Lost to time…. tick-toc

My father passed away in 1993 and with both of his parents also passed on I realize my kids are in danger of losing 1/4th of their heritage without even realizing it…. tick-toc… tick-toc

My father had polio in 1955. Before that he’d been a partner in a telephone company in upstate Wisconsin. Due to the polio he couldn’t climb the poles anymore…. How many recall seeing telephone poles with steel steps attached? … I do… He took his 24 year old wife, 4 year old daughter with his 2 sons (one 2 and 1 only 1) and moved them lock-stock-and-barrel to sunny central Florida, where he’d gotten a job with RCA working on the space program….

This migration south has had a huge impact on my family relationships…. tick-toc… tick-toc… I didn’t grow up with my cousins, aunts, uncles around…. my grandparents would come and go, and my dad’s folks became rather permanent snow-birds… but my problem is that now, today, I find myself without ties with close blood lines still in Michigan and Wisonsin…. and the folks I do know are my mom’s and dad’s generation and they are moving on… my children don’t know them at all… when my oldest son went to college in Michigan, I’d encourage him to contact family… he told me, “But, Mom, I don’t know them.”…. tick-toc… tick-toc… while, thank God, my mom is still here, but when God calls her home it’ll be the same story repeated… I really don’t know them at all.

Neither my father nor his folks documented their families, they did tell me some stories, but they only went back one or two generations at most. I have artifacts… some pictures… a Bible..a candy dish… tick-toc… tick-toc…

Fortunately, my mom has a gene…. it’s a genealogy gene… and she’s documenting her family… in some cases back to the 16th century… she’s been working on it for well over 20 years and she’s given all of her kids pictures and stories with names and dates… it’s awesome what she’s done!… thanks to her my children and grandchildren will know her family.

Now it’s time I knuckle down to work on my father’s family… I’ll post my trees (with only deceased people in them), and stories, and issues on this site… my husband is joining me in this effort…. it’s going well… it’s a huge blessing in the evenings as we find ourselves with TV never turned on, reading, researching, and discussing our famlies… We were planning to take a cruise of the Amazon into Brazil next year…. we cancelled that Saturday… now we’ll be taking a trip back in time to capture family records and perhaps to strengthen some ties….. tick-toc, tick-toc….

The primary surnames we are researching are WILDER and FRINK on my husband’s side from Northern Illinois, and GLAZIER and HARRIS from mid-Michigan, Tuscola county to be specific…. my mom is working on DEGARMO and DAHLKE from Minnesota and Wisconsin… more, very much more will be published here. One of my goals is to make The Wilder Place “the” definitive website for my family, with trees, pictures, and stories galore.

Jesus tells us to put aside our “vain genealogies”…. why? … Our Lord understands and supports our desires to know who we are in terms of those who came before us, from whom we descend… I know this because in both Old and New Testimates we’re told over and over again “so-and-so begat so-and-so”…. but being descended from someone whether it’s a king, queen, or Abraham does not stand us in good stead before God…. only accepting Christ’s attoning death for our individual sins does that.