Hi Which of your late relatives do you most regret not having asked for family-history details? We often visited my wife's grandparents and they visited us, but they're gone and his ancestry is unfound. Bob Doerr in the beautiful Missouri Ozarks

Up until the time I had my own children I was the youngest member of my Mom's side of the family. These were primarily German families with sprinkling of Swiss and Austrian. These are also the families I am having the most trouble tracking down. But I was young and they were old...I grew up with death. Someone died almost every year when I was a child. I was born in the 50s and many of these folks were born in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. They were fun to visit and play games with but history was not even in my vocabulary! I am finding out a huge amount about them and their lives (at least those that lived here in St.Louis) through reading lots and lots of microfilm! Being the "scrubby Dutch" they did not tend to save the things I wish they had (my Mom and Aunt were shocked when I took things out of the trash they had thrown away...their trash was my treasure! One of the things I dug out was a brass and crystal chandelier that I cleaned up and hung in my house...they were amazed and wanted it back...I said, nope, you threw it away!) The other thing that I have found is that the family "stories" are not even close to being true. They had children all born in the wrong order, the history of my great grandparents all messed up as to where and when they got married, among other things. But it has been fun to find things. I just need to find out where in Baden my Great-grandfather came from and where in Baden / Bavaria my Great-grandmother's family came from. I just recently found all the baptismal records for this crew. (My grandmother was one of 12 children...most never married or if they did the children all died young...there are not many of us left even at the second cousin level). So my Reiss (great-grandmother) and Woerner (great-grandfather) family are the ones I want to find out about right now the most. They are the ones I have the least information about as to siblings of my great grandparents. Let alone great-great grandparent info (I do have it to the great-great grandfather and grandmother for Reiss but not her maiden name). Bob, this is a really good question! Laura ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Doerr" <bdoerr@rollanet.org> To: <MO-STLOUIS-METRO-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2004 1:31 PM Subject: [StL-Metro] Regrets > Hi > > Which of your late relatives do you most regret not having asked for > family-history details? > > We often visited my wife's grandparents and they visited us, but they're > gone and his ancestry is unfound. > > > Bob Doerr in the beautiful Missouri Ozarks > > > > > > ==== MO-STLOUIS-METRO Mailing List ==== > Search the Archive of Messages for MO-STLOUIS-METRO Mailing List at http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl?list=MO-STLOUIS-METRO >

Well, since my father-in-law just passed last Monday, I'd have to say him. I should have been more of a bulldog with him. That is my regret. We were sifting through his detritus on Sunday, and found things not even his WIFE (my MIL) knew about - what a freakin' waste of good history lost to the wind. He boxed in the army, he had his letters from his letter jacket when he played football for Wellston in '46-47, his graduation announcement, pictures taken with his army buds and a trophey none of us knows why they won it - pictures of Germany. . . I know it's not about ME - he's the one who died, it was my husband's father, but WHY would he not tell even one soul? I'm forever meeting relatives at FUNERALS and finding out all sorts of things after the fact and it hurts. It truly hurts me to think that the person didn't trust me enough with their history to just TELL me. This is my passion, just like others passion may be politics, or baking, or building things. Sorry - I'm still upset. Lisa Farrand Kemp "Interum faeces et urinam nascimur"