Close to Home

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 learned to drive and lived out their lives of almost a century each,  probably never straying more than 5-10 miles of where they were born.   #52ancestors


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Nine - Disaster

Week Nine - Disaster I am behind on my blogging BECAUSE - I can't think of one disaster that occurred in my family.  I've been researching a long time and there is nothing that comes to mind in my immediate  family that would say disaster. I do have distant relatives in what I would call disaster situations - a Civil War soldier who came home and found his brother was having an affair with his wife.  A resulting dual left them both dead. A relative bitten by a rabid dog, who suffered a horrible death, too early in history have an antidote. available. Obituary Washington Register  The sad news of the sudden death of our young friend, John Ott, whose home is five miles south of town, which was received last Wednesday evening, took our people by compete surprise.  Mr. Ott some two years ago bitten by a dog that he feared was mad, and although he tried a madstone without effect, the thought that he would die of hydrophobia continually preyed upon ...
Read more
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...
Read more

Week 10 - Strong Woman

Image
Week 10 - Strong Woman This challenge was an easy one for me.  It always brings to mind my grandmother, Emma Lovinia Nemitz Wimp.   Born in 1885 in Stiles Iowa, she went to the one room school house in the community until she completed 8th grade.  At that point, she could be a school teacher.  She balked at that prospect, because she was very good at math and envisioned a job as a bookkeeper.  Her father, however, thought that was man's work, and worse, would put her in a man's world. He made her take a job as a school teacher just across the county line in Missouri.  He drove her there in a horse and buggy. Some of the boys in her class were bigger than she was, and hard to handle.  She was miserable.  So she saved her money and when she had enough, she did two things.  She bought a beautiful watch (which I still have) and she moved to Burlington, Iowa where she got a job as a bookkeeper at the Drake hardware store.  The sign for t...
Read more