Category: Family history
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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…
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A mystery solved – the Wackrows of Müggenburg
Hartmut has saved the day — again! If you’ve read my prior post about the Schmidt family of Müggenburg, you’ll know that my knowledge about this branch of my family (my mother’s father’s father’s side) is wholly thanks to the efforts of one local historian, Mr. Hartmut Wegner of Mönkebude. When Hartmut read that post…
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In search of the Lehmanns
I drove out into the German countryside today to get a sense of where my grandma’s grandma came from. The grandma in question is Louise Lehmann Kaufman, the mother of my paternal grandma’s father, Edward Carl Kaufman. My great-grandpa Ed Kaufman is the man on the right in the photo above. His mother Louise is…
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The Hahn and Sahr families of Woltersdorf
Today I visited Woltersdorf, Wartin and Blumberg — small villages that were home to my great-grandpa Frank Smith’s mother’s families — the Hahns and Sahrs. (For information about Grandpa Frank’s father’s family, see this post.) The region is home to sprawling farm fields — mostly wheat and hay, but occasionally corn and sunflowers. In some…
Deep Roots 