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A Milestone Reached

For Christmas distribution this year, I am finishing up my last biographical sketch of my great-grandparents. I began this project several years ago. Each calendar year I have done exhaustive research on one person or couple, collecting information and photographs. At the end of the year, I have written and illustrated my findings and sent them around to relatives. I am missing only one person, my paternal grandmother Grace Riddle’s unknown father.

I began this project when I realized that the memories of this generation of family members, who lived between 1845 and 1976, would be forgotten unless someone recorded them. I never met any of my great-grandparents personally, but I had heard stories of them as I grew up. Our photo albums held their likenesses. I knew I could be the one to memorialize their lives when no one else has. My project preserves some of the history of our family’s survival through difficult times from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.

With this step complete, next year I hope to go on to begin writing about the previous generation of sixteen great-great grandparents. I will not have the oral history and photographs available to me that I did with my great-grandparents. Consequently, I will need to take a slightly different approach. But there are stories here, too, that I can create from documents left behind by these forebears. Among others, these will be the stories of Jane and Caleb Reed, who moved in covered wagons to the Illinois wilderness, of the blacksmith Thomas Sherman and his yet-to-be-found German wife, of elderly Karen and Nikolai Bentsen who left Norway to follow their children to America.

I do not know how many miles lie ahead on this road, but I am happy to have reached the first milestone on the journey. I will never run out of ancestors to study, so the quest continues until I must hand if off to another. In the meantime, my only question is, who will I write about next?

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