Traveling Through Time

Week 4 Close to Home My maternal grandmother was a Mennonite.  I have been fortunate in my research in that the family names are well documented, and family history goes back to Switzerland in the 1500's.  Her family came from Austria, but like many Mennonites, persecution and deliberate changes in laws forced them to keep on the move.  The original members of her family came through Pennsylvania and Ohio, eventually ending up in Iowa.  Like many of her religion, her families were quite large.  The result for some in their small rural community was that there were women who couldn't find spouses.  This picture is of two of my grandmother's aunts and a cousin, all in their nineties.  They never married and lived in the family farmhouse.  There were four sisters and a brother.. all living a "single" life.   Other than going to church, they stayed at home and did "handiwork", crocheting, embroidering, knitting and quilting.   They never l...

Week Three Long Line There are so many meanings to the beauty of the phrase "long line."  Both my husband and I have families tracing back to the Revolutionary War. On my husband's side,  the name "Solomon" seems to be most prevalent from the late 1700's and probably further back. One of those genealogy brick walls has prevented me from making the connection with the first ancestors of his to come to the United States.  I do know that the first generations with that surname to immigrate from Ireland came in 1540!   Pictured here are my husband (baby) his father, grand father and great grandfather.   I t reasure this picture and what it means to know of these people and the heritage they have provided  us, our children, and now our grandchildren.  #52ancestors

Week Two Favorite Photo This picture of my Dad and his brother immediately came to mind when I saw this theme, favorite photo.   The year was 1909, and Anton Irenus Akerberg, age 19, (sitting) had waited for his younger brother Eugene Constantine Akerberg (standing)  to turn 16 and  be confirmed in the Lutheran Church in Skane, Sweden, before immigrating to the United States. They were sponsored by their older brother Almar Peolot, who was already homesteading in Minot North Dakota. They left Malmo Sweden, headed to Leeds England and then across the Atlantic on the USS Celtic.  The Celtic was part of the White Star Line, famous for its loss of the USS Titanic just four years later.   In this picture, they look full of innocence, anticipation and hope for what lie ahead.  They would lead very different lives, one being troubled, in a troubled marriage, and dying early, the other living an adventuresome life and becoming a successful engineer on some of t...

Fresh Start - Week One. https:www.travelingthroughtime.blogspot.com I first started researching my ancestors and those of my husband in 1995.  In the past 25 years, a lot has changed.  I have pages and pages of old census records, and many pages from the early startup of Ancestry. I have bookshelves full of old genealogy "how-to"  books , where the information is now readily available on line.   Over 100 white notebooks fill two bookcases, all labeled with the surnames of our families.  And in the closets are boxes and boxes of information, most labeled with family name but many boxes with a mixture of family papers.  Research has become so easy, and as we all know, it is tempting and almost inevitable that we will go "down the rabbit hole" chasing peripheral relatives, or looking at the same information over and over.  Much more fun than organizing what you've already accumulated. However, there comes a time, and particularly as we get older, w...