More on Albert and Jay

Here's Albert and Jay in 1901, with their sisters.  The oldest sister is my great-grandma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's another of their military photos:

Kep, this one may be of some interest to you.

 

And here's their daddy's (and my great-great grandpa's) military headstone.  My grandpa Charles served in the Civil War.

 

For those of you who do genealogy research, please appreciate the difficulty of researching the last name of White!  As they say about Pokemon, "Gotta catch 'em all!"

I have, in fact, collected data on nearly every White family in the counties and states where my own ancestors lived in the 17 & 18 hundreds.

Veterans

These are my uncles, Albert and Jay.  Photo was taken in 1907.  They enlisted together.  However, Albert was told that he could not enlist with his brother.  So he left the line of volunteers, and rejoined the line at the rear, and used the last name of some family friends instead of his own last name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are some photos of my uncles' military days:

 

My grandparents

The first of my immigrant grandpas was William.  He came to Massachusetts from Scrooby, Nottinghamshire via Leiden, Netherlands in 1620.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mosmd/leaders.htm

Shortly after William arrived, my grandpa, Christian, (a Mennonite) came to Pennsylvania, where he died 4 years before the American Revolution.

Right around the time Christian died, my grandpa, Aaron, also arrived in Pennsylvania.  When the War broke out, he migrated to Canada because this branch of my family favored the King.  They returned to the U.S. a couple decades before the American Civil War, in which they fought for the Union.

At about the same time Aaron's descendents returned from Canada, two grandpas, Pieter and Johann, came to Michigan from the Netherlands.

My most recent immigrant grandpa, Johan, brought his son, my grandpa Wilhelm, to America so that Wilhelm would not have to serve in the German military.  Johan was, according to family verbal history, the illegitimate son of Wilhelm I of Prussia.

None of these grandpas ever knew each other, but their children were all living in Michigan and eventually produced my two parents.

 

I have been studying genealogy, and history.  Unraveling riddles from my childhood.  Some day, when I have finished my research, and found my voice, I hope to write about those riddles.

     

Zuiderzee

"Take me down to the banks of the ocean, where the walls rise above the Zuiderzee.  Long ago, I used to be a young man; and Margaret still remembers that for me." 

 

from "The Dutchman"
by Robert James Waller
(a song I have tried to add to MyMusic, without success)

http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/history/zuiderzee/zuiderzee.html

http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/second_world_war/clip/11425/

What this younger generation needs is

OUR BLESSING!

Rani Kaye

Genealogy/Humanity

Here's what I've got to say:

Every man, woman, and child alive today "found grace in the eyes of the LORD" in our 95th great-grandfather, Noah.

And Christ died for ALL of us.

See Genesis chapter 6

See the New Testament

"Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another"  Romans 14:19 KJV

We are ALL cousins.  Be good to your family.

Rani Kaye

When I Wasn't Blogging

What have I been doing when I wasn't blogging?

There were quirky computer problems, stuff you couldn't quite get a handle on, and maybe it was just a matter of not enough RAM for the way we live.

Around about the end of January, I just quit trying.  I had a subscription to ancestry.com, and I quit using that, too ... and when it came up for renewal, I didn't renew it.

Meanwhile, my youngest son (he'll be 18 on Reformation Day) got "Smallville Season 1" for Christmas.  Smallville's a TV show about Clark Kent (Superman) as a teenager. Here's their MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/smallville

After we finished watching Season 1, we borrowed Seasons 2 & 3 at the library.  Early this spring Circuit City put seasons 2-4 on sale and we bought them and watched again, then bought Season 5 at Meijer and then Season 6 at Target.

This Summer we watched all the way through Seasons 1-6 AGAIN.

September 9th Season 7 was released on DVD.  Youngest son pre-ordered it at Best Buy, and picked it up that day after he reported for U.S. Navy DEP.

Youngest son is in the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) for the U. S. Navy.  That is another problem we solved this summer -- how to pay for college.

Youngest son also installed more RAM (80 gig, I think) in my laptop computer in August, and he also built for himself (but I get to use it too) this incredibly fast screamin' machine I am blogging from in front of our new 40" HDTV.

 

So, I'm back with ancestry.com now and I have reconnected with my cousins and discovered a mess of new info.  Plus, youngest son had to go get permission to join the Navy signature from my ex, whom we hadn't seen in like 7 years, and I got from him the genealogy his grandfather had typed from his research in the Netherlands in the 1950s, and I posted all that at ancestry.com.

And we watched Smallville Season 8 Episode 1 on TV this past Thursday night.  Smallville is awesome in HD

And youngest son is back in school, a Senior, taking Physics and Phys. Ed, among other things.

 

 

 

And I'm back heavy into genealogy, and just beginning to blog again, and happy as a clam at high tide (or is it low tide -- I can never remember which is the way that saying goes).

So that's the story.

I'm back.

How NOT to Prune the Family Tree

 

Genealogy Research Success Story

 

 

Second cousins, three times removed.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Does anybody know the author of this poem?

I found a handwritten copy of this poem in a shoebox belonging to a 91 year old cousin:

On the banks of Allan Water
When brown autumn spread its store;
There I saw the Miller's daughter
But she smiled no more.

For the summer grief has brought her,
And the soldier false was he;
On the banks of Allan Water,
None as sad as she.

Rani Kaye

A MySpace friend sent me a message telling me the name of this poem is "The Banks of Allan Water," and the author was Matthew Gregory Lewis. Posted by Rani Kaye on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 10:05 PM

Mayflower Connection

I drew this picture in 1973 when I was 20 years old and working as a secretary at a downtown mission.

It just seemed a lonely spot, and for some reason it drew my attention.

What I did not know when I drew the picture ...

Did not find out until I was doing genealogy research at the public library in 2006 ...

Is that this is where my mother's father fell to his death from a scaffolding ... many, many long years before I was even born.

He was an artist, I've been told.

His father was a preacher.

His 9th great-grandfather was William Brewster -- the man who wrote the Mayflower Compact.

God bless you, Grandpa