Family Heritage

I'm taking an online class over at JessicaSprague.com about creating a family heritage scrapbook. I'm using Ancestry.com to help find long lost relatives. It's an awesome resource, and you can try it for 14 days free. Anyway, I've spent this entire, beautiful Saturday in my jammies working my way back through census reports and ship manifests and Social Security death records. It's completely addicting! I've encountered a few dead ends, but on one branch of Al's family I've found relatives all the way back to pre-Revolutionary War time! Incredible!

I've found out some really interesting things, but the really interesting stuff is what I probably will never know...

• Like my great grandmother Margaret Freise was 17 when she married my great grandfather, who was 32. She was working as a housekeeper for the priest in St. Lucas when she married John Theodore Schmitt. I wonder what circumstances led to her marrying a man almost twice her age.
• Al's great grandmother went by the name Clara, but the ship manifest from her journey from the Netherlands to New York (she rode in steerage) has her name as Klaasje, and her gravestone at the Greenmound Cemetery in Holmen, WI, spells it Klaaske. In census reports it is spelled Klaske, Klaas, and Clara. Thank goodness her husband's name was Geert, which gave some consistency to the records. She arrived in New York in 1889, two years after Geert. Geert worked for two years on a farm near La Crosse, Wisconsin in order to save enough money to bring his fiance over. I wonder how she travelled from New York to Wisconsin, and how she made the transition to life in a new country.
• I always thought I was 100% German, but my great-great grandfather was named Jean (John) Baptiste Blong and he was from Luxembourg. His parents were Jean Piere Blong and Marie Jeanne Lochrohr. I don't know, but it sounds like there may be some French in my blood as well.
• There are some incredible names in our lineage, like Hazeltine "Happy" Perkins, Comfort Turner, Hopestill Holdridge, and Experience Benton.

I wish we had more photos of our great-grandparents, but I was thrilled to be able to put these scrapbook pages together with the photos we do have. I'll keep hoping to fill in the missing spots some day.