Random Relative of the Week - Mar 9, 2009

[I haven't been doing so well with my Random Relative posts...it's been a month since the last one! I will try to do better in March.]
















Laura GRABER RITTENHOUSE

Born July 12, 1901 ~ near Apple Creek, Ohio

Died March 30, 1985 ~ Wooster, Ohio

Laura was my great-great aunt and as I mentioned in a previous Tombstone Tuesday post, she is the source of most of the information I have on the Graber side of my family.

What was so interesting about talking to Aunt Laura was that she was a link back to a generation beyond my grandparents, even though she was their contemporary in age. Laura was the youngest child in the Graber family and my great-grandmother [Ella GRABER SAURER] was the oldest in that family. When my great-grandma Ella was having her first child, her own mother [Emma ZAUGG] was having her last child. That is the source of this Wordless Wednesday picture from a number of weeks ago.

So, while my great-grandmother past away when I was not yet 5 years old, Aunt Laura came to my high school graduation ~ and was around many years after that! She was the keeper of a photo album in which she had picture of all the families of her brothers and sisters. Her father, Rudolph Graber - subject of last week's Wordless Wednesday post - had come to Ohio from Switzerland as a young man. Aunt Laura wrote about him for a county history book and I have her hand-written account. She was more interested in his descendants than in his "pedigree", but she did have a picture of his father and mother.

I was fortunate enough to inherit Aunt Laura's book from my grandmother. It was in one of those horrid magnetic albums, so I spent some time scanning the pages and then taking them all apart and carefully putting the pictures in an archival album. I also put the scanned pages into a Kodak Gallery album to give to my Dad and my uncle. As it turned out, several people saw the book and have ordered copies of their own. Most all of Rudy's descendants knew about "Aunt Laura's Book" because we all had to send pictures of ourselves to her periodically.

This is one of my real goals - to share all these one-of-a-kind items with relatives. It's one of the best things about technology...now, instead of this compilation of pictures and history that Aunt Laura made being just "mine", it can easily be shared with all Rudy & Emma's descendants!