Month: May 2024
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A tip of the hat to Britanno-American friendship
Everywhere I travelled over the past 10 days, I was reminded of the close and abiding ties between Great Britain and my home country. What might have started as a begrudging alliance between mother Britannia and her uncouth, rebellious child blossomed over time into a deep friendship. The progression of this relationship was laid out…
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The Wells family of Worcester
My grandmother’s grandmother Fannie Wells was born just north of Madison, Wisconsin in 1854, a few years after her parents Maria and William Wells had emigrated from Worcester, England. Fannie died in 1931, but she is remembered in my great-aunt Helen’s genealogy as a deeply spiritual person and “an immaculate housekeeper, [who] always placed a…
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How William Wells of Worcester ended up in Virginia’s bloody soil
This is a reconstruction of my 3x great-grandfather’s brief and tragic Civil War experience, based on first-hand accounts of Wisconsin’s 37th Infantry written shortly after the war.
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The Burgess and Weeks families of Bristol and Somerset
My husband’s paternal line hails from Bristol, a major port city on the west side of England. Theodore Burgess (my husband’s great-great-grandfather) and Theodore’s father William Burgess said goodbye to Bristol on March 29th, 1852, climbing aboard a ship called Scurry with 127 other passengers. Scurry was bound for Port Phillip (Melbourne) and Sydney, Australia,…
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Gene Smith’s Signal Corps service: Part 2 – England (February – July 1944)
On the morning February 28th, 1944, Cpl. Eugene Smith woke aboard the RMS Aquitania. He had heard the ship’s anti-aircraft guns fire a couple of times during the night but the word that morning was that it had just been a test. He and the rest of Company C took their turn in one of…
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Gene Smith’s Signal Corps service: Part 1 – Camp Crowder and Camp Wood (March 1943 – February 1944)
My grandma Phyllis described in a letter the heartbreaking moment when she and the family dropped my grandpa Gene off at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. They wandered the premises for about two hours, watching some recruits do target practice and hoping they might catch a glimpse of Gene. “When we got back to the car frozen…
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Hello from a corner of the world
Our globe may not actually have corners, but Britain certainly does. Cornwall is perched on Britain’s southwest corner. The “corn” in Cornwall derives from the Romans’ name for the tribe that lived here — the Cornovii — and the Latin root cornu means horn, perhaps referring to the horn of land where this tribe dwelt.…
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A journey down a genealogical mineshaft
A few years before my grandma Barbara Jean (Kaufman) Rude died, I started asking her questions about her childhood, her parents, and what she could remember of her grandparents. Although my grandma’s mind was sharp, the details were murky when she spoke about her mother’s parents, John and Margaret Clark. There are a few good…
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Gene Smith on the eve of World War II
Think of World War II and, if you’re like me, you probably imagine it a bit like a movie. And thanks to compelling movies like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk, we might picture men doing heroic deeds in the face of uncertain odds. Don’t get me wrong – this kind of heroism did occur and ought to be…
Deep Roots 