One of the very interesting aspects of using "Blogger" is the ability to track the number of "hits" my page has online as well as the wide variety of web browsers that are used. One of the first things I took into consideration before even posting for the very first time (May 19, 2011) was the fact that once that "publish" tab is clicked, my words and thoughts are out there circulating on the "world wide web" for anyone and their brother to see. In a way, it's kind of a concerning thought and because of that concern, I do try to be careful as to what I say in each of my posts. But as I have learned just recently, sometimes some very unexpected things happen when you write a blog and when you least expect it, opportunities arise that you would never have dreamt of.
On December 6th of last year, I wrote a post called "The 100 Thing Challenge". It had to do with the concept of downsizing your life to the point of whittling your possessions down to the 100 most essential and important things in your life. It puts the whole notion of "simplifying' on the front burner. Towards the end of the blog, I used the example of my great-grandmother who came here to the New World as a 17-year old young woman from Bremerhaven, Germany in the 1860's. Everything that she brought with her fit into a medium size steamer trunk and with those meager possessions, Christina Billhardt Schilling began a new life in America.
Hey, I didn't think anything out of the ordinary would come from that posting, now 7 months ago. I just hoped that people would read it and give some thought to all of their possessions. With luck, they might even ask themselves the questions, "What are the things that I could never part with? What kind of stuff might I easily live without?" I expected nothing more than that. But as of 5 days ago, that post was read for the very first time by someone who unknowingly found a connection between herself and me.
Out in the Denver, Colorado area, a woman named Diane was researching online for some information about her great-grandmother. When she typed in the name "Christina Billhardt Schilling" the first site that popped up online was my December blog post in which I used my great-grandmother as an example. A few days ago, an email message came to me from Diane, explaining that she had just read the blog post "The 100 Thing Challenge" and wanted to tell me that both she and I shared a common great-grandmother. In other words, I found a second cousin that I never even knew I had.
As I write this blog post, I'm getting "goose bumps". For me, the idea of having family members all over creation that I would have never met, is something I hadn't even considered. My Great-Grandmother Schilling died of a stroke in 1953, 2 years before my own birth. I had only heard stories of her~our "German grandmother" who came here to America and started a new life as a very young woman. Christina's first born child, a daughter named Catherine Schilling Brown, would later become my grandmother.
When my Grandmother Brown passed away in 1997 at the age of 105, I thought that I knew about as much family history as anyone could have learned. Little did I know that a woman living not even that far away from my home here in south central Kansas had a close connection with my life. And the sobering and often forgotten fact is this~the blood of my great-grandmother flows through the both of us, Diane and I, two of her many great-granddaughters.
Many of you reading this post have probably done some research on your family's history. Genealogy, or the construction of your own "family tree", is an exciting and very worthwhile hobby for folks to take part in. Preserving important facts about your family's ancestors and the descendants that followed them can reap amazing rewards down the line. It can be a time consuming project and certainly one that requires a great deal of patience and planning. I have known people who searched for many months just to find the correct date of death for one of their grandparents. Each little bit of information is important and accuracy is of the essence. I encourage you to learn as much as you can about your family's history~it's actually kind of fun to do!
Over the years as I have worked on our family tree, I have learned the importance of collecting as much accurate data as is possible. While my mom and grandmother were still living, I asked as many questions of them as I could think of in order to learn all about the people who came here before me. They both helped me to identify the subjects of old family photographs and where they were taken. I saved old letters and postcards that my grandmother had received because of the great value they had in explaining our family's life here. Some of you already know that I am a collector of obituaries (I can only imagine yourselves saying, "Geesch, I never met one of THOSE kind of people before!) as well as the customary "funeral" notice that people are given as they attend services for friends/family members and that "buried" (no pun intended) deep in my bedroom closet is an old box containing at last count 200 death notices for family or acquaintances of mine. (Holy Moly, that's the longest sentence that I've ever written~English majors, my apologies.) These things are a written record also of life yet, once again, while working on your family tree, you must hope that all of the information contained therein was accurate. A couple of years back, I finally told me kids about my "collection". I didn't want to them to find it after I had died and wonder what the heck their mom was keeping it for!
You know, as I think back to the beginnings of my own interest in genealogy, I am so very glad that I learned to "walk" the cemeteries as a young girl. Both my mom and grandmother played a big part in that happening. As I walked through the cemeteries with those two women, I learned a lot of oral history and it forever, to this day, amazed me to learn about how much they knew about each person who was buried there. And lest I forget, they also taught me how to read the grave stones and to use that information to further understand the circumstances of both the life and death of the person whose name was found on the headstone. For instance, when I first saw my Great-Aunt Mary Brown's grave in the old part of the Halstead, Kansas cemetery, I noticed that she had died in 1918 at the same age that I am now, 56 years old. Grandmother told me that Aunt Mary (her sister-in-law) had become very ill with Spanish Influenza and had succumbed to it only a short time after coming down with it. The year 1918 was the beginning of the epidemic that claimed 3% of the world's population and my Great-Aunt Mary was a part of that ill-fated group of people.
And while we are on the subject of "graves", there is a great spot online called "Find a Grave". (www.findagrave.com) If you have never seen this particular page, it is well worth the time to go there, especially if you are interested inlearning more about your family's history. At present there are over 81,000,000 records there with photos of the grave and marker as well as the cemetery plus other items of information that are helpful to know about the deceased. As you view the site, you have the ability to leave messages there for family members to view as well as provide more information about your family member or friend's death. I stumbled upon it accidentally one day and after I saw what it was about, I became a very frequent visitor.
I've never entertained the idea of adding to my bucket list journey the thought of further working on my family tree. But after my second cousin's email, I am beginning to think that might not be a bad thing to add to the list some day soon. How about you friends? Have you ever followed your family tree back as far as it could go? If so, I applaud you and commend your fine efforts. I remember thinking (quite smugly) once that I had been able to trace the Brown side of my family back to the Revolutionary War times. Then I met a friend who had done his research clear back to the 1500's. Man, I sure can't top THAT one!
If you haven't begun, who knows? Maybe it's time to give it a try. And friends, even if you have no interest in working on your family tree, you still have the ability to save, in some form or another, a record of the dates of birth and death, marriages, jobs attained and places lived, for your children and grandchildren. That information, kept by you, may be just the information a second cousin down along the line is looking for. And if YOU can provide it, then you have supplied a crucial "leaf" to your own family tree.
I am very anxious to meet Diane some day in the near future. I'm sure that our great-grandmother would be very pleased. And as always in this life, it's important to know where you are heading but it is doubly important to know from whence you came. In the future, some of us reading this will be the "great-grandmothers" or great-grandfathers that someone speaks of. What will they say of us, you and me?
Adolph, Rudolph, Michael, and Albert ca 1940
No comments:
Post a Comment