Julia Anne Hare

When I went back to Florida to say goodbye to my grandma a few months ago, my cousin and I started to go through a box of ancestry information that she had in her house. Sadly, we had very little time to actually go through it. My cousin was very kind and said I could take back what I wanted with me to NZ. But I was traveling with my baby and wasn't really able to carry much more than I had. I was very sad to leave all of it behind as I am extremely interested in our family history. It is something that I had been going through with grandma for a few years before she died. A huge amount of sadness overwhelmed me when I looked at that box and had to choose to leave it behind. I feared that a part of us, who we are and who we have become would be lost, possibly forever.
I decided to play the "the lucky dip," and randomly grab a folder of papers to take with me. This folder had copies of handwritten stories, and something about it seemed familiar. It turned out to be filled with interesting stories that I am sure my grandmother had once told me on those occasions where we would stay up until 2:00am talking about "everything."

• Above is a photo of Julia Ann Hare, who is my great, great, great, great grandmother. Her grandson Ernest Henney learned her story and recorded it to be passed on. It goes like this:  Julia's parents came to the US from Germany during the time of the Napoleonic wars. They left four children behind in Germany and brought one with them. When they landed in New York, their one child was kidnapped and taken back to Germany. They intended to go back to Germany one day, but their land was taken and destroyed by the French, so they never did. They later had four more children, one of which was Julia. Julia was around one year old when her father, Christopher Hare died. So her mother, Anna (Hanna) Ersila Howe became a school teacher. She left Julia with the neighbor during the week to look after her while she taught school. At the time, they were living in Pennsylvania I believe. The lady who looked after her, kidnapped Julia at a very young age and moved to Ohio. No one knew what happened to her until one of the boy's from the family that took her, wrote to Julia's older brother, Conrad to tell him where she was. By then she was fourteen years old. They treated her very badly. She was not allowed to eat at the table like the rest of the family. Instead she had to eat out of the frying pan with her hands. She only wore a "gunni sack" with hear and arm holes to keep her from leaving the house. They made her spin wool and would give her tasks that would keep her busy all day so that she would not be tempted to leave. If she didn't finish her jobs she would be "severely punished." Conrad went to get Julia. When he found her she was drawing water from a well. He told her that she was not their child and she began to cry because she said she had always felt that she wasn't. He stayed with the family for a few days before taking her back with him to Pennsylvania. The old woman was very angry with them when they left, and was said to have reached for a butcher knife. They walked 300 miles back home and slept on the ground. When recounting the story, Julia remembers her brother making a fire all around them to keep the wolves away and getting food from the Indians. 

I think this is an Amazing story. Looking back at the world during that time period, it just feels like people did their own thing. When leaving behind the old world and coming to a new, people were bound to meet others who lived by their own code, rather than shared morals that were taught by close knit communities. There wasn't the infrastructure that there is now. So they couldn't just go to the police and tell them that she was missing. And to think that Julia's mother had already left four children and had one kidnapped. What a crazy life. She must have become a pretty detached mother who was just in it to survive. All of this information helps me to form opinions about my family and why we are the way we are. I have always felt that it was strange how the mother's and daughters on this side of the family struggled in their relationship with one another. I know bits of information about each one of them, leading all the way back to Julia that that illustrates stories of friction. I can't help to wonder if this is where all of it started. I personally feel grateful that I don't have to live under this curse and believe that God has brought me above it. I believe it is so good and important to look back and try to create understanding so that we can learn and grow from our past.

Identifying photos with Grandma Karen

A few years ago before my grandma got sick for the second time we started identifying images. So I thought I would just go through and copy and paste them along with the emailed description that my grandma gave me. Its random. But one day when everyone on this side of the family has copies of all the photos, they can look back on the blogs and get a little back story to go along with some of the photos. Here is the first correspondence:

22/09/2013
The lady is Helena haenke. She is my grandpa Haenke's sister. She was always called Lena. Even my father did not know that her real name was Helena. Lena was born in Germany. She changed her name to be more American. I spent hours with my grandpa Haenke who gave me lots of family stories. The man to Lena's right is my grandpa whose real name was Reinholdt Emil Heinrich Haenke. He changed his name to Henry Emil Reinholdt Haenke. I remember when I was a little girl that my grandpa went back to see Helena in Michigan . They visited their one room schoolhouse and other places they knew as children. The other two men in the picture I am not sure about..... The man on Lena's left is her husband I believe  . he did not have a hand. You can see he is hiding his hand behind his back. He had a hook . I do not have his name in the family tree. Wait and see if I can find it . I don't recognize the other man . He does resemble my grandpa but I don't know.

Here is the photo of them at the schoolhouse that she was referring to also.

Walter DNA Results

My grandpa Walter just did a DNA test to shed some light on who we are made of. This was really interesting information to me. We have always been told that we were part native American. But this test disproves this. My grandpa also wondered if we had German ancestry. Nope. Anyway, here are the results.99% Europe, 76% Great Britain, 10% Ireland, 4% Iberian peninsula, 4% Finland/NW Russia, 3% Scandinavia, less than 1% West Asia, Italy/Greece, Europe West, Caucasus.

Paul Karl Otto Haenke

I wanted to write about Paul Haenke because it has been a fun journey discovering him and in the process connecting with relatives. So this might be a little more about the process than Paul himself. Paul Karl otto Haenke is the brother of my great, great, grandfather, so my second great granduncle. There isn't too much to tell about him, except that he ran away from home at a young age and joined the circus. His father's story (my great, great, great grandfather) is a little more interesting. This is what my grandma told me. Emil Haenke fell in love with Maria Lehmann. She I believe got pregnant with Paul. But Emil's mean old dad,Gottlieb , would not let Emil marry Maria because she was Jewish. But a very nice older man with the last name Clouse wanted to marry Maria and raise her child as his own. Though Maria and Emil still loved each other Maria married the older man because she really had no choice. Then she became pregnant with Mr. Clouse's child who was named Karl. Shortly after that Mr. Close died. Emil married Maria Lehmann Clouse despite His father's disapproval. He raised Karl as his own. Later they had Olga who always was called Ida and Helena wbo went by Lena and my grandpa Reinholdt who went by Henry, Karl went by Charlie. He used the last name Haenke until a family rift caused Charlie to run away. He then went back to using Clouse.. By the way, Paul also ran away and joined the circus. There is a picture of Him on a TRAPEZE. ...MORE ABOUT ALL THIS LATER This to me is a very interesting story. I started going through old photos with my grandma and found a photo of a lady named Roma. My grandma remembered she was a Haenke, but didn't remember how exactly she was related to us. She sent me some family tree information and I found that she was Paul's daughter. I went back to my family tree on ancestry.com and noticed that a woman named Roma asked me a question about a photo I had posted of someone else. I private messaged her and sent her a copy of the photo I had that was titled "Roma." As it turned out, that was a photo of her. So I met a new relative (my grandma's cousin) in the process of learning and recording information about our family. She is a very nice lady who remembers meeting my great, great grandfather Emil when she was a little girl. She is also very interested in family family history. I thought this post would be a little more exciting. But now that I have written it, it doesn't seem to be that much. What is exciting for me is; 1) there is a very good love story here 2) every family should have a relative who has joined the circus and 3) I connected with a distant family member. Thats all!

Steve Walter story

Here is the first post of my grandpa Steve Walter's life story as he wrote it to me in a series of emails. We then pieced them together and he is currently editing them. He has been writing to me for the past four years, telling me about himself, which I have really enjoyed. The last time we visited him at Christmas we went through a box of photographs and he told me more stories. I wish I had my recorder for those because they were fascinating. I don't know if he has photos of himself as a child. But I will look into it. In the meantime, here are photos of his Mother Margaret Griffith, and Father James Walter when they were in High School.

My father was born in Placerville, California in 1910. His dad was probably part Irish and part American Indian of some type or another. It was a sore subject with him so we never found out much about him. I would really like to know but probably never will. He was born in Lions Nebraska on January 15, 1879. My Dads mom was born in Lyons Nebraska on November 20, 1884 and was either 100% or half English. My Mother was born in Los Angeles on January 4, 1912. Her mother was born in Michigan on August 31 1889. Her dad disappeared on a trip to the drug store one evening. My mother never met him since he took off before she was born. My mother's maternal grandmother raised my mother for the most part since her mother had to work to support the three of them. The town my mother's mother came from was I think Greenville Texas where there used to be a big sign over the entrance to town on both ends "Welcome to Greenville Texas the home of the blackest soil and whitest people". I actually saw a picture of the sign. My grandmother said she was told to carry a stick with her when she went to school and to hit any black people she saw. She didn't do it and hated being told that. She used to cry when she talked about it which was almost never. My dad died at the age of 76 from prostate cancer and my mother lived to the age of 94 where she died happy in Alaska where she always dreamed of living. She was there for 14 years. I drove her up the Alaska highway when she was 80. She had lived in California all her life until then. She was going to drive up there alone but I decided she would never make it. My sister Joy went along and we had a pretty nice trip. It was quite an adventure for all of us. When we got there they both told me they would have never made it without me doing the driving. It was only September but we hit some snow and super cold weather. It was zero degrees one morning and I complained in a café where we had breakfast. They told me zero was nothing. It was 70 below the winter before. Now that's cold. We drove several hundred miles through ash so bad you could hardly see due to a volcano that was erupting. We didn't know the road we were on was closed 'till we got to Valdez where my sister lives. I was born in Los Angeles on September 13, 1938 and lived in the same house 'till I left home at the age of 18 (two months before my 19th birthday) to join the Navy. I have two sisters Joy born in 1936 and Terry in 1946. Joy still lives in the Los Angeles area and Terry lives in Valdez Alaska. Joy has two kids Irene and Dan. Her husband died of lung cancer at the age of about 50 and she is still single. Terry married the son of the ambassador to Greece and they have a son Scott and adopted daughter Jenny. I am the only kid of my parents that has grandkids. My mother was upset with me one time when she realized that I had more grandkids than she did. I appeased her by telling her she had more great grandkids than I did. At the time I didn't have any. Of course entertainment wasn't like it is today for kids so I entertained myself "building a thing". At least that was my response when people asked me what I was doing. I also liked to dig holes but my dad put his foot down about my elephant traps and made me fill them up. We lived in Los Angeles city limits but had a garden in the front yard every year. I sold corn to the neighbors for ten cents an ear. The neighbors kids teased me and called me "Farmer Jones". I went to an Adventist school for the first three years then to a public school for the fourth grade. They were conducting an experiment I public schools that year called "voluntary learning". We could either learn or go to the back of the room and goof off. I chose the goofing off where I learned to make drums out of nail kegs and to spin thumb tacks like a top (which I can still do) and a few other useful things. The next year my parents decided I better go back to private school and repeat the fourth grade. I went to a Lutheran school for the fourth through sixth grade where learning wasn't optional. That took some adjusting but I managed after finding out what happens to kids who don't do their homework. Junior high (7th through 9th) as it was called then was at Eastmont Junior High in East Los Angeles. I went to Montebello Senior High (in Montebello California) 'till graduation in 1957. My childhood wasn’t very happy. My parents were not at all happy about being stuck with kids especially an energetic boy. Today my treatment would be called child abuse although there were some fun times. My dad did encourage my interest in Ham Radio and electronics. I wanted to be a carpenter like he was but he discouraged that telling me to get a job working with my brain instead of my back. The theory was if I hurt my back I could still use my brain and wouldn't loose my job. (He spent six months flat on his back once due to a back injury). After a very fun day at the beach with my friends shortly after graduation, my parents went nuts telling me that it just wasn't right to have eight full hours of fun in one day. They were very serious since fun wasn't part of their make up. They grew up in tough times and actually seemed to think fun was a sin. I told my dad it seemed like every time I had any fun at all they wanted to spoil it by yelling at me. He said if I didn't like it why didn't I go join the Army? I told him it was Sunday and the recruiting office was closed. He told me I could get someone to open it if I wanted to bad enough. Of course I couldn't but the next day I joined the Navy and shipped out the day after that. I wasn’t going to tell my parents but left a note tied to an electric alarm clock I had hidden. It would buzz for an hour every 12 hours so I figured it wouldn’t take too long for them to find it. I didn’t write a bitter note but just told them where I had gone. As it turned out they found out anyway. The recruiter called my mother to find out if I was really born in Los Angeles. He had checked and they couldn't find my birth certificate. When she asked him why he wanted to know he told her I had just joined the Navy. I had only told one person (my boss at the TV repair shop) and swore him to secrecy. A friend of mine found me at another friend's house and asked me if it was true that I had joined the Navy. I was mad at my boss for letting the cat out of the bag but he swore he hadn't told anyone. I called my friend and he told me my grandmother had told him. I decided to ditch the note and 'fess up. I acted like I had intended all along to tell my parents. We had a pleasant evening and the next morning my Dad took me to the induction center in Los Angeles. The Navy was a piece of cake. My folks were sure I would end up in the brig but I found that having consistent rules made it easy to keep out of trouble. When I was living at home I got in trouble for getting in a fight. I got a real beating for fighting. A few days later a guy came over trying to pick a fight with me and I refused to fight him with my parents watching me out the window. When he left I got a beating for not defending myself. That was just one example of the way my parents were. I couldn't please them no matter what I did. The Navy was different. If you followed the consistent rules all was well. I loved my job in the Navy and did quite well. They sent me to a six month long school to become an Aviation Guided Missileman. It was an electronic school and I loved working on the missiles and the missile test equipment. I spent the first part of my enlistment after school in Fallbrook California at a Guided Missile Service Unit. I transferred to Seal Beach for a few months then back to Fallbrook 'till my shore time was used up. I was transferred to The USS Hancock (an aircraft carrier) in Alameda California then to another carrier (the USS Bon Homme Richard) in San Diego. (there is a long story about the transfer if you want to hear it). I'll start part 2 with the transfer to the Bon Homme Richard.

Walter Family Tree

My grandpa, Steve Walter just sent me a copy of our family tree on his side. I thought I would put it up here so everyone could have a copy of it. The first page is the family tree while the other two pages go into more detail pertaining to siblings, children, and significant dates. Soon I will be putting up a series of posts written by my grandpa about his life. I thought this would go well with those posts. Hope you enjoy.

Ollie May Jones

I thought it would be good to put up a little information for the Floyd side of the family. This is Ollie May Jones. She is my great, great grandma on my dad's mother's side. So it goes Me, My dad, Ola Nadeen Wortham, Myrtle May Pate, and then Ollie May Pate. She is the kind of woman that really reminds me of where the Floyds get their family culture. We are hardworking people who are firmly rooted in that "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" mentality. When I read this, I could just see her life and what she did trickle down the tree to me. The ringing chickens by their necks, knowing how to handle a shotgun, and always lending a helping hand is just so Floyd. Part of the article got cut off when it was originally copied for me. Something that I remember my aunt Carmen mentioning was that she was a bit of a midwife in her parts of the state as well. Its an interesting read and is written by a not so distant relative that we are no longer in contact with, but my dad and aunt recollect.