My Trails into the Past

A value that my husband’s grandmother held was service. Throughout her adult life she valued providing a service to others. There is no documentation as to why she did this. Perhaps her unorthodox childhood had something to do with it. Matilda Pearl Davey was born on 18 April 1880 to Frederick Henry Davey and Matilda “Tillie” Wollenweber. She was their second-born child. [1] She had three brothers from Fred’s first wife, one brother from his second wife, and two step-brothers from the third wife. [2] Her mother died when she was five years old. [3] In the beginning, her mother’s sister, Julia Wollenweber, came to live with them and her father married her on 28 July 1887, however, the marriage did not last and they were divorced by 1892. [4] The story as told by her son, George, Matilda was sent to live with aunts and perhaps spent time in a children’s home. [5] She married Joseph Norman Gorrell on 19 December 1900. [6] He was a lineman for a telephone company. In their first ...

We never can really know our ancestors. We locate documents that suggest what they did or not do, where they lived, and who their families were. However, we do not know what they thought, what kind of personality they had, and what their goals were. Sometimes we do find records that hint to a personality. My 2x-great-grandfather, Vincent Sievert, was one of my German-speaking immigrant ancestors, who came in 1852 with his family from a part of present-day Poland where Germans had settled. [1] He first started out in Will County, Illinois, as a farmer, [2] but later worked as a stonecutter. [3] He and his wife, Susanna, had eleven children, eight whom grew to adulthood. [4] Domestic Goose JJ Harrison , CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Assault Charge I was surprised to discover from a newspaper article that Vincent was charged in the County Court with assault with a deathly weapon. [5] Oh, my, what had he done? The next month he was arraigned and he plead not guilty. [6] ...

These items were given to us by my husband's cousin, Shirley. She likely got them from her mother, Bertha Gorrell Smart, who got them from her parents, Tillie and Joseph Gorrell. But the items were made by their son, George. Perhaps he gave the items as a gift.  What is most likely, they were made in high school shop class. But there is no date and we have no one to ask. Still, they are a treasure to have and they are now with us. I am currently using this table as a night stand where I have a homemade lamp my grandfather made. George continued doing woodworking as a hobby. He made his wife and me puzzle boards where we could put jigsaw puzzles together but are able to put it away when it is time to have a meal. He made a special table-top shelf to store the collection of Women's Day cookbook set. Someday, I need to get them out and take a photo of them. #52Ancestors: Week 43 – “Homemade ” This is my ninth year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow ( htt...

For the 52 Ancestors theme for week 42, we are to compare our life to an ancestor’s. I have worked all my life, first as a babysitter to neighborhood children, then in the library at Cal State University, Hayward (now East Bay), a year at Alameda Sporting Goods as a clerk/computer operator, and then at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District first as a train operator and then as a train operator instructor (official title was Employee Development Specialist). I retired in 2010 after 32 years. My mother did not work outside the home. She raised six children while my dad worked in various grocery stores as a produce clerk. However, both my grandmothers worked outside the home. My paternal grandmother, Nana, worked because she had to. She left her husband and raised her four children alone. She worked in restaurants, and then in education, first in Napa at a one-room schoolhouse, and later in Concord, California, at Williams School. Because her credential was earned in Montana from a norm...

This has been a hard post to write in that I could not think of anything specific to write about. I’m sure many of my ancestors had the courage to make the journeys they did to come to the United States and later make the moves further west each generation. It takes a lot of courage to leave the place you know to go to a place that is unknown. I do not know the reasons they moved. No record has been passed down either by journal or letter, so we can only guess at the reasons they may have made the journeys. Things were bad at home and another place looked better. Or the place at home was too crowded and the land further west offered new hope. Perhaps someone else moved first and wrote back saying, come! There is one person I know who must have had some courage. First to leave her husband, and then to move across the state to a new place to live. This was my paternal grandmother. She was probably thinking about her four children: three daughters and one son. Like a mother hen, she w...

John H. Sullivan is my paternal great-grandfather, the father of Anna Marie Sullivan who married William Cyril Hork. I have no records naming him until he shows up in Dakota Territory getting land from the federal government. Below is a timeline of the information I have already gathered. Once this is created, I can then do more searching in newspapers, full-text search at FamilySearch , and regular searching at Ancestry and other genealogy database sites. Creating this timeline will likely spark new questions, which will be put into red text. I might even find conflicts that need to be addressed. 1854 June 20. John H. Sullivan was born 20 June 1854. There is no birth or baptism record for him. Other documents suggest his birth range: His intent naturalization in 1882 said he was born in 1853. [1] His land patent application in 1881 said he was over 21, and his own testimony as the claimant on 10 June 1882 stated he was 29 (1853). [2] 1900 census gave June 1854. [3] 1910 census i...