Passing It On

It’s Adopt a Genea-Blogger Day

Do you remember how you first got interested in your own family’s history? Kate Keller does.

She was “bit by the Genealogy Bug” through a high school biology assignment, but gave it up when her assignment was done. Her brief spurt of enthusiasm was contagious, though, and her mother took up the torch, spending 20-some years collecting family information on notebooks, scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes.

Now retired, Kate has esperienced a genea-bug relapse. She now has possession of her mother’s research material and is eagerly sorting through it. This week she started blogging about it. Through her blog, Kate shares that she lives in Michigan, is retired military, a great-grandparent and is a four-year cancer survivor.

Now that Kate has taken the blogging plunge, here’s a great opportunity to adopt a genea-blogger. Why don’t you subscribe to Kate’s blog and help her along with constructive comments? If you’re new to researching family history, you can learn along with her. If you’re a veteran, why not share a few tricks of the trade?

With your help, perhaps you can keep Kate’s enthusiasm for saving her family history from slipping into remission again.

If you like old rock and roll music, check out my interview on Minnesota Public Radio about the last tour of singers Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens. My book, The Day the Music Died, focused on that tour, which was marred by a fatal plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy pf pinknblack73.

NBC series to give family history a boost

Look for interest in family history to spike again this spring as NBC-TV rolls out its own version of England’s popular “Who Do You Think You Are?” series.

Like the British series, the show will examine the family trees of celebrities.

"This show personalizes history and turns it into a gripping narrative," said Executive Producer Lisa Kudrow. "The most striking thing about the show is the realization of how connected we all are."

The series is a logical extension of PBS’ “African-American Lives,” which surprised famous black Americans with previously unknown details about their ancestors.

While the NBC project is laudable and will doubtless prove entertaining, I have a couple of caveats for prospective viewers.

First, expect to get a PG version even if investigators turn up some R or even XXX details. These are celebrities, after all, and celebrities are first and foremost about image. Don’t expect to see anything that taints that image. Keep in mind, too, that you don’t really know these people; you just know what they want you to know. Unless, of course, they’ve committed actual news and were scrutinized by authorities or media outside their control.

Second, despite America’s obsessive celebrity culture, the rich and famous don’t have a lock on interesting family trees. We all have fascinating stories in our familial past. Our goal should be to unlock those stories and share them with those people closest to us.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Photo: Aaron Lehmer checks out the roots of a California redwood. (Larry Lehmer collection)

Inauguration was just a family gathering on steroids

Did you catch that presidential inauguration last week? The one that drew 1.5 million people to Washington, D.C., for the swearing in of our new president and thousands to a spate of celebratory balls? The one that garnered all-day television coverage and netted zero arrests?

While watching the grand occasion unfold from the comfort of my own family room, I couldn’t help but notice how similar it was to a family gathering, albeit on an incomprehensibly huge scale.

Weddings, baptisms, holidays, birthdays, family reunions and funerals have much in common with presidential inaugurations. They are generally festive occasions. Even funerals can be respectful celebrations of life rather than somber, mournful events. All family gatherings present opportunities to honor our family elders and to learn from them.

Family gatherings are often times of transition. Funerals often mark the passing of family leadership from one generation to the next. Baptisms and weddings create new branches on the family tree. All gatherings give families a chance to evaluate the status quo and catch a glimpse of its future.

Recognize each family gathering for its uniqueness and take from it as much wisdom and family lore as you can absorb. These are truly special occasions and you needn’t wait four years for the next one.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Photo: Elsie Lehmer, Rick Andersen and Norman and Norma Thomas at Andersen family Christmas gathering in 1959. (Walter B. Lehmer collection).

Sniff, cough, wheeze…how does your family handle a cold?

Has the weather got you down? Got the sniffles? Does your head feel like it’s about to explode? Does that itchy throat have you coughing so much your ribs hurt?

I know the feeling. For the better part of the past month, I’ve dealt with the walking crud known as bronchitis.  Two antibiotics, one allergy and dozens of restless nights later, I’m finally emerging from my cocoon to reestablish a bit of what passes for normalcy in my not-so-normal life.

Many of you probably have old family cures for those winter blahs. Tea with honey and/or lemon, perhaps. Maybe a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup. Or a secret concoction passed on from one generation to the next. We don’t have those in my family. We were more of the drink-plenty-of-fluids-and-rest type when I was growing up.

There are many more options these days. Just check out the cold remedy aisle in your neighborhood supermarket or drugstore and try to make some sense of it.

When I recognized my first signs of a cold last month, my visiting daughter-in-law offered a bit of advice. “Want some Airborne?” she asked. Soon my son chimed in, “How about some Emergen-C?”

This globe-trotting couple is obviously much better equipped for dealing with the common cold than I was at their age. But when I was their age, cold remedies took up a much smaller section of that drugstore aisle.

Modern medicine is great, but is it really any better at dealing with a perpetually nagging ailment like the common cold? Do you deal with a cold more like your parents or more like your children?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Say, wasn’t that President …?

Here today, gone tomorrow.

That tired old cliché is spot on today as the United States replaces President George W. Bush with a new chief executive, Barack Obama, at mid-day tomorrow. Of course, as a savvy consumer of news, you already know that. But have you ever considered how presidential politics figures in your own family history?

You may be lucky enough to have a president lurking somewhere in your family tree. Or, more likely, there are stories passed on about brushes or near-brushes with past leaders of the free world.

I have a former vice president, John Cabell Breckenridge, in my own family tree, but he’s several branches over from my direct descendants. Sadly, most of the presidential-related stories in my family tree that I’m familiar with are my own.

Keep in mind that I live in Iowa, where serious presidential candidates practically take up residence in the months leading up to our state’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses. Even though I’ve been generally apolitical in my adult years, I have found myself up close to a couple recent candidates – John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

As a high school student in 1960, we were briefly released from class to observe a passing motorcade, but I can’t tell you if it was Richard Nixon or John F. Kennedy that zipped past our school that day. I clearly remember being inspired at a rally for candidate Eugene McCarthy eight years later, however.

Then there was the time I practically bowled over George McGovern at Custer State Park in South Dakota and the time I was invited to go pheasant hunting with candidate Jimmy Carter’s campaign consultant and eventual press secretary Jody Powell in 1976.

I’m sure there are similar stories from other family members, but I have yet to hear them. What about your family?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo of the White House courtesy of ktylerconk.

Health care changes affect your family history

I had my annual physical this week. As health care goes these days, my physical is quite a bargain since my insurance company picks up the tab.

Other trips to the doctor hit the pocketbook a bit harder, but not as hard as it would be if I didn’t have insurance. While we all want good medical care, I’ve always wondered whether insurance was the best way to get there.

When my grandparents immigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1920, medical insurance didn’t exist. Although a rudimentary form of health insurance was attempted in the Civil War years, it wasn’t until modern medicine evolved in the 1920s that a precursor of the non-profit Blue Cross was founded in 1929.

Commercial insurance companies, wary of their ability to accurately assess risks associated with health care, eventually got into the act in the 1940s as companies added the perk as a way to lure potential employees.

It’s been chaos ever since as the rising quality and cost of medical care have bedeviled health care providers, politicians and ordinary people who are steadily losing ground while trying to balance health and wealth.

By the time my grandparents reached their retirement years, Medicare was in place. They lived for decades after that and I honestly don’t recall much discussion in our family about the high cost of medical care. That includes my parents, who undoubtedly had their fair share of medical expenses with three rambunctious sons who regularly needed stitching up, bottles of medicated goo and injections of the most potent infection fighters then available to man.

How times have changed. Health care is probably issue No. 1 with people past the age of 50.

Ironically, the biggest benefactors of health insurance are the biggest losers, health-wise. For example, if I collect $1,000 of health care from my insurance company after paying $200 in premiums and co-pays, that means the company must collect the remaining $800 from healthy souls just to break even, and they usually do much better than breaking even.

As you research your family history, you’ll find plenty of health-related stories – relatives who died too young, surgeries done on kitchen tables, epidemics that crippled communities. How do you think future generations will view health care as it exists today?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of otisarchives1.

Your family history and 'the lost hour'

Can you pinpoint where or when you first became interested in your family history?

For many of us, it’s an evolutionary process, building over the years until it reaches a tipping point where we come to the realization that who we are extends well beyond our everyday existence.

For others, it may come in one of those “ah-hah” moments, often ignited by the loss of a close family member or friend.

For fellow personal historian Bob Milner of Sedalia, Missouri, it seems to have sneaked up on him without him even knowing it. Over the weekend, Bob, who dates his interest in family history back about 10 years, shared with fellow members of the Association of Personal Historians a link to a YouTube video of a 1985 Twilight Zone episode called “Paladin of the Lost Hour.”

Acknowledging that “the story and what it says stayed with for the past 20 plus years and I think played a role in what I do now,” Bob quoted a bit of the ending narration:

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”

The episode was written by noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison and stars Danny Kaye. Check it out for yourself before answering this question: Would you take one minute of the lost hour and if so, what would you do with it?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site, send him an e-mail or follow him on Twitter.

Flickr photo courtesy of Andreas Falk.

Your life as a plate: Handle with care

Think of your life as a plate.

At any given time, your plate may be full. Or it may be empty. You may even find that your plate has more than it can comfortably handle, with the excess slipping away before it can be properly addressed.

Whatever your plate looks like today, it probably looked different a few short months ago. In these times of economic distress, many of us are dropping the side dishes, appetizers and desserts of the past while concentrating on the basic “meat and potatoes” that sustain us.

Regardless of your situation, don’t neglect the plate that is your life. Its contents may vary greatly from one moment to the next, but the plate remains the same. It was fired in the kiln of your ancestors and tempered by the wisdom gained through succeeding generations.

Don’t drop your plate. Don’t let cracks degrade it. Add to its strength my making prudent and wise decisions. Above all, make certain that your kids and grandkids know and understand your plate’s history. It is your legacy.

Check this out: I recently worked with The Des Moines Register on an extensive project concerning the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens. You can view the project (and an extended video interview with me) here.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, send him an  e-mail, visit his web site or follow him on Twitter.

So, Dad, tell me about this Karen person

See the picture at the top of this article. It’s a bit blurry so let me explain what it is.

It’s a tiny aluminum bracelet with the name “Karen” etched into its face. It was among a handful of similar bracelets I discovered in a trunk in the attic of my parents’ home as my brothers and I were preparing to move them a few months ago.

To be honest, I can’t tell you much about the other bracelets I found at the same time, so intrigued was I with this one. All were engraved, as I recall, but with familiar names or titles, such as “Elsie” (my mother), “Sweetheart” or something like that.

But Karen … well, that was special. There’s no Karen in our immediate family and it was far too small to be worn by anyone larger than a baby. Perplexed, I asked Dad about it.

“That was for you,” he said in a very matter-of-factly way, “if you had been a girl.”

As my parents awaited my birth all those decades ago, my father spent many hours in the hobby shop at Port Hueneme, Calif., making things for the new arrival. That’s where he came across the scrap aluminum that he crafted into the bracelets. He also designed and built a newborn-sized crib that would travel well on the train journey back to the family homestead in Iowa.

That crib would eventually be used by Jack & Elsie Lehmer’s four boys, several grandchildren and is still in use by one of their five grandchildren.

I have known about the crib for many years, but I had never heard the Karen story. I suspect that most parents have their children’s names selected in advance, regardless of gender. It took me more than 60 years to learn my “altergender identity.” Do you know yours?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family stories. To learn more, send him an e-mail, check out his web site or follow him on Twitter.