Category: Genealogy
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PAYING RESPECTS TO OUR COUSIN
General George S. Patton Jr commanded the 3rd Army of the United States as they victoriously entered Nazi Germany during World War II. He remained in post-war Germany but was killed in an auto accident while going out pheasant hunting near Heidelberg just months after the war ended. He wanted to be buried with his men so he was laid to rest with 5,000 other American soldiers at the Luxembourg American Cemetery near Luxembourg City. Old Blood and Guts is my eight cousin, once removed. We both descend from a Huguenot…
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GRANDPA GAUSTAD
For as long as I remember, my mother has flaunted her ‘Norwegian-ness’. Her mother, Gertrude Gaustad, was of full Norwegian stock. So mom has an appetite for lefse but when I would ask her about our Norwegian ancestors she would draw a blank. She didn’t know much except that her grandfather was named Ole, he was blind and had died before she was born. So I set out to find out where we came from in Norway. It took quite a few years but I figured it out. In 1883, a…
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OLAV OF BYNESET
I hit a brick wall once. A genealogical brick wall, that is. For five years I had been trying to find out where my great grandfather, Ole Erickson Gaustad, came from. I was getting nowhere and figured I’d never find out. But one night in 2007, I was Googling ‘Gaustad’ and the village where I thought he was born, ‘Byneset’ and I got a hit. I found a function centre with Gaustad in the name so I took a chance and wrote an email. Within a day I got an email…
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INTO THE LAND OF MY GERMAN ANCESTORS
I had visited Germany on numerous occasions prior to living here. And every time I visited I felt an odd sense of belonging. As long as I didn’t open my mouth to speak, I even felt German. I felt comfortable and at home. And in a way, I was indeed home. Half of me is German. My father is half German and my mother is half German. For 15 years, I have been trying to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that constitutes how I came to be. While researching my father’s…
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GRANDMA AND SINCLAIR LEWIS
I was filing away some of my grandparents’ papers the other day when I spotted a short letter addressed to my grandmother, Cecile Belle Adam, in October 1940. It was a simple letter about missing a dinner engagement or similar and it made me start wondering why do we bother keeping such old correspondence. Then I looked at who sent it and immediately thought: Could it be? Could it be THE Sinclair Lewis? The Nobel Prize laureate for literature? Not a chance, I thought, and filed it away. But it was…
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MASSACRE AT MYSTIC
Now that Thanksgiving is over and today is Native American Heritage Day let’s look at what happened after that peaceful gathering in Plymouth in 1621. During my early years of schooling in Wisconsin, I learned of how Native Americans welcomed new immigrants and taught them to plant corn and catch eel and thus survive in the New World. Relations between the Native Americans and the Puritans appeared to be good and the two co-existed. Fast forward a few chapters in my history book and I learned that Native Americans were being…
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DAY 9. St Charles, Illinois
My grandfather was a Methodist minister and preached in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Idaho, Washington and California. My dad was a deep sea diver and brought the family to Southern California and Alaska. My uncle Carl was a journalist and settled with his family near Chicago. Because of these geographic differences I never got too close with the only first cousins I have – Jennifer, Jeff and Lee. About the last time the whole family got together was in Seattle around 1957 a year before I was born as shown in this…
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THE ELK MOUND TOUR
I was born in Southern California and didn’t move to Wisconsin until I was 10 years old. As a result I always felt like a bit of a foreigner here and that probably explains why I left Wisconsin after finishing university and spent most of my adult life living overseas. What I didn’t know at the time though is that my ancestral roots are very deeply embedded in Wisconsin and my ancestors were some of northern Wisconsin’s original homesteaders. I was keen to get in touch with my Wisconsin roots so…
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CALLING ALL WEBERTS
Grab a map of Germany and find Frankfurt in the centre of the country. Then trace your finger about 100 kilometres northeast and amongst the forests and fields you’ll find the tiny hamlet of Olberode. In 1364 four brothers Adolf, Christian, Frederick and Eckhart cleared land at the site and the village of Olberode was born. Now, 650 years later, Olderode is throwing a big anniversary party and is inviting its lost sons and daughters to return to their ancestral homelands this September. In the mid-1800s emigration fever struck Germany and…
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