In a message dated 3/6/03 4:57:21 PM Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes: << I wondered if your email address was also part of your name....with your last name being Just. I'm researching the Just family that lived in LaSalle/Peru. Just curious. >> Hi Karen! I married into a Just family in west central Minnesota. They were in the Lac Qui Parle and Yellow Medicine counties. The first Just in this family, Christoph Just, came to New York from Schneidemuehl, Germany (formerly Prussia, now Poland), in 1885 with his son, Christoph Just. They came to "Walnut," Illinois where two daughters lived who had emigrated some years earlier to Wisconsin (still unknown location), married, and then moved to Illinois. The senior Christoph Just died probably about 1895 when the junior Christoph Just left Illinois and went to Minnesota where he lived with a cousin, whose last name was Bohn. We have the details of most of this, and I and two other researchers have pulled together enough information so that one of the other researchers has a fairly large collection of individuals (maybe around 1,500). The other two researchers still live in Minnesota. An amazing thing is that a descendant of the only Just son to stay on the old family farm in Prussia was able to re-establish contact with the American branch. He lives in Berne, Switzerland, and his family escaped from that Schneidemuehl area just after WWII when he was just a boy. One of the descendants served in the German army in WWII and was killed. Most of the descendants were very poor during the war and for some years after the war. I have noted that there was a Just family at Lee County, adjacent to LaSalle County. If you go to the Lee County Genealogical Society site at http://www.rootsweb.com, selecting Illinois for the state, and Lee for the county, they have some indexes there that you can search for Just. I have never known if there was a connection, but it's hard to think that there wasn't some connection (cousin, uncle) given the way family groups tended to emigrate in patterns. There was a Jacob Just in the death records at the library at Princeton, Illinois, and I spoke with them on the telephone several years ago but they did not follow through on their promise to send me the entry. I think he died in the 1860s. This was in Bureau County where the two Christoph Justs settled. I believe that the senior Christoph was buried at New Bedford, but we are still on the hunt for that. If you want to be in touch with the guy from the current young-adult generation who has the most records (we two senior researchers shared our data with him to help expedite the search at a time when he had 300-400 individuals), let me know. What is your connection to the Just at La Salle County? Adele Just/Seattle