13 – Light a Candle

My Grandmother, Marie, was a staunch Catholic, and must have lit many candles in church, praying to keep her son safe overseas during the last year of World War II; it was not to be. Harry Jr. died during Operation Varsity, on March 24, 1945, just 6 weeks and 3 days before the Nazi surrender on May 8. A paratrooper captain, he had jumped with his men into Germany, in the vicinity of Wesel, just across the Rhine. 

The Wilms family, living in Beek, 20 kilometers from the Netherlands American Cemetery outside Maastricht on the Belgium border, adopted Harry's grave there where he was first buried. The cemetery, the only American military cemetery in the Netherlands, had been created in November 1944 when the American forces pushed into the Netherlands from France and Belgium:

"Unique to the cemetery is the connection with the Dutch people. Since 1945 members of the local community have adopted the grave sites of our fallen. They bring flowers to the cemetery and research the life of the service member as a way to honor their sacrifice."

The Wilms family must have sent this photo taken in 1944 when they contacted Harry's widow Kay about their having adopted Harry's grave:

This map from the brochure for the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial shows the site of the cemetery in relation to the WWII battles; Harry died in the drop over the Rhine near Wesel in the upper right corner of the map:

In early 1949 Harry's body was exhumed and flown home to be reburied at West Point. This photo was mailed to Kay from the Netherlands, in 1949, just prior to his body being moved; the girl, Yvonne, looks like the youngest of the Wilms' daughters: 

Harry was given a full military funeral, and buried at West Point on April 15. The funeral service was done by a Protestant minister in accordance with the wishes of Kay: Harry had fallen out of his Catholic faith during his time at West Point.

The Wilms family and Marie stayed in touch. We have a 1951 letter from the family, living at Prins Mauritslaan 22, Beek, Netherlands, 22 km from the cemetery in Margraten. They thanked Marie for the package she had sent, including clothing (probably from my Aunt Pat, Harry's younger sister) that their daughters could use without alteration; the letter notes the hard times in Europe in the post-war rebuilding period:

"We've started our new business just in time as every thing has become so expensive and especially building materials are so dear that we couldn't have afford[ed] it any more now. Sugar, butter, wool and many other materials became so expensive that most people are not able to buy them if they won't get higher wages very soon. Besides taxes are terrible high too. But we must struggle on of course and see if we can make it. Many people do emigrate to the states, Canada, Australia. We had better not do such a thing as I myself don't like it."

In the 1970s, Ron, one of their grandchildren in his late teens, visited the U.S., and stayed with Marie in Wisconsin, my parents in Illinois, and me out in California. In 1979 I visited the Netherlands as part of a 2-month trip to Europe with my bike, and Ron showed me around the country for a week, visiting parents, uncles, brothers, aunts. We have kept in touch sporadically. I hope to visit the Wesel site and Margraten someday, as well as West Point – keeping a candle burning a while longer for Harry.

Sources

“Netherlands American Cemetery | American Battle Monuments Commission.”  January 1, 1960. Accessed 30 Mar 2023. 

"Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial." Brochure accessed via link at the above site.

“Netherlands American Cemetery.” 2023. In Wikipedia. Accessed 30 Mar 2023. 

12 – Membership

For this week's theme I wrote another story about my Uncle Harry...

We have a first picture of Harry in a uniform at age 7; I haven't found that he was a member of any scouting organization at that age, so it was probably dress up. It is clear that he liked uniforms from a young age.

Age 7 in Milwaukee; age 15 as Eagle Scout; West Point Cadet

Harry joined the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization sometime in the early 1930's. BSA had been founded just a couple decades before, in 1910, inspired by a similar organization in England.

"Created in 1910 during the Progressive Era the Boy Scouts of America was a civic reform, middle-class, professional organization intent on building the characters of America's juvenile boys, believing that America's transformation from a rural and small town culture to an urban society had removed some of the traditional character building opportunities from the boy's normal daily routine." [Phillips, pg. 1]

Harry became an Eagle Scout November 30, 1936, a few months shy of turning 15.

Harry, member of Fond du Lac Troop 5

Harry had 22 merit badges out of a total of about 100 possible at that time; 21 were required to become an Eagle Scout. His were pioneering, swimming, public health, personal health, stamp collecting, civics, first aid, reading, athletics, first aid to animals, pathfinding, safety, animal industry, reptile study, aviation, scholarship, wood carving, bird study, leathercraft, life saving, cooking, and camping. The process of becoming an Eagle scout surely helped him on his application to West Point, and later when he was in the army.

In 1937 Harry took a train from Fond du Lac to Washington, D.C. to attend the first National Boy Scout Jamboree held there from June 30 through July 9. The 12 July 1937 edition of Time magazine ran a long article about the jamboree: about 25,000 boys camped out in Potomac Park north and south of the Tidal basin for 10 days, most coming by train to the event. Delayed 2 years due to a polio outbreak, this was the first national gathering of members, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the organization. It had to be quite the adventure for a 15-year-old boy!

Harry on the train to Washington, with friend Bill Korrer

Harry also attended summer camp for eagle scouts, and remained active in the organization. A January 22, 1939 article notes that he was an assistant scoutmaster for a new St. Joseph's Church-sponsored troop 48 in Fond du Lac, shortly before he would head off to the University of Wisconsin, Madison for a first year of school. 

The idea of membership begs the question "who was excluded?" There were black scouting troops early on, but integration came much later. Girls had their own organization, and both excluded gays, and the openly non-religious. 

The Boy Scouts is now, of course, fully integrated, and accepts both boys and girls. Troops may still exclude the openly agnostic or atheistic from membership. Until 2015 there were restrictions on gay membership. Current membership policy states: 

"It is the philosophy of Scouting to welcome all eligible youth, regardless of race, ethnic background, gender or orientation, who are willing to accept Scouting’s values and meet any other requirements of membership." [BSA]

Harry died on a battlefield in Germany, less than 9 years after he became an Eagle Scout. His life and service was honored by the local organization after World War II ended.

Sources

Phillips, John Calvin (2001). Selling America: the Boy Scouts of America in the Progressive Era, 1910–1921 (PDF) (Thesis). University of Maine. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 10, 2008. Retrieved Mar 28, 2023.

Time. 1937. “SCOUTS: National Jamboree,” July 12, 1937.

“Membership Policy.” Boy Scouts of America. Accessed March 21, 2023.

11 Lucky

I talk about the idea of luck, and magical creatures, and my third-great-grandmother who emigrated from Sweden in 1853...

We can look back on our ancestry and label different people "lucky" or "unlucky" based on their longevity, the survival rate of their children, other "good" or "bad" things that they experienced and that were captured in records. There is also the general luck of the genes you inherit, and the place and period in which you were born. So there is always the question of luck or chance; what is important is how you play the odds, and how you respond once you've placed your bets. Feeling "lucky" might boost your confidence, but luck is not really something you should count on.

Christina Larsdotter, my third-great grandmother, was born in late spring 1814, the second of six children born to the tenant farmer Lars Nilsson and his wife Anna Nilsdotter, on Hälltorp farm near Grythyttan in Värmland, Sweden. She emigrated to America at the age of 39 in 1853, along with a husband and 6 children. She lived to the age of 86, dying in 1901, leaving behind 40 grandchildren and 42 great-grandchildren.

We only have a couple photos of her, in her later years; this one captured Christina perhaps the best. It was probably taken in the 1890's, the decade before her death: 

Christina Larsdotter Johnson, 1814-1901

Christina was lucky to live so long. Her first husband, several children, and grandchildren died of tuberculosis at early ages. The life expectancy in Sweden when Christina was born was only about 36, about 20 years shorter than the life expectancy today in the world's poorest countries. So given that Christina was born in a time and place with so little opportunity compared to now, she certainly beat the odds.

My mother gathered various family stories into a book, and one chapter was about our Swedish heritage (her mother was a second generation Swede), and included some stories passed down about Christina.

According to family lore, Christina was a bit superstitious, and felt that she could prevent certain events by being proactive:  

"One of her descendants who knew her has written that Christina always slept with an old razor under the bed spring to keep nightmares away."

She also believed in magical creatures. She told her children and grandchildren a story about riding in a cart pulled by oxen back in Sweden:

"As Christina was riding along, one wheel came off. She said an imp or bad man had come out of the cliff and stolen the pin. She was resourceful and took her knife out of her pocket, whittled a new pin, put the wheel on and went merrily on her way."

This is a different world view: unexplained things happen not because of luck, but because of other agents, and it's up to you to respond appropriately. Perhaps it was easier to be able to turn luck into a being with whom you might struggle a bit in life than having to deal with random chance. 

Two weeks ago upon leaving the grocery store I found a rear tire on my car almost flat. I know I must have run over some nail or other object by chance, and that it wasn't a puncture made by some hidden elf. I was able to change the tire for the spare, and found a tire store a few blocks away that patched the tire for free. I guess I was a bit lucky, and I did have the satisfaction of responding to that chance situation successfully, but maybe it would have been more satisfying if it had been an imp?

Sources:

“Spirits, Trolls, Elves and ‘Näcken’ – Discover Sweden’s Mythological Creatures.” 2023. Visit Sweden. 2023. https://visitsweden.com/what-to-do/culture-history-and-art/culture/mythological-creatures/.

Kenyon, Shirley. n.d. “Our Swedish History.” In Knaus Family Stories: A Compilation of Stories Told by the Offspring of Dan and Lillian Knaus, 1st ed., 166.

10 Translation

 I enjoy going page by page through an old German church book, tracing families through baptisms, marriages, and deaths, back into the murky past of my ancestry. How did I get here? I trace my start to a meeting with Lewis Bunker Rohrbach in Switzerland...

The old Swiss farmhouse at Paradiesweg 5, Worb where I met Lewis

In 2008 I had just started my family research, first trying to learn a little about the Swedes in my heritage, then branching out a bit to my Swiss and then to my wife's Scottish heritage. I knew I had an interest in my ancestry, but I did not think of genealogy as a hobby. Tracie, our eldest, had just married, and my wife and I had planned a trip to Europe with our son Travis who had just graduated high school. Our middle child, Cristin, was going to be in Europe already, and we planned to meet up midway on our trip, in Geneva.

Using family heritage as a bit of a guide, we had selected Scotland, Switzerland, and Sweden as destinations, and planned to spend a week in each, and so I prepped to visit different family heritage sites in each of these countries. My Swiss great-grandmother Eliza Greub had come to Colorado from Lotzwil, Switzerland according to family stories, and her mother was from Koppigen, and so we planned a couple days in that area, staying in a hotel in Solothurn, after visits in Geneva and Gruyères.

I didn't know much about our Swiss, and so I had arranged for a visit to a genealogy office in Worb (found with an Internet search) set up by an American named Lewis Rohrbach, where I hoped to pick up some helpful information, including a couple CDs filled with church book record images from Lotzwil and Koppigen. And so I showed up at 10 am at the Genealogie Zentrum Worb, home of SwissGenealogy.com on Tuesday, July 29, 2008, with my son Travis, after dropping my wife and daughter off at a laundromat in Bern – they were not interested that much in genealogy, and almost 2 weeks into our trip, we did need to get some things laundered. Lewis Rohrbach met us when we arrived; the center was a renovated old Swiss farmhouse. 

Travis recorded that visit, and this week I listened to that recording again. I really knew nothing at this point about German church books, yet Mr. Rohrbach spent an hour and a half going over all the basics I would need to get started, patient to a fault. He explained how to navigate the CDs, how Swiss church books were organized, the idea of Heimat or home town citizenship, etc. He patiently answered my questions on emigration, sources I would find useful, and showed me how to look up my towns and ancestors in those sources. Lewis was analytical like me, and the time flew by quickly. He stated his opinions plainly: e.g., 

"There are no good histories of Switzerland... there are some general histories of Switzerland, but Switzerland is not large enough for people to have done much - in English." 

Re-reading his book "Guide to Swiss Genealogical Research," I can imagine him talking that day. I finally had to beg off, so we could get back to rescue my wife and daughter at the laundromat in Bern.

In the fall I started going through those CDs, trying to capture some of the writing examples in letter tables that I could use as a reference. I had learned to speak a little German 25 years earlier, but had never really encountered the old script found in German language church books. I printed out a set of blank alphabet charts, and when encountering a new minister's handwriting, found examples of each letter and wrote them myself in the blank templates until I got the basic feel for that person's writing.

Here is one of the first records I found and translated, the baptism of my great-great-grandfather Rudolph Greub in 1824. The handwriting is clear and consistent, some of the best you might encounter. Even so, when I first translated it, I missed many of the words, but they are all clear to me today after years of practice: 

Lewis Rohrbach died 2 January 2016. I liked this quote from the obituary written by his wife posted on the Amherst College website: "A few months before his death, knowing that he was working against time, he wrote to a friend, 'There is something simply magical about being about to go into old German from the 1500s and 1600s which has never been transcribed much less translated, and solving problems.'" I would agree: thanks Mr. Rohrbach!

More on translation:

To get a basic idea of the characters you are looking for, an alphabet chart makes a good start: just Google the term "German script chart." It is impressive how varied the writing of a letter can be. Here is just the letter "g" from Kenneth Smith's "German Church Books":

Lewis Rohrbach recommended Smith's book which is also a good source for figuring out how to traverse a church book in search of a family. Unfortunately these Picton Press books are out of print, so you need to look for a used copy:

After I got familiar with transcription and looking through church books, the source I found most valuable for translation was Ernest Thode's "German - English Genealogical Dictionary," an amazingly complete dictionary of words you might encounter in these records.

The Murkier Past

The records in the 1800s are pretty clear, and have a decent amount of information. Going back into the 1700s, the records can become harder to read. This continues until the records no longer exist; for Switzerland the earliest records are in the 1500s and 1600s. In birth records, sometimes the mother's name is omitted, or just her given name is captured. The script becomes harder to decipher, more Latin is found, and the spelling of surnames can change.

Here is a baptism from 1618, in Koppigen, "24. Octob. ein Kind touft heist Durs. Parentis: Hans Affolter, Margreth Hinger. Zeugen: Hans Mülitaler, Michel Sÿber, Barbara Mathis". The Family Search family tree currently says this is the baptism of my 8-times great-grandfather Durs Affolter to my 9th-great-grandparents Hans Affolter and Margaretha Hinder, but I haven't verified all the generations back myself yet. As you can see, the handwriting is quite a bit different than the 1824 record!

 

Today, general information on getting started on Swiss genealogy is easily found on the Internet. For example, the familysearch.org wiki has a number of online videos, and pointers to online records. Local information is available in books, but typically not in English. And there are many online forums where you can get help with translation. I guess that at some point in the not too distant future, all this information will be available already translated into whatever language you would like!

09 Gone Too Soon

 The theme "gone too soon" makes me think about young people dying in wars, childhood deaths, and all the mothers and fathers I have encountered in my genealogy work who died well before their children grew to adulthood.  Today I write about one of those mothers, my great-great-grandmother on my maternal line, Carolina Nilsdotter.

I imagine a play, a tragedy. The setting: 1853, Sweden. Enter stage right, Carolina, now a 10-year-old red-headed girl, her two older sisters Maria Lena and Anna Christine, a younger half-sister Charlotte and two half-brothers Lars Frederick and Carl Johan, her mother Christina ("Sara" in this record) and step-father Karl Johnson. They are packed and ready for their journey to America. Another companion: a small microbe that today we call Mycobacterium tuberculosis... 

The family arrives in Boston after months sailing on the ocean, heads to Chicago by rail, and lives there 2 years before settling in Geneseo, in western Illinois. Carolina matures over the next 4 years, and marries Lars Johnson at age 16; he is 34. We only have one photo of Carolina – photography was still pretty rare then – perhaps taken for her wedding when she was 16, or somewhat later:

Carolina and Lars have 8 children over then next 13 years; 3 die as infants (at 6 months, 5 months, and 2 weeks). And then tuberculosis (TB) takes Carolina's life, the first of October, 1872, leaving behind 5 motherless children: Lottie (my great-grandmother) 12, Sophie 10, Mary 7, Anna 3 1/2, and Lars Fredrick 2 months. Carolina is buried alongside her older sister Anna who died of TB just 6 years earlier at age 26.

A family story, as told by my second cousin Linda, provides a good illustration of what followed:

"At that point 4 year-old Anna went to live with her mother's half brother, Fred Johnson and his wife, while the three elder girls, Lottie, Sophie and Mary, tended their baby brother. The girls would take turns staying home from school, and would wash their school dress and Fred's baby things on the day home. Supposedly, 8 year-old  Mary got bored one day and took baby Fred up on the roof: she climbed onto the coal bin, onto the shanty (back porch), then on to the roof of the one story kitchen, then up to the two story part. Supposedly a neighbor who was driving by saw her and Fred on the roof. He thereupon tied up his team, climbed up onto the roof, took the baby and helped Mary down. He told Mary to never do that again. According to Johnson family narrative, this showed that these children needed a mother." 

Here are the oldest three daughters Sophie, Mary, and Lottie, in their mid- to late- teens: 

Their father Lars did remarry, almost 2 years after Carolina's death, to Christina Andersdotter, a 21-year-old woman with a young child, and ended up fathering 8 more children before he himself succumbed to TB at age 66. Carolina's 5 children managed to survive childhood and marry; this photo shows them together as young adults:

Both Sophie and Lottie (my great-grandmother) also died of TB, at ages 41 and 44. Sophie left a family of 3 young children; Lottie left behind 6 children, including my grandmother Lillian who was 15. Lottie's husband died of TB just 6 years after that. 

After moving to Colorado and marrying my grandfather Dan Knaus, Lillian made sure the family slept with the windows open, even in wintertime. My grandmother never knew her grandmother, but she did know tuberculosis. The disease killed a sister, both her parents, an aunt, three grandparents, a great-aunt, as well as other ancestors back in Sweden. 

A little more on TB...

It would be nice to be able to say that tuberculosis is a disease of the past, but it is unfortunately still with us today, killing 1 1/2 million people each year, and infecting millions more. It has been with us since history was first recorded, and yet it would be possible to eradicate it with a strong international effort, given the political will. Here are a few sources I found interesting:

Geiter, Lawrence. 2000. Ending Neglect: The Elimination of Tuberculosis in the United States. United Kingdom: National Academies Press. This can be previewed here on Google Books. 

“Global Tuberculosis Report.” 2022. Geneva: World Health organization. https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2022. Current state of TB in the world. Eradication efforts, and set backs due to Covid pandemic.

Leão, Silvia Cardoso et al. 2007. “Chapter 1: History.” In Tuberculosis 2007. https://tuberculosistextbook.com/tb/history.htm. Comprehensive online text book. Good section on history of the disease.

“Questions and Answers about Tuberculosis.” 2021. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/faqs/pdfs/qa.pdf.

“Tuberculosis.” 2023. World Health Organization. 2023. https://www.who.int/health-topics/tuberculosis.

“Tuberculosis (TB).” 2022. American Lung Association. 2022. https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/tuberculosis. The American Lung Association was actually founded in 1904 as the “National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis” to fight TB, changing to its present name in 1973.