The President's Letter is a monthly column written by the FHSA President. It is published in our newsletter and posted here. Katie Gertz offer's insights into family history, the needs of the society, and personal reflections each month.
February's President’s Letter
It’s hard to believe the month of January is over already. Time is such a precious commodity that we don’t seem to have enough of. At least for me. My retirement years seem just as busy as when I was working full time. Many of us probably wonder how we ever had enough time to raise our families, keep house, taxi our kids to their soccer games, guitar lessons, cheerleading practice and on and on. I wonder if our ancestors had similar thoughts and experiences. Even though we have all the technology today versus years past, I suspect that life was just as busy, albeit in different ways. All the reasons why we should carve out a certain amount of time each day to work on our family history research.
Part 2
As I wrote in my January letter, I have a huge impasse with trying to find out what happened to my maternal grandfather. Growing up, I had no maternal grandparents. According to my mother, her parents had passed away before she and my father were married. They married in 1946 after my father was discharged from the United States Army after serving in WWII.
While attending my mother’s sister’s funeral in 2000, I was introduced to another my mother’s sisters whom I had never met nor even heard of. This is the beginning of my genealogy interest although it would be another several years before I got involved in earnest. Since my curiosity was piqued, I had to see if my only known cousin knew how to explain why I’m finding out about another aunt for the first time. As it turns out, my cousin did know quite a bit but could not fill in all the blanks. She knew that my mother’s mother was still alive until 1970. She hadn’t died before 1946 as I had been told. And my cousin knew her. And she also knew that my mother’s father had deserted his family sometime in the 1930s. The family story my cousin shared with me was that our grandfather had an affair with a red-haired woman and left his family for this woman never to be seen or heard from again.
More next month…
Katie Gertz
FHSA President