.I have never been there but hope to get there sometime. Speaking of snow, we are in the midst of a winter weather advisory and should get from 3-7 inches today. It is snowing like crzxy just now. I am nearly finished with my tale of traveling with relatives (the trip to London) that I hope to get to Dale this week.

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    3. I have a binder given to me by a relative which gives the history of my Grandmother Tjepkema’s family, which were De Groots, and it also includes some infromation about the Tjepkemas. Both families came here from Friesland in the Northern part of the Netherlands. My mother came from English stock. Her maiden name was Thompson and her mother’s maiden name was Jackson.

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      1. Jim, all those names are so familiar to me. In my home town we had De Groots, Habemas, Eikemas, … it is the “emas” ending that gives the names away as Frieslander. My dad’s family are Frieslanders. Boomgaarden and Kruger are the family names, with first names like Harm, Weirt, and Okke, Frieslanders are considered an ethnic minority in the Netherlands. My mother’s family had last names like Bartels, Cluver, and Hellwinkle. They came from Bremen and Hamburg, and were Saxon, not Frieslander. They all spoke platdeutch.

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  5. Good morning. Thanks, Jacque, for the good story, pictures, and very interesting segments of letters. I haven’t done very much to explore the history of my family. My Great Grandfather may have crossed paths with your Great-great Grandfather because he served in the civil war and was on Sherman’s march to the sea. I don’t know any details about his participation in the march to the sea. All I know is that my Grandfather’s middle name, Alonzo, was picked to honor a soldier that my Great Grandfather met while serving in the Civil War.

    I’ve been to some of the places in Wisconsin that are part of my families’ history. Probably the most historic place, for my family, that I have visited is the Green Mound Cemetery near Galesville, Wisconsin. It is a small rural cemetery where my parents and my Dad’s parents are buried as well as some of my other relatives. It is not too far from my the farm of my Dad’s Grandparent’s which is still being run by one of my relatives that I have only visited with briefly when attending funerals.

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  6. Naperville, Illinois. My father’s ancestors first settled there in the 1830s or 40s and were some of the earliest settlers in the town. Dad and his brother co-wrote a genealogy book of the family and visited us when we lived in Roselle for several years, so we had heard of the possibility of the family first settling in Naperville, but couldn’t confirm until we visited the county historical society archives and found data that proved the family had lived there.

    We found the first family graves in a Naperville cemetary. Inscriptions were barely legible but confirmed the family’s presence. At a Civil War reenactment event my wife and I attended, we were browsing through a souvenir shop and came across an old Plat Map from 1870. It turns out that a son of the first arrivals to Naperville became quite prosperous and managed to buy some farmland abutting the Du Page River.

    Turns out the plot was on ground that is now the heart of downtown Naperville and likely worth exponentially more than it was valued in 1870. If only great-great-great uncle Harry (or whatever his name was) had kept that land in the family, I might have been an heir to a land baron’s fortune. *Sigh* Guess I’ll have to settle for my little half-acre in Owatonna.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  7. Hi all. I just took a phone call that brought unwelcome medical news. My sister, Crystalbay, was in a restaurant yesterday when she blacked out, regaining consciousness in an ambulance. She apparently had a grand mal seizure. They don’t know why yet. She is comfortable now although highly frustrated because she hasn’t been able to link to the hospital’s WiFi system. She absolutely depends on her computer to connect with friends, so I sure hope the frustration gets resolved.

    Right now we just have a lot of questions and no answers. I’ll update you when I know more.

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    2. Thanks for the news Steve. Please give her my wishes for a speedy Wifi connection and a quick recovery– probably in that order?

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    6. Hi Steve (and CB as well if you’re connected),
      I’ve been gone all day and I am just joining the Trail now. I hope CB is able to bounce back quickly and with some idea what caused the seizure.

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  8. My folks, my sister, and I are planning a road trip to Montreal this summer. Apparently, my dad’s side of the family were part of the settlers of Montreal, originally coming from the Normandy region of France. Apparently, they gave up strawberry farming for the adventurous life of the New World. And, unlike the previous settlers, weren’t killed! Always a ‘plus.’

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  9. Nice topic, Jacque. When I wrote the book about my parents, one of my favorite chapters was the one in which I took my father for a trip to revisit scenes of his childhood. He had been raised for six years by his aunt, a woman who lived in the charmingly old fashioned town of Keosauqua, in extreme southeastern Iowa. That trip was one of the finest moments of sharing with my dad.

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  10. Morning gang–
    Thanks for the story Jacque! What a cool trip!
    The story is our name got changed so it’s hard to track the ‘Hain’ side back very far. Mom’s family was from Switzerland settling over by Lacrosse before moving here. Apparently there was a large Swiss contingent in the ‘Mormon Coulee’ area of Lacrosse. Mom has pictures of the former farm stead over there; nothing left of it anymore.
    We spent a day with Kelly’s Mom driving around over by Fairmont looking at bare patches of ground where Mom had grown up in rented homes. Not much history of her family either. Kelly had an uncle, whose mother could trace her family back to the Mayflower. (No blood relation to Kelly).
    And of course I have history right on the farm since it’s been in our family since 1896. I have mentioned before how much I appreciate sitting in front of the barn looking across the same fields Great Grandpa saw.

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    1. Down in that Mormon Coulee area near LaCrosse is a cemetery called Kienholz Cemetery, where a lot of Swiss immigrants are buried. My great great grandmother was a Kienholz from Switzerland and I think her family settled in that area, though she herself, after she married my great great grandfather, also Swiss, settled near Red Wing. Most of his family, once they arrived in this area, settled around Plum City, Wisconsin, which was also a concentration of Swiss immigrants as I understand it.

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      1. Alright Bill, I had to go dig out my mothers family history book. I recognized the Kienholz name. My Great Grandmother was Barbara Kienholz and she married Casper Eggler in 1874 in Lacrosse. They had 12 kids; 3 boys and 9 girls. One boy, Victor, died at the age of 1. Eight years later they named another boy Victor and that was my grandfather.
        Barbara Kienholz, born September 10, 1853, Bern, Switzerland, and came to the US when she was 3 years old.
        Casper Egger, born April 5, 1848, Brienz County Bern, Switzerland and came to the US in 1865.
        Here’s a site I was reading today about Mormon Coulee:
        http://tinyurl.com/cfyo94m
        Does that make us cousins??

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        1. My cousin and my mom are both big into genealogy and they say when you find someone who might be related, even distantly, just call them “cousin.”

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        2. Probably cousins, but remote ones. All of my Kienholz relatives also came from Brienz, Bern Canton, but they seem to have traveled a little further upriver and settled around Lake Pepin and Red Wing. Other names in that family group include Schild, Fuchs, Ab Egglen (or Abegglen), and Rode. The places in Switzerland they came from were often
          isolated and insular, sandwiched between the mountains and the water. I’ve seen some of the census materials from there and it struck me that there were relatively few family names used over and over. Likely lots of instances of second cousins marrying.

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        3. I forgot to add, my great great grandmother was Magdalena Kienholz, born in 1834 in Brienz to Ulrich Kienholz and Magdalena Wyss.
          About 30 years ago, there was a big Kienholz reunion somewhere. My parents went to it, but that was before I had gotten involved in the research. Do you remember ever hearing about it from your grandmother?

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        4. News flash! Your great great great grandfather, Peter Kienholz, born in 1783 and my great great great grandfather, Ulrich Kienholz, were brothers. Cousin!

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        5. Yay! Isn’t that cool! Or as I always say to Kelly, ‘I think I went to school with him!’ (425 kids in my graduation class; so I did go to school with a lot of people and I’m still in the same town, so it’s possible. Kelly rolls her eyes when I say that…)

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        6. I don’t have any info before 1853 – Barbara’s birthdate, so that’s pretty cool you could track it back. I don’t recall hearing about the reunion, but I’ll check with my Mom and another person that always seems to know this stuff.

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  11. It’s fun to read all these stories. And Jacque, I recognize some of these spost from our trip there last fall. On that same trip, we stopped to see… let’s see, he would be my grandma’s sister’s grandson, in Tennessee. It was amazing to me how welcoming were he and his wife, who does the genealogy that got usc connected. I would love to delve more into that on both sides of my family, and if I did, to go to Wales, Norway, Sweden to look up ancestors. In my spare time. Currently, though, the Roland and Sioux City (both in Iowa) cemeteries are the most likely destinations for seeing ancestors.

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  12. I recently traveled through the pages of a book to get closer to my history. The children’s book “Tomorrow Will Be Bright” was written by Mabel Leigh Hunt, a distant cousin of my dad’s. She wrote the story based upon the stories she had heard about her great-grandparents coming by wagon and horseback over the mountains from North Carolina to Ohio and Indiana. The people in the book are cousins of my ancestors, but my ancestors also made the same journey between 1805 and 1811. So even though the book was about cousins of my ancestors, a similar book could have been written about my direct ancestors.

    I will try to link to a picture of the book, but I don’t know if it will work.

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    2. How wonderful that you have this family treasure, Edith! A story that speaks for many people’s histories/journeys/pasts. So one person’s story becomes a shared story. More of us should write our stories even if only for our children and grandchildren. There’s no such thing as “ordinary” when you think of how many millions of children have identified with Lucy Maud Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder 🙂

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  13. Thanks for a great post, Jacque. What a wonderful experience!
    Both of my grandparents’ homes are now gone, so can’t take the s&h there, although I did write awhile back about our pilgrimage to the ancestral barn.

    I’ve had business reasons to go to St Peter a couple of times this spring (yep, I am calling this spring), and it has gotten me thinking we need to try and track down the farms that the great-grandparents settled on. My family mostly got off the ship in New York and headed straight for the Minnesota Valley-I’ve got some old plat maps and my dad’s memory to go on, so we should be ok with that. S&h is up for travelling the back roads of greater Carver and LeSueur counties-should be fun.

    Then there is the old coffee mill my mom has with an address in Euclid, OH written on the bottom of the drawer. I know that one of the great-grandparents came from there, so will have to try and check that out too.

    And someday, there is the trip to Germany(actually now Poland). Google Earth is a marvelous thing, as I think I may have been able to “see” the church one of the great-great grandparents attended, but I would have to try and correspond with them to see if the records bare that out.

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  14. Somehow, talks of visiting parents’ and grandparents’ homes and farms brings to mind a trip I took with friends to southwest Minnesota. We went out to Walnut Grove and waded in Plum Creek (and saw the divot that was the only remains of the Ingalls’ sod home there) – and we visited the Jeffers’ Petroglyphs, which were totally awesome. Totally cool to think about the centuries of humans and buffalo that roamed that area and returned to those same rock formations. Adding to that was the knowledge that when my grandmother was young, it was a spot to go for picnics (she grew up just south of there in Windom). She wondered about all those generations of Native Americans, returning year after year to add to the art, too. Only when she and her pals went it was just “that spot with the Indian carvings” – not really a revered or special place, other than it provided a nice picnic location because of the rolling landscape and nearby creek. That change from “a spot the locals now about” to an actual preserved and protected location speaks volumes about our view of the land (including that the spot had once been wild and open to all, populated by buffalo and owned by no one, and now it is a demarcated spot in the hands of a state agency).

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  15. Nice job, Jacque. Sounds like you and Lou had a grand time.

    I grew up just a few miles from where my dad was born. He was born out of wedlock, and put up for adoption. Through his birthmother’s public records we have been able to trace his ancestry back to a highly esteemed Danish author, Steen Steensen Blicher, and I have visited several of the towns in Jutland where he lived and worked. No one in our family has made any effort to discover anything about his biological father’s ancestry, presumably because he left dad’s mother in the lurch.

    Some years ago, oh maybe 7 or 8, my sister, Randi, suddenly got the notion that it was possible that my father’s biological mother had other children that might still be alive. She did some digging through the National Archives in Copenhagen, and sure enough, discovered that dad (who passed away in 1992) has a half sister still living in Copenhagen. Randi called her on the phone and told the woman that she thought we might be related. Birgit, my dad’s half-sister, declared that was impossible as she was an only child. Randi persisted and told Birgit about dad and the circumstances of his birth. Eventually Birgit invited Randi to a cup of tea. Birgit was shocked to learn that her mother, who she had been very close to, had taken that secret with her to her grave. But she too had gone to the National Archives and determined that she did in fact, have a half brother she knew nothing about. Turns out that Birgit has two adult children, a son who lives in Copenhagen, and a daughter who lives in Dearborn, Michigan. I contacted Lise via email, and it just so happened that the following weekend she and her husband were coming to the Twin Cities to pick up their son who had just graduated from some technical college in Bloomington. Lise and I met for a cup of coffee at the Mall of America, and had a very nice chat. She and I are now friends on Facebook and enjoy having expanded the family with newfound cousins.

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      1. I’m curious, Renee, how so? Because those records are reliable, exhaustive and readily available or what?

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        1. They have provided information on identical twins separated at birth so that the nature/nurture conondrum could be examined empirically with regard to mental illness.

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        2. Breaks my heart to think that anyone would separate identical twins at birth no matter how many conundrums they solved by doing it.

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        3. How true, but it has relieved many a mother to know that genetics, not mothering, is the major factor in the development of mental illness like schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder.

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      2. i have a friend who has a wife who is a carrier for md and she researched it ong and hard on how to have children form chosen eggs and ll that. she has had two children and informed them about their carier roles in parenting down the road. what a burden it must be to realize that the danger in continuing the family genetics means more mental chalanges like they have witnessed or heard the nightmares of in family history stories. better to be aware than not but wow…

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  16. Greetings! I have not traveled to family homes of antiquity. But weirdly enough, I went to high school where my father’s side of family settled when they came to US from Germany/Austria. St. Nazianz, WI was settled by Father Oschwald and Rose Marx, my great-great(?) grandmother (yes, related to Karl Marx) and they formed some sort of religious commune there. There is a beautiful school campus in St. Nazianz, WI which originally was a Salvatorian seminary (Catholic sect) that my father attended for 2 years. This Salvatorian seminary was turned into an ecumenical, coed, hippie, progressive boarding high school based on Dr. Maslow’s ideas of self determination and named John F. Kennedy Preparatory High School. About an hour from Green Bay, this is where I attended high school, a watershed event in my life.

    It’s a beautiful place, although the buildings are run down now. The Salvatorian brothers still lived there while it was a high school and they took care of many things. Brother Bread baked the homemade bread each day, Brother Bus drove the bus to sporting events and the students who came from Milwaukee area (we had a sizable African-American population), Brother Flowers tended the flower gardens, etc. We never knew their names, but they quietly went about their chores. One of them, Father Melvin, was an outstanding science teacher who had graduated Summa Cum Laude from HARVARD! I kid you not. There is a small cemetery on edge of campus with a large tomb for Father Oschwald. Rumors abounded about it being haunted.

    I was in the Passion Play at JFK Prep, and junior year I was Caiphus, High Priest (a major role). It was a small school, so lots of girls played male parts. Using a low voice and sporting a proper beard, turban and robes; I pulled it off. Performing the Passion Play was a tradition with the school all the years it was a seminary, so it was a big deal. Turns out there was a picture somewhere of my dad working backstage on The Passion Play (I saw it!) when he was in school there. Weird coincidences and a very special place.

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  17. Fascinating entry, Jacque! I’m the one in our family who knows where all the bodies are buried. I started researching my family genealogy years ago, before any of that information was available online. The portion of my ancestors that came from Europe originated in Sweden and Norway, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. Though I haven’t yet been able to seek out my origins in the old country, I have visited many of the places my ancestors lived in America. My Czech relatives settled in Northeastern Iowa, in Clayton County. My Norwegian relatives came first to Owatonna and then made their way up to the northwestern part of the state in Grant County. My grandfather and his father-in-law, my great grandfather, were both from Sweden and both ended up in Grant County, Minnesota. The portion of my family that goes back any distance in America comes from New York state and possibly from Vermont. I’ve been to the cemetery that holds the graves of my great great great grandparents in Otsego County, New York. Robin and I have also chased down her relatives, to Watertown and Allegheny, New York and to Trempealeau, Wisconsin.

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  18. Great post, Jacque. It sounds like you had a lot of fun.

    Thanks for the birthday wishes everybody! I’ve had a peaceful day doing some of my favorite things. My internet connection has been down all day and I finally got reconnected a little while ago. I also had a nice, long post typed up and I lost it. Completely.

    Steve and Cb: I hope all is well and that you are home – healthy and connected – very soon.

    I have never traveled to learn about my family’s ancestry. I would like to but I haven’t had the opportunity. I know more about my dad’s ancestry than my mom’s. I used to have an ancient, cloth-bound book hand written in the German script that described where my dad’s ancestors were from and why they decided to come to America. I loaned the book to my cousin, who hasn’t returned it. They were from Wirsitz im Posen, Prussia Germany, now Poland. My uncle did some research and learned that they had been French Huguenots who had fled to Wirsitz im Posen to escape religious persecution. They must have been Catholic, which surprised us. “Will” was a shoemaker. We think “-kowske” was a suffix added to Will’s first name to create a new surname. I have no idea why it ends in an “e”.

    My maternal grandparents have more mysterious, and mixed, ancestry. I think they were mostly German but I also believe there must have been some Irish Catholic in my grandpa’s ancestry. His name was Gleason. My grandma’s name was Schaumkessel (or boiling or foaming kettle, remember? The name suited her.)

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  19. First off – fantastic post, Jacque! So cool 🙂

    Some day, I would love to make it to Finland to check out where my ancestors are from. The closest I’ve come to being closer to my history was going to the farm where my grandma grew up. It wasn’t far from my grandparents’ house in Black River, MI, but you wouldn’t have known it was a farm unless someone told you. The woods took back the land when they quit farming. Now, a lumber company owns the land. We used to cross-country ski across it, but not for a few years now. My grandpa (her husband) grew up near there as well, but he grew up in “town.” Champion is too small to really make him a “city boy.”
    I would love to get to North Dakota where my other grandma grew up, but that may have to wait a couple of years. I’d like to go with her for a high-school reunion. I think it would be fun 🙂 When her family first came to America, they settled in Calumet, MI. I’m sure I still have relatives there, but they’re back a ways. They moved to ND to farm, and part of the homestead is still there. I believe they still own the land. My grandpa grew up in Sebeka, MN. His dad owned a hardware store there. I’ve been near there, but I can’t remember ever going to Sebeka. Maybe when I was younger, but I’m not sure. I want to go with my grandpa to his next school reunion as well. I don’t know when it will be though…
    Some day, I’ll make the rounds. I would love to see all of these places. It’s too late to experience it with one set of grandparents, but hopefully I can with the other 🙂

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      1. I know she went to high school in Bismarck, but they lived in a tiny town near there that I can’t remember the name of…

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    2. Alanna, don’t put it off, make it happen. We all assume there’s plenty of time, so we don’t ask the questions, and we don’t make it a priority to explore the living resources that are available to us. It’s a mistake. For instance, I know that my mother late in life discovered that her father, who had abandoned his wife and children, had moved just 20 miles to Dublin. I know nothing of the man, except that he deserted his family. I don’t have a first name, birthdate, or any other information that would make it possible to track down his roots. Somehow that was not important to me 30 years ago, and now it’s too late.

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      1. 30 years ago i started looking into my greatgrandfathers stuff. i have a suitcase full of great notes and articles and his diaries but the people i wanted to talk to are all dead. get on it alanna

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      2. i say that and realize i know next to nothing about my moms dads family form hoople. i know all about the fargo jones clan folks but not the herbisons from hoople

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    3. I second PJs admonition. I didn’t start my research into my family’s history until the oldest generation was all gone. You can research the statistical information anytime, but once the first person narratives are gone, they’re gone forever.

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  20. i failed to mention my trips to leech lake to see my greatgrandfathers legacy. he passed on beautiful land to the family and the town of wlaker is where he lived and left a lot of wonderful cool things to look into. ireland was cool leech is so close i almost forgot to count it.

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  22. I haven’t traveled to any ancestrally significant locations. The house that my paternal grandfather built was in St. Paul, and I remember it from my childhood when my aunt and her husband lived in it. I’ve driven around the neighborhood once or twice, but the house has since been torn down, and I can’t even tell where it was exactly.

    The house was built in stages and took on a strangely labyrinthine quality as stairs and hallways and extra rooms were added on. Sometimes I visit it in my dreams.

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    1. I sometimes visit my grandmother’s home in my dreams,too, Linda–A rambling boarding house full of nooks and crannies and hidey holes near the University in Berkeley, CA–now a city park and playground–but I found the spot because I recognized the boulevard tree we used to climb when we were kids. I also once revisited the site of my childhood home in Kyoto, Japan. The neighbors were still there, but our lovely little house and garden had been razed and turned into a parking lot (the university owned the land and needed parking space more than a gem of a house and a koi pond). Imagine that! It’s a strange feeling to realize that if not for our stories and memories, these places and times and lives are lost to time. There’s a Japanese word “natsukashii” that loosely translated means a sadness/ache for the ephemeral nature of all things. The ghosts/shadows of our pasts, yes?

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