01 I'd Like to Meet

In these posts are stories mostly about people I've never met, and have only "met" via the records they have left behind. I was drawn to genealogy because these ancestors are all people "I'd like to meet," and genealogy offers me the only chance to do so.

Harry Kenyon, my father's brother, left behind a trove of letters and other artifacts, more than any other relative or ancestor other than my parents. He probably deserves a whole book. His uncle, Louis Kenyon, another great war veteran, also left many letters he mailed home from the war. There will be a number of stories about Harry and Louis, perhaps because there is so much material.

Harry's (and my father's) ancestry is a mix. There are the English, coming to the Americas in the 1600 and 1700s, bearing the Kenyon, Brewer, Allen, and Jones surnames among others, coming from Harry's grandfather Louis Kenyon Sr. There is the Baker-Steinke line out of Posen, contributed by Ida Becker whom Louis married. There is the Gerhard-Steiger line from Limburg and Wiesbaden in Hesse that produced Harry's grandfather Jacob Gerhard, and the separate Justen and Gaetz lines that produced Harry's grandmother Louise Justen. Other than the English, all these paternal lines of mine came to America between 1843 and 1872.

A quarter of my ancestry is Swedish tinged with a bit of Finnish, and comes from my maternal grandmother Lillian Wederquist. I met my second cousin Linda when I was just starting this hobby; she shares my quarter Swedish, has done the genealogy work on this line back to the 1600s, and has been a great role model for me in this field. But since I have had to do so little work in this area, I have few stories of my own, and so you won't see much here in that ancestry quadrant; Linda has those stories sprinkled throughout her Swedish tree – I would love to see her write a book.

The other quarter of my maternal ancestry is split between Swiss, from Canton Bern, and southern Germany, from Schwabia. Both have been a strong focus of my genealogy work and both are inspirations for many of the blog posts you will see here. 

Birthplaces of my Ancestors - 5 Generations

In the last 15 years of my genealogy hobby I've focused on gathering facts and data, leaving the writing to later; this 52Ancestors exercise in 2023 is providing a nice impetus to getting the writing going. It also affords a chance to go over previous research, reviewing and rounding out the research, hopefully improving it as I go. Some of the blogs I did simply because I wanted to do a bit more research in a particular area. And some blogs are about the process, and probably will only interest other genealogists, present and future.

Enjoy!