During my formative years (i.e., the early 1980s), I recall a flurry of genealogical interest on multiple sides of the family. My paternal grandpa’s sister Carol (Rude) Luiso had been interviewing her father John Rude and other older relatives about the family’s early years in the US. She and her cousin Judi collected a wealth of information about both the Helgestads, my grandpa’s mother’s family, as well as the Rudes, my grandpa’s father’s family.

Meanwhile, my maternal grandmother’s sister Helen (Reiner) Reed was in the midst of writing her book about her father’s paternal grandparents — Elsbeth (Hitz) and Johann Jacob Reiner, who had immigrated from Switzerland and Württemberg to Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1840s. It was around that same time that my maternal grandparents welcomed relatives from Norway — just a couple years after they themselves had traveled to Norway to see the villages of their forebears and connect with distant family. This was also the time that my maternal grandpa’s sister Shirley (Smith) Stork was busy compiling her many binders of information about her father’s family from Pomerania (Prussia) and her mother’s family from Norway.

Is it any wonder then that something was sparked in me? With all the family history talk happening around the kitchen table, these “ancestors” started to feel much closer, much more real. They weren’t just people with funny-sounding names who had lived and died a long time ago. I started to see a connection between their lives and mine. And for this, I have my great aunts to thank — especially Carol, Helen, and Shirley. They are they greats on whose shoulders I stand.

Of course, these ladies can also thank the previous generation for carefully preserving family history. There are another set of greats. I’m thinking especially of the mother of Aunt Shirley and my grandpa Gene Smith — my great-grandma Elvina Anderson Smith. My great-grandma Jessie Johnson Reiner was also keenly interested in family history. She and her sister Glenrose passed along countless stories from their parents and grandparents. All of us who carry the torch of family history are indebted to these greats as well.