A Year Ago Today

     A year ago today, we walked out of the vet with Danny and got into the truck.  WWJ was on, and  they ran the announcement of the death of Gord Downie.  We were still in the parking lot.  I knew he had glioblastoma, but as for anyone with the disease, I had hoped he'd be the one to beat it.  My brother didn't, so many haven't, but maybe Gord... 
     In a way, though, he did beat it.  In spite of the disease, the Hip did the Man Machine Poem tour.  He got up there, and while ill, still performed a heck of a show.  My brother couldn't do a fraction  of what Gord did after the same treatment.
     I find myself thinking more about that while taking care of my aunt.  We are almost a year out, depending on how you want to mark time.  I'm there 3 days a week so my cousin can still work, because she can't do family leave act or anything like that.  We could just stick her into a facility again, but she's been nearly killed off multiple times in multiple places because she is oxygen dependent, and the supposedly trained staff doesn't pay attention to whether or not her oxygen is attached.  Awful expensive, too.
     This far in, I'm tired, sick of everything, and ticked at the world (but not my aunt.  It's not her fault.)  I don't see my family to know what is going on.   I don't get to pick the kids up from school.  I had to give up my paid job so my husband could keep his, but I can't do the work I need to do at home, because I'm not home enough.  Then I have to listen to some know-it-all tell me I can't do it.

     "Use it up, use it all up/ Don't save a thing for later."  ("Use it Up", In Violet Light by the Hip)

The things we do for love...

In Search of ..... myself? Part 3

In search of myself...Part 3... or "why I quit 'doing' genealogy."

Sometime before my grandma died in 2009, a post showed up on the old MI-Macomb list about Spallers.  I asked my grandma about them, discovered she had known them from church in Mt. Clemens, and she was able to give information to report back to the person who was stumped looking for her family.  I got chewed out by another member of the list.  "Your grandparents don't know what they are talking about.  That is only hearsay." So on and so forth.   That was the final straw for me.  I deleted everything off of Rootsweb.

Over the years as I have tried to learn more about my family, I have been chastised time and time again by so-called "real" genealogists.  Floating around out there is the wrong birth date for my great-grandma Hummel.  Grandma Hummel and Aunt Annie (whom I remember!) were born Dec 11 and Dec 27, respectively.  When the clerk came around and recorded the births, a few years after the fact, he wrote the dates down wrong (got the years correct).  My grandpa could, and my mother can testify to the trouble that Grandma H and Aunt Annie had straightening that out.  It was fixed before Grandma H died in 1973 but apparently not noted in the early records.  So when I contacted someone who had that info incorrect, I was chewed out because that was hearsay.  Really?  I have her baptism certificate.  She is my great-grandma.  "That isn't really family," I was told and I was supposed to supply some stranger, who never did explain how he was connected to my family, my great-grandma's baptism certificate.

Then I understood.

My grandparents were apprehensive about sharing information much outside of the family.  They told me stories about their grandparents, Grandpa and Grandma Rohrbeck, Grandma Hurttgam, Grandpa and Grandma Saal.  I even heard stories from my grandma about her great-grandparents, Christ and Matilda Ahrens, and even Uncle Alfred's parents and grandparents (that would be the Daus and Schuett families.)  No one -- and I mean NO ONE -- will ever tell me that I am not really related to these people.  So I never got to meet some of them here.  Whatever.  I take care of their graves, yes, even my great-great grandparents' graves are checked, as I learned from my own grandparents.  They are all family.  On July 28, 2018, four out of five of Grandpa and Grandma Saal's children were represented at a family gathering for my great-uncle's 95 birthday.  Because Grandma's aunt married Grandpa's cousin, I had double family there.  There were other parts of the family there, too.

Don't get me started about the warped sense of family in today's society.  I have known too large a family to allow myself to say that my grandparents' cousins aren't really family.

So what am I?  I don't "really" live in my township, as I was told by elected township officials.(Because I live on the border in a cheap house, I'm not really a resident.)  I am neither a Mayflower descendant nor English, nor do I have family that fought in the Civil War, War of 1812, or Revolutionary War, so I'm not "really" an American, in the same sense on not "really" living in my township.  (Yes, I have been told that, too.  Plenty of family in WWI and WWII, however, and even a KIA in WWII.)  On my father's side I am part Moravian (Czech), Irish and the mysterious "German."  I never really grew up knowing that, so is that really part of my identity?  On my mother's side, I am part French, the mysterious "German," sometimes "Prussian"  was written down, and in one case, "Pomerania" was used.  At this point, all I have left is my religion as an identity.  I feel like Philip Nolan, "The Man Without a Country."

In Part 1, I wrote: I suspect that those of Polish descent will be able to sympathize with his story in a way that I cannot, but more about that later.    

I have yet to meet Polish Americans who are lackadaisical about their identities.  There seems to remain a pride in the descendants.  They know they are Polish, and the identity is carried through the generations with the food and customs.  I assume that comes from 200 years of keeping the identity alive when the country wasn't on the maps.  I don't have that.  One great-great-grandfather became an American citizen as soon as he could, the other did not until 1918.  However, I get the "identity crisis," if you will, in A Polish Son.  I understand what drove the writer to go to Poland and search for family.  I would do the same, if I had a distinct country and identity to search.  It is a brave person who opens himself to the criticism of the so-called "real genealogists," and Leonard Kniffel gets my respect for doing so.  

So check out those books.  They're worth the read.  Anything that makes me stop and think this hard is good.  Then again, An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott makes me think this hard.  I like to think.  Even my husband read them, and he's the first one to say he doesn't read books.

I might not know what I am, but I know WHO I am.

http://claraspet.blogspot.com/2009/12/trip-down-quilt-memory-lane.html

In Search of ..... myself? Part 2

Then I asked myself, "Why isn't there ever anything written about us of German descent?"

There are Polish Americans, there are Irish Americans.  Italian Americans.  So on and so forth.  My grandparents, who spoke Low German at home amongst themselves and with a few others well into the 1980s, never fell into being hyphenated Americans.  They were Americans, and they didn't appreciate it being advertised they still spoke Low German, thank you very much!

Of course, two World Wars have something to do with this.  In my church history book I talk about Rev. Justus Lohrmann, Pastor Lohrmann's son who almost stood trial in WWI, down in Southern Illinois.   (The man who was not American enough in WWI lost his son in WWII.  Justus was born in Richmond, Michigan.)  Whenever I would ask questions about the war years, my grandparents refused to talk about the "German" question except to say that one never, ever spoke German except when sure it was safe.  I've also heard the local stories of the farmer of German descent, whose family has been here since the 1830s, and the zealous milkman who dumped out into the ditch "that German milk."  Germans are racists, horrible people, uneducated, unrefined, you name it.  I know, I've heard it -- and gotten the treatment to go with it.  We're still immigrants, 4 and 5 and 6 generations later.

My family ditched "Germany" between 1840-1871.  Sometimes I have found towns, sometimes not, and some of the places seem to be those not found on maps.  When I ordered the Busia book, I also ordered two maps from the Polish Art Center.  I have looked for years for old maps showing old place names, and these are from the 1830s-40s.  Some of these place names are: Woderik Vorfonen,  Brandenburg, Schwaneburg/Schwanburg, Kadlow (Kartlow perhaps?) (Pomerania), Schmarsow (Pomerania), Pasewalk (Prussia), Rossow bei Prenzlau (that family originally moved to Germany from France!), and Schwerin.  These are the names written down in family records and sometimes church records.  For you see, all I have to do to go visit multiple generations of my family is drive down to Sterling Heights, Fraser, and Clinton Township, to some obscure cemeteries, and there I find generations going back to my 4th great-grandparents or so.

But these names -- they aren't all from Germany.  Some appear to be in modern day Poland.  Then there are the last names... I have been told by real Germans that some of my family names, like Rohrbeck, isn't German at all.  "Never heard of it before.  Are you sure it isn't Rohrbach?"  No, in the few records that have shown up from Germany (Schwaneburg area) it is very distinctly "Rohrbeck."   So tell me, do these people look German to you?  (My great-grandma is in the back row on the left, picture taken in 1929.  Grandpa and Grandma Rohrbeck are in the center, both of whom were born in "Germany" or "Prussia".)

So in the end I'm left with the question that all Lutherans learn in Luther's Small Catechism :  "What does this mean?"

Well, a few thoughts.  On my mother's side, I come from a long line of Lutherans, and German would have been the language of the church.  (Some Reformed/Calvinists show up also, but the language was still German.)  Lots of border changes, Prussian Union of Churches, etc, and throw in some moving around (Grandpa Rohrbeck and his siblings were born in different towns in "Germany") did nothing but confuse the nationality.   Throw in a couple wars and goodbye any records that may have been.  In many respects, I'm no further than when I started trying to work on "the family tree" over 20 years ago.  I have more questions than answers when it comes to "what am I?"

Stay tuned for Part 3.

In Search of ..... myself?

This post started out as a book review of two excellent books I read recently, but it has ended up with me staring at myself and asking questions I have successfully dodged for most of my life.  Before I get deep, the books I read:

These are two very excellent books, and I have my neighbor's son to thank for A Polish Son in the Motherland.  It was a thank you for having given him the entire ownership line for his parents' house. 

A Polish Son is the search of Leonard Kniffel for his Polish family, and as I read it, I felt there was a deeper search for identity: his grandmother's identity, yes, but more so his identity.  He lived the genealogist's dream, that of being able to go back to the "old country;" of seeing where his family came from and what influenced them; of being able to track family that may be left, with the help of his grandmother's surviving letters.  That is a long, awkward sentence that would make Henry James proud, but that is the book in a nutshell.  It is an intensely private story, yet it doesn't read like that. It is the work of a talented writer.  I suspect that those of Polish descent will be able to sympathize with his story in a way that I cannot, but more about that later.    

The glimpses of his life as a child piqued my curiosity, as he mentioned both the creek down the road from my house and the very road I live on.  Living as I do in "the Great Nothingness," to see my area in print was enough to make me say "Well, flying potatoes!"  For certainly, should I see flying potatoes I would no longer be surprised.  I suppose one would have to live here to understand how a place can exist and yet not exist.  At my house, we live by this line from The Hip's song "Fireworks,"  "... And believing in the country of me and you."   

All that said, once I had finished A Polish Son, I was curious if he had written anything about growing up out here.  That book is called Busia.  I felt that book was entirely too short, but that isn't a bad thing.  It really lays the groundwork for A Polish Son.  After reading the memories of growing up with his grandmother, his Busia (in Polish), one understands the love and the curiosity which caused him to go to Poland.  For certainly, it takes love to pack up and walk in footsteps almost a hundred years old, in a land where the language is not your first.

Then I asked myself, "Why isn't there ever anything written about us of German descent?"  

The next post deals with that question.

Michigan TOGA 2018

 I was a bad girl this year.  With all the stress in the family, I proceeded to forget the camera and that I could take pictures with my phone.  That said, I did get 2 pictures from the day before, when we packed the truck.

In the passenger seat, that was my 1874 Singer 12 riding shotgun, seatbelted in.  I hated to see her go, but I have too many machines for this stick-built trailer I live in.  

In the truck was a 1955 or so Necchi Supernova in a giant desk cabinet, the Singer 12, an Eldredge head (pony express), a German hand crank Atalanta, and the 1918 New Home hand crank I posted about just recently.  The New Home sold last minute, and so I came home this year with a record "no machines."  I did, however, come home with 3 sets of attachments (thank you, Sharon), needles for my Minnesotas (thank you Patience), and some fabric. 

In spite of the rain it was a pleasant day and fun to see the machines everyone brought to work on.  Lots of beautiful German hand cranks with perfect or nearly perfect decals, with a couple New Homes and a Singer 48 making an appearance.  I ended up not getting much work done as I sold the New Home I brought to work on, but that's OK.   

Our venue this year was in Charlotte at the Hen House quilt store, and it was a nice place to be.  

If I seem rather quiet about TOGA, it is only that things keep spiraling downward here and no matter what it's a hard thing to shake off.  However, for a few hours on Saturday the 21st, I forgot it all and got some good visits in, but not nearly enough!  One can never have too much TOGA.

Latest Project(s)

When the clouds gather and the wind shifts direction.... this is what my kitchen looks like.

Thanks to the upcoming Michigan TOGA, I'm working with a vengeance on sewing machines.  The idea was to get one ready to sell, but dang it, I'm getting attached to it, this lovely critter, a 1918 New Home with mismatched decals and botched up wiring.  It is now a hand crank.

But of course, I can't just work on one machine, right?  I mean, really, with the fruit production around here right now, this is not the time to get sucked into multiple machine-cleaning and restoring.  Therefore, this is my other project, an 1889-90 New Home.

It's not a very promising machine with heavy decal wear and rust, but I got it from my now-deceased "neighbor" Chuck, and let's just say, it's a tribute machine to him.  I've had it for long enough, and I guess it just had to hang around long enough for me to see its potential.  That and it has a decal set I had not seen before, what's left of the decals, anyway.  It came in a complete cabinet, with full set of attachments and all.  Can't wait to get to the cabinet.  As some of you may remember, part of the cabinet has been at my inlaws for a while now.....  Very soon it will come back here, and I'll be able to call Chuck's wife and say, "Come see your sewing machine...."

Fourth of July thoughts

Which way does this picture go? This way ----

---- or this way????

I thought of this picture when my neighbor, "The World's Best Neighbor" TM, was over the other night. She found out the hard way that she no longer has internet service. The tech was at her house to set up another service and told her she has no internet. That was news to her, as she has had it longer than we have, and she's had better connection speeds, too. She can't get it back, as the house next to her managed to grab it, and there's only enough signal for 2 out of 4 houses.  Oh, and dial up is now her only choice.  Yes, folks, in 2018....

Some of you reading this may remember me talking about the fun of living on a main road without any real choice for internet. ATT DSL is all that we have, other than going back to dial up.  ATT recently asked me to find another provider and leave them -- at $125 a month, I would think they would want to keep us -- and I informed them I would gladly leave if I had anything else available here. (We live on a main road, a main artery between Canada and Oakland County.)

"Oh." That was all the employee in Missouri had to say after telling me to take my business elsewhere.

There is this "trompe l'oeil" (fool the eye) in our society, like my picture above (taken in 1998), of two worlds. The news/social media/etc would have everyone believe that EVERYONE no longer uses cash, is connected 24/7/365, and lives in a perfect house with multiple bathrooms, marble and tile and spits money out like trees suck in carbon dioxide. EVERYONE lives in a manicured neighborhood where the houses are miniature compounds, with personal gyms, movie rooms, or whatever else floats your boat.

Then there is the real reality. The world where, in Michigan, laws were passed in 2014 that make it easier to throw customers off of landlines (and apparently DSL internet, which travels over said landlines.) It's called, "Michigan Public act 52 of 2014," people.   You know that real world -- the disgusting one where people turn their heads and look at their feet if one implies that it exists. The world where a poor college student with good grades can't get a scholarship because said student had to work to live to get through high school and couldn't play the required sports.  The one where a news reporter, who makes much more than $19 an hour, can imply the Detroit Police are overpaid if they make that.   The one where if a political candidate dares to show up in certain areas, he gets nervous quickly and disappears because he was scared to have us "northenders" talk to him. (To be fair, lately we have had some decent state representatives, even if this one is afraid of using my sledge hammer.)    

Strangely enough, this all fits in with today, the 4th of July. Just yesterday my 16 year old informed me that he does not believe America ever gave people a chance to succeed, because even a hundred years ago and more businesses still ran everything. I can't completely agree with him, and yet he is right. I know my family had chances here they never had in Prussia, but they also had agriculture open to them. They were farmers, and the businessmen hadn't taken that away yet as a profession. I remember well when I wanted to follow in my grandpa's footsteps and farm, and I remember him telling me that those days were gone. He was right. The day of the small farmer is gone.

Thomas Jefferson, who died 192 years ago today, was a visionary when he wrote to James Madison in 1787, "I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe."

However, it is Benjamin Franklin who nailed it when he wrote,"Finally, there seem to be but three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way; wherein Man receives a real Increase of the Seed thrown into the Ground, in a kind of continual Miracle wrought by the Hand of God in his favour, as a Reward for his innocent Life, and virtuous Industry."

By the way, the 2nd picture is the correct one.  That is Deer Creek.  I grew up playing around there.

From the Great Nothingness, Claraspet.