Family Events ~ March 8 - 14

[still catching up...]

Elsie RITCHIE - my great-great aunt was born on March 8, 1869 in St. Andrews, Scotland.

James RITCHIE - my great-great uncle (Elsie's younger brother) was born on March 9, 1879 in St. Andrews, Scotland


Helen Cormack BENZIE - my great-great aunt was born on March 11, 1888 in Inverurie, Scotland.


Jane Emslie BENZIE - my great-great aunt (older sister of Helen) was born on March 12, 1882 in Inverurie, Scotland.

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!

Wordless Wednesday ~ 03/04/2009

Rudolph Graber, Wayne County Ohio, [1880/1890?] ~ don't know the name of the cow!

Tombstone Tuesday ~ and a Story

EICKELBERG

Nellie
APR. 29, 1864
SEPT. 27, 1940
William
MAR. 24, 1863
DEC. 11, 1934

Along with this TT, comes a story.

Nellie & William are my great-great grandparents. Thanks to my Grandpa Quick I know quite a bit about his grandparents. I know that they met in Ohio and married January 1, 1884. I know that they went out west to Colorado sometime after that - certainly by 1887 when their son William was born. I know that not only Nellie and her husband went west, but also Nellie's sister Sophie and brother John - her only living siblings - ended up in Colorado. I know that Nellie's parents both came to Colorado as well and that they are buried in Lafayette, Colorado. I know that Nellie is buried in Fairmont Cemetery in Denver, Colorado because I took this picture and have visited there more than once.

What I didn't know until yesterday was why, this summer when I decided to request her death certificate along with a few others, the nice people at the Colorado Vital Records Department were unable to find it. Oh they looked - they looked under her maiden name as well as her married name and they looked through all of 1940 but to no avail. The funny thing is, I almost didn't request her death cert, because I didn't expect it to tell me anything anyway. I knew her parents names, I even knew her mother's maiden name as well as where Nellie herself was born. Also, Colorado birth and death certificates are not cheap. But for some reason I filled out a form for her and included it...and came up blank.

Well, that made no sense. I knew when she died, so obviously this was just a record that somehow was misfiled or not recorded ~ right?? The only thing I hadn't check was how it was that I KNEW she died in Colorado. Because when it came right down to it, I didn't really have any source for that conclusion other than the fact that her whole family lived in Colorado including her children and grandchildren - so where else would she have been? Well, not surprisingly, when a person leaves the place they had grown up, and doesn't leave until they are an adult and married they just might still have ties back there even if not family ties! (Why is it still so hard to think of some of my ancestors as three-dimensional PEOPLE?!)

I found through the Denver Library's Western History and Genealogy website that there was an obituary published for Nellie. I ask a volunteer at RAOGK if they would be able to obtain a copy for me. Well, yesterday in the mail I got a copy of a standard obituary as well as a brief article. The article is titled, "Nellie Eickelberg, Denver Mining Man's Widow, Dies in Ohio.

Wow - I'm so glad this is my year to clean up my database and put my facts in order. It will force me to find all the things that I've just always "thought" were true because someone told me or just assumptions that I made back when I was starting out.

Anyway - I NOW have a death certificate for Nellie because the Ohio death certs for that time are online at the FamilySearch and this time, I not only know where she died, I also know how I know!

Family Events ~ March 1 - 7

William BENZIE - my great-great-grandfather died on March 2, 1922 in Inverurie, Scotland.



Erma Christina GRABER MALCUIT - my great-great-aunt died on March 3, 1984 in Ohio.


Anna STETLER - my 4x great-grandmother died on March 5, 1882 in Wayne County, Ohio.

James Swinton RITCHIE - my great-uncle was born on March 7, 1912 in Cleveland, Ohio.

[Something that I am shamelessly stealing from Julie over at GenBlog is this idea of showing what events happened during the coming week in my family history. Thanks Julie!!]