Roberts Roots & Branches

This was an especially special evening.  Watching these two little ones, knowing that they were related, and yet only through serendipity events they were able to meet and be friends.  I am sure my Dad-and other ancestors-were smiling in heaven this particular evening.

Family love is messy,  clinging,  and of an annoying and  repetitive pattern,  like bad wallpaper.   ---Fredrick Nietzsch

"A man with a hump-backed uncle  mustn’t make fun of another man’s  cross-eyed aunt."   ---Mark Twain

Home is the place where,  when you have to go there,  they have to take you in.   ---Robert Frost

I love driving from Evanston to Rock Springs early in the morning and seeing the landscape of grayish brown and brownish gray. I love reading microfilm on B2 at the Library.   I love the dark secluded microfilm readers than transform you through time and through countries. I love making copies of newspaper articles at WWCC.   I love reading the fascinating news and social articles, reading the ads and finding glimpses of my ancestors.   I love how the old newspapers seem to transport me back in time. I love looking at original marriage applications at Sweetwater County Court House.   I love gleaning the information from the documents, touching the originals and reaching through time to young love of yesterday! I loved driving to Iowa with my Dad and back home through Wyoming.   I loved listening to him recall stories as we traveled through Wyoming.   I loved spending uninterrupted one on one time with him for miles and miles and hou...

All men cannot boast freedom, all men cannot boast love, But every man, since Adam fell, can boast of one thing from above. That thing most dear is heritage, they know the story well, Take away man’s heritage, he is nothing but a shell. Heritage is priceless, it means so much to me And by reading many histories of those who used to be, I realize the true values of life and liberty. It is a broad horizon to look upon and say, I love those dear pioneers who made possible this day, I love them, and honor them, I proudly think of them and tell; Take away man’s heritage, he is nothing but a shell. --Anna Rae Williams Carter            Carter, Kate B, complied by, Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, 1958, Lessons for May, 1958, page 524-525

Thinking back to something my grandmother said, Years and years and years ago, I wish I could remember Her words better and see her face as clearly as I did When we sat on her porch shelling peas and talking, Talking, talking about what happened that afternoon, And last week and when she was a girl at home With Mama and Papa and Brother. They are names to me and faces in faded pictures, But from her I know that Mama was an educated lady, And Papa made whiskey in a still in the woods (Which was a secret from all the neighbors, except a few), And Brother, who wanted to fight for the South, But was too young, ran away and fought anyhow, But was too young, ran away and fought anyhow, Though Papa tried to stop him.   He returned, But was not the same precious boy who’s slipped away On a moonless night, unseen by all, except Grandmother. Now, at a distance of years from Grandmother’s porch, The sound of her voice has faded from my memory. Thou...

“Family faces are magic mirrors.     Looking at people who belong to us,  we see the past, present and future.”      ---Gail Lumet Buckley

Sometimes I wonder what my ancestors would think of me as I search every nook and cranny to find information about their lives!   What if they were private people and would not necessarily want someone, especially a hundred years later, poking about their business! I will admit I have searched for living people, and as I do that, I wonder, if the extended cousins would feel the same way about me poking my nose in their business!   It isn’t that I have done it on purpose, sometimes I have just assumed, yes you heard me—assumed, that someone has passed away when they haven’t.   Embarrassing! Hopefully, my ancestors know me well enough by now to understand that I am just trying to learn about them and understand who they were.   Hopefully, they understand that by putting the pieces of their lives back together I learn about them and become familiar with them and together we develop a relationship of understanding and familiarity.   Hopefully. . .

What are you doing today to save your family's history?

National Sibling Day  

Heading to the hospital on a train, in Vienna, Austria, Maria Augusta Kutschera was born on January 26, 1905.   Maria married Georg Von Trapp on November 26, 1927 in Austria before the Nazi takeover of Austria.   It was this Maria, that Rogers and Hammerstein fashioned their legendary Maria in The Sound of Music .   There are similarities and differences between the “grand story” of Maria in The Sound of Music,   and Maria Augusta Kutschera Von Trapp’s “real life”.   “Maria Von Trapp died in 1987, but the songs her life story inspired, echo still.” ---Charles Osgood, CBS News Sunday Morning, aired 1/26/2014.(1) Of course the musical is a beautifully written sugary rendition of a fictional life with many liberties taken with the outcome of a musical in mind, rather than a historically accurate documentary recounting Maria’s life and that of her family members. In her article,   “Movie vs. Reality: The Real Story of the von Trapp Family”,...