A big thank you to the Peoria County Genealogy Society for their Prairie Roots publication and their ideas for stories. Thanks to them I have now written and shared four different stories. I believe they have all been told via this blog in some fashion, but it doesn’t hurt to put them all in one place.
First, they asked a few months ago for a story about an ancestor’s occupation. I wrote about my grandmother and the fact that she and her sister made bombs in Nebraska during WWII. We nearly missed this story all together, other than the fact that Grandma mentioned it one Christmas. That was a fun story to write, and it was also printed in the Nebraska Genealogy Society publication of Ancestrees.
In the most recent publication, the story idea was something you have from your ancestors. Well, thankfully we have a lot of little tidbits and personal items that we all love – dad has Grandpa Ben’s pipe and I can still pick out the smell of his pipe tobacco all these years later. For this one I wrote about some things that had stories top of mind. One was the WWI uniform and footlocker we found of Otto Mausers. I’m still so impressed by how complete the collection was (even if it isn’t worth much dollar wise it is sure worth a lot to us). I also wrote about the little Chinese Statue from JP Anderson who spent some time in an internment camp in China during WWII. Lastly I wrote a story about how Grandpa in his determined way made sure that at Otto’s estate auction that he purchased all of Gottlob Mauser’s blacksmithing tools. We still have the forge and all the tools that were used way back in the 1880’s It was so much fun to write the stories that I can’t wait to see what the next topic is. This may be the first step to being a published genealogist!
Cory and Nicole Family History 