I’ve spent quite a bit of time today with my mom looking at family letters, journals, pictures and memorabilia. I am very confused and totally impressed with anyone who spends more than half an hour studying genealogy. Think of it this way – most of us know who our parents are. That’s two people. A lot of us know or have known one or both of our sets of grandparents. It’s not too hard yet – that’s just six people all together. A few of us knew great-grandparents, or heard about them from people who knew them. We’ve just added eight more people to the mix, fourteen to keep track of. Still with me? Now maybe you get married and have children. Those poor kids have double that number to figure out because you’ve just joined them to another line of your spouse’s ancestry. And that number doubles every time you go back another generation. We haven’t said anything about aunts, uncles or cousins yet either.

And ancestors can really confuse you if they happened to have more than one marriage. Also in the past, people didn’t have a lot of imagination in naming their kids, or they were too busy, or something. They just kept picking the same names that their father or uncle or sister or brother had. So every generation had repeats with a number behind the name. (If you care about genealogy, pick a unique name for your child, please.)

I’ve about decided that I’m not going to get it all straight. I’m just going to remember some of the neat stories. For instance, one of my ancestors (George Boone III, poor guy) came over from England and enjoyed dabbling in real estate. He was the original owner of the tract of land in Maryland that became Washington, D.C. and in fact, Georgetown is named after him. There is even a plaque in the city that says so. Pretty cool, huh? Yes, there was also a George IV,

Another of my ancestors named Squire Boone (and I have to hand it to his parents for thinking of a name I certainly wouldn’t have thought of) had two sons, Edward and Daniel. He lived in Kentucky and yes they did have coonskin caps. Edward was my ancestor, but he was killed by Indians and his brother Daniel helped raise his children. I haven’t figured out how many “greats” I have to attach to it, but Daniel Boone was some kind of an uncle of mine.

There’s lots more and the really great thing is that so many of my ancestors were the bloggers of their day. They wrote journals, they were newspaper reporters and writers of one sort or another. Many were school teachers or ministers which gave them a familiarity with writing and an appreciation of family histories. One of “my people” sat in a tent one night during the Civil War and put down his thoughts in a poem and we have it today.

My great aunt Esther was one of the historians for our family on my mother’s side. In spite of the fact that she wrote a lot of her notes on napkins, and lost pages of letters all the time, she did have a large collection of family history that she passed on to my mom. That’s the material we are sorting through. My mom has compiled a two volume history from most of the writings but what do we do with those precious originals? I want to thank my ancestors for writing about their ordinary lives, which, turns out for some of them, were pretty extraordinary. If this makes you want to start a journal, I’m sayin’ just do it!

Do you have an interesting story in your family history? Tell it to me, please.

Round Lake

July 20, 2013May 20, 2014 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

I grew up on a small farm in northern Wisconsin – a place where nature is not all that friendly to farmers. Summers are short and cool, winters ~~are~~ seem endless with lots of snow and cold weather. The area is kept alive by tourism and is a playground for hunters, fishermen, outdoor sports enthusiasts and others who just want to get away from the larger cities in Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota. I is a land of lakes and I have been on many of them, but my favorite is Round Lake. Others will say the same.

A road winds past my childhood home, around a small pond and climbs a wooded hill. I spent a lot of time looking at that hill from the front yard and from my second story bedroom window. At some early point I must have seen some people on horseback riding up the hill at a gallop because I recollect a romantic notion of there being a castle up there waiting for knights to arrive on their steeds. My family later became friends with the people on the hill since they had children close to our ages. The hill became Kendall’s Hill and we also came to know their cousins who did indeed visit them on horseback.

For some reason today I started thinking about that hill and the nearby geography and wondered why I had never thought of it in the bigger picture before. The centerpiece of it, to me, is a beautiful, deep, spring fed lake with a very unimaginative name – Round Lake. Parts of it might be kind of round, but I would never have named it that. In many places it has a very rugged, high and steep coastline. People owning those pieces of lakeshore have their log cabins that we can see through the pine trees and long stairs zig zagging down the bank to their boatdocks.

There is another outstanding feature of the lake and that is a peninsula of high ground that circles out into the lake and back toward the shore. It had to have been connected at one time because there is a sand bar across the narrow space where it doesn’t connect. It has to be dredged for boats to safely cross into Hinton Bay. Hinton Bay, by the way, is almost perfectly round and maybe that’s the part someone was looking at when they named the lake. I would love to know what kind of geologic activity has gone on to form this lake, and its surrounding hills. I know there was a lot of glacial activity that gouged out some pretty crazy river beds and valleys and left a lot of rocks of various sizes. Once I found a fairly large Lake Superior red agate in the lake so I’m suspecting a relationship with the Great Lakes chain.

But there are also some fairly flat lands where people have attempted to farm, as my family did. The pond between my house and the hill had a couple of springs that were probably fed from the same underground reservoir that feeds the lake. We children who skated on the pond in the winter were always afraid to go too near those places we could tell had frozen over last. The pond has gradually become more marshy and filled in with sediment – it may disappear someday but I probably won’t be alive to see it.

Last month I visited the hill and took another one of many pictures, looking out over the pond to my old home. I’m always hit with nostalgia at the view. What a privilege it was to grow up in such a beautiful place. I spent many years drinking that clear, cold well water and eating food grown in that soil so it’s pretty safe to say it is in my bones. I will always be “from” Round Lake and Hayward, Wisconsin.

my old home from the castle on the hill

Reader, blogger, and essayist Andrea Badgley is collecting “Show Us Your State” stories for her Andrea Reads America website. Submission guidelines are here if you would like to participate.

Old Jed

February 29, 2012 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

On this pleasant day off from work I went to see my aunt and uncle who live a short walk away during the winter. Auntie Irene is my father’s sister and has always been one of my favorites along with her whole family – Uncle Bob, cousins Mark, Robin and Todd. They would visit regularly when I was growing up. Their summer vacation was usually spent in Hayward at Grandma’s house and the Round Lake beach. I did a lot of water skiing behind Uncle Bob’s boat, although he loved to scare me by pulling me faster than I wanted to go and heading for the choppiest part of the water to see if I’d fall.

So we were talking and looking at some pictures, one of which was of a big rock in California with a plaque on it memorializing Jedediah Smith. My cousin Todd is posing by the rock. Turns out Jed is one of our Smith ancestors and his claim to fame is the discovery of a route west to California prior to Lewis and Clarke. Somehow L and C got credit but evidently books have been written since acknowledging Jedediah Smith with an earlier route. I have been aware of well known ancestors on my mother’s side of the family, the Boones, but this is the first I’ve known that anyone has traced the Smiths back to someone like this. So now I need to find the books and find out what is known about Jedediah. Auntie Irene says he died young, killed by hostile Indians.

Geneology also shows that we Smiths are related to a family named Bunker. They owned the land on which the battle of Bunker Hill was fought. When you think how hard it is today to make some kind of mark on the world that is remembered at all, it is kind of special to have a family history of memorable characters. We should know about these people. I think it would give us a sense of who we are, who we could be to know who we came from.

Last year for his birthday I had framed for Dennis the roster showing his ancestor Abraham Starr as a soldier in the Civil War. It gives information about the whole company, the battles that they participated in, shows that he was twice wounded and honorably discharged. It has colorful pictures on it and, unfortunately, numerous holes that the mice and moths have made in the paper over the years. Nevertheless an interesting piece of history – and now preserved behind special glass on acid free paper for future generations should they be interested.

I’m in the stage of life where I have occasions to listen to the stories of the generation ahead of me and wish that they were recorded. I can only remember bits and pieces of what I hear. And I wonder what I will have to tell when I’m the oldest generation alive. I spend so much time thinking about mundane things concerning the here and now – it actually feels eerie to think about people much like me who lived and have been gone for hundreds of years who are responsible for my being alive. There are so many stories out there that have never been told…

All for today… back to the here and now.