Our guest, writes for and joins us for this All About That Place cohort of the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

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An Exhibit Unwinds the Story.

This unusual story combines Hong Kong with Hollywood stardom and WWII-era spycraft. It came together after a conversation with Nancy Kwan, the legendary starlet of post-war films like the 1961 Flower Drum Song.

I’d known Nancy since I was a teenager in San Francisco in the 1990s. In 2024, she visited an AAPI History Month exhibition I’d arranged at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles.

The exhibit took us deep into her remarkable family and their contributions to Hong Kong in the last decades of the Qing dynasty.

The story starts with this famous photograph of a young Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with his contemporaries, Chan Siu-pak, Yau Lit, and Yeung Hok-ling, taken at a medical school in Hong Kong around 18881. Standing behind them is Nancy’s uncle, Kwan King-leung. A copy of this famous photograph is on the cover of a book, “The Beginning of the Colony of Hong Kong and the Kwan Family,” co-written by another of Nancy’s uncles, S. Kwan.

Colonial Hong Kong Sets the Stage.

Nancy’s father, Kwan Wing-hong, was a member of an affluent Chinese family. His family sent him to Cambridge University to study architecture. While there, he met and married a British fashion model, Marquita Scott. After graduating, he returned to Hong Kong with his new wife and moved into a large home in Kowloon. They had a son, Ka-keung, and a daughter, Ka-shen (better known by her English name, Nancy.)

By the time his daughter Nancy was born in May 1939, China had been at war with Japan for eight years. Most Chinese date the start of the war to the Mukden incident in Manchuria in 1931. As international affairs deteriorated, so did their marriage. By 1941, Marquita Scott divorced her husband and returned to England. After his first wife returned to England, Kwan Wing-hong married a Chinese woman named Nan. 

The Chinese who lived in the territory of Hong Kong under European control were protected from the hardships of those wars. However, that was not to last.

The Japanese coveted Southeast Asia's natural resources. Before WWII, the Kwan family owned vast tin and rubber holdings in Malaya, which thrust family interests directly into the war. 

Black Christmas & the Escape from Hong Kong.

On 7 December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on US forces in Hawaii. Attacks soon followed against other Allied Pacific bases. The British had been complacent and underestimated the ability of the Imperial Japanese forces. The loss of two British battleships and the fall of Malaya and Singapore upended the British strategy in the Pacific. The battle of Hong Kong is considered one of the first campaigns of World War II.  The Hong Kong garrison of British, Canadian, and Indian forces fell in 17 days, surrendering on 25 December 1941.

It’s a date known in Hong Kong as “Black Christmas.”

The British had no practical way to defend the city. In a 1962 interview. Kwan Wing-hong recalled how Hong Kong was “chaotic and disorganized.” He added:

“I knew all of this would change as soon as the Japanese occupation authorities arrived, so I decided that it was now or never if I was to escape with my family. I booked passage on a Japanese ship that was leaving for the Portuguese colony of Macao, about forty miles down the China coast. 

On the morning the ship was to sail, we left our beautiful house on the hill in Kowloon. There was Nan and myself and our cook and the children’s nurse. We had the two children hidden in baskets, which the cook carried Chinese-style, on a pole across his shoulders. We had nothing with us but the clothes on our backs, so as not to arouse suspicion.  I’ll never forget that day. 

“We walked past platoons of Japanese soldiers, took the ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong, and boarded the Japanese ship without any trouble. The Japanese were stopping all families with children and baggage; but since we were well-dressed and didn’t appear to have either, I guess they couldn’t conceive that we were refugees. I tried to act as imperious as I could, and maybe they thought I was a Chinese collaborator leaving on some official mission with a retinue of servants.”

Kwan Wing-hong and his family reached Macao without incident. He realized he could not support his family on that island. He negotiated with a Chinese businessman and arranged passage for his group on a junk headed up the Pearl River to the Chinese mainland.

The junk was a blockade runner, jammed with rich and poor people. Nancy’s father’s description continued:

“Little Keung and Nancy kept crying, but there was scarcely room to stretch out and sleep. We sailed for nine hours in the pitch darkness, to avoid the Japanese patrol boats. When we finally arrived, our ordeal was far from over. The area was teeming with Japanese soldiers.  I knew I had to get about a hundred and sixty miles inland, beyond the area the Japanese army controlled, and I decided to brave it by walking right through them. Again I used my rich-Chinese-collaborator act.

Using my small reserve of money, I hired two sedan chairs, with porters to carry them. Nan rode in one and the nurse and the children in the other. The cook and I walked. We walked right through the Japanese army.

They just stared at us curiously as I strode by like a pompous functionary, although I was terrified lest they ask for my identification. They never did. I’m quite proud of that march. We walked a hundred and sixty miles in five days. That’s a little more than thirty miles a day – or just about the pace the British army sets when it marches under combat conditions in the field.”

The Intelligence BAAG in Wartime China

Kwan explained that he and his family lived in several places in China.  Kweilin (Guilin), Chungking, and Kunming, near the Myanmar (Burma) border. 

Nancy added:

“I was too young to remember all this...but my stepmother has told me about Japanese air raids and how we nearly starved and how my father was always going off on mysterious missions for the Allies”.

Kwan Wing-hong’s value to the Allies could not be minimized. He looked Chinese, but his soul was British. He was very well-educated, and his aristocratic heritage gave him the leadership abilities that helped him achieve results. It was probably inevitable that Kwan’s talents would find a place in the military. He joined an organization that came to be known as the “British Army Aid Group” (BAAG). 

Lt. Col. Sir Lindsay Ride formed the BAAG after escaping from a Japanese POW camp. The War Office incorporated the BAAG into the structure of Military Intelligence known as Military Intelligence, Section 9, or M.I.9.

The BAAG became operational on 6 June 1942 and presented itself as a humanitarian aid organization. To be sure, it provided substantial amounts of aid to needy civilians. However, its primary mission was to help prisoners of war and internees escape. In doing so, it also collected military intelligence. 

Chinese James Bond

Kwan Wing-hong’s language skills were critical. An American aviator forced to parachute into hostile territory must have been pleasantly surprised to be welcomed by a Cambridge-educated Chinese savior who spoke impeccable English. He might be viewed as having been a Chinese version of James Bond who led the oppressed to safety.

Kwan’s BAAG codename was “Domus.” He may have also been known as No. 74 and may have also used the following names: “Hunky” or “Hongkie.” According to available information, Domus worked in forward areas and mainly engaged in Escape, Evasion, and Evacuation missions, principally under Colin McEwan. Domus was said to be full of initiative and devotion. He later reportedly received the King's Commendation from Great Britain.

The BAAG continued its work after the surrender of Japan and was disbanded on 31 December 1945. As Colin McEwan2 explained,

“My man in the upper West River area rejoiced in the code name of Domus3 although after all these years I can find no reason why that particular christening came about. Hunky Kwan was a Malayan Chinese architect whom I had known in Hong Kong (sic) and many of my readers will have seen his daughter Nancy Kwan who became quite a well-known film star in post-war days.

My pet story of Hunky’s ingenuity was when Lt. Miller of the USAAF was shot down in Hunky’s area. There was a Japanese concentration camp in that particular area and since he had been shot down in daylight there was a fair amount of hue and cry after him which came a bit too close for Hunky’s comfort.

So, to pass a few days till this died down, Hunky took the lieutenant by night into Nanning, the biggest city in the area, which, sitting as it did on the West River, was a main Japanese center. There they both spent a few days in one of the better class brothels which catered for the higher ranking Japanese officers but on the ‘call out’ system which meant that no Japanese apart from the odd medical officer ever called personally. 

In May 2024, Nancy recounted this fantastic story of her father’s World War II exploits in China. Although he began his work with the British forces, sometime after 1942, he transferred to the American forces and worked with them until the war's end. This fact was validated by discovering his original identity card/paper issued by United States forces in China in 1944. (Nancy recently found it in her family’s archives.)

A Little Girl’s Dress

At the war's end, American pilots thanked Kwan Wing-hong for his contributions in their own way. Nancy remembered how a group of American pilots came to their home with gifts for her and her brother. They presented her with a white dress made from parachute cloth and her brother with a little leather bomber jacket.  Sadly, both of these items have been lost through time.

On the occasion of AAPI History Month, I arranged for Cindy Yee,4 Nancy Kwan’s friend and superfan, to present her with a recreation of the little white dress made of parachute cloth. The dress brought back all the emotions and memories of her father’s service in World War II.

The exhibition had been planned to celebrate the fallen warriors of AAPI heritage during WWII. Nancy’s presence also allowed us to explore her father’s unsung heroism.

As the first Asian actress to play a leading role in a major American motion picture, Nancy Kwan has a distinguished place in film history. Today, she’s working on her memoirs.

This post is part of our special All About That Place cohort for the Members’ Corner, but these posts are released each month. Our next opening is for October with a deadline of the 21st of the month. Do you have a story to tell? We’d love to share your work. Learn more:

Our guest writer, Kerri Kearney joins us for the fourth in her series for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate family history storytelling — in all its forms. You can contribute stories to the Members’ Corner, too. Learn more here.

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In my first three posts, I introduced tree burls as a metaphor for the unexpected twists and turns in family trees. Though sometimes unwanted, these natural anomalies often hide beauty. Burls appear in family trees when we depart from “ideal” social norms, such as growing a family through adoption or surrogacy or changes caused by divorce, remarriage, or a child conceived through an affair. These and other instances spin family branches off in unexpected ways. 

My first post introduced the concept; my second described sharing the burl in a family tree through stories; and my third post introduced sharing stories as profoundly important tools to families.

Our lives are intertwined with people, places, and times. These elements factor into how we “story” our families. Burls often represent the complicated circumstances or even secrets lurking in the shadows. A critical consideration in sharing these stories is appreciating the affected characters.

For example, the children’s book I described in part 2 told the origin story of our daughter, who came to us through adoption. I thought of the story as her story. I wrote it for her, but the story included other important actors: her biological mother, my husband, and our other two children.

Was it my right to tell a story in which aspects of their lives were revealed?

I honestly don’t know. Even in research, which has numerous rules to protect individuals, privacy in storytelling (which often provides data for research) is a murky and much-discussed question.

While there are multiple positions people take on this question, let me share my take on three of them:

1. “You own your stories. To tell or not to tell is your decision.”

2. “Share only with permission. No one should be writing about others without their explicit permission.”

3. “It’s messy and bears careful consideration every time.” 

1. You own your stories.

I believe that each of us owns our stories. But telling our stories rarely impacts only us. For instance, an individual who tells the story of how she experienced her parents’ divorce is highly likely to reveal her “truth” about both parents, who they remarried, and others who may have been involved. Putting those stories “out there,” especially with no warning to the other characters, is likely to create conflict, embarrassment, anger, and other negative responses within and sometimes outside the family. 

I have a bonus (or chosen) family member who had children with his second wife. She insisted that their children never know he was married before her. (Perhaps this assumes that neither of the children become genealogists!) As a result, telling a family story that reveals his first marriage may have a profound impact on his marriage and children that could affect essential trust relationships. Compounding the problem, his first marriage and divorce also involved extended family members as characters.

Thus, you can see how the stance of “we own our stories” suggests that extended family members could incidentally include his first marriage in a story without regard to the potential fallout for his family. Many people who take this stance have remaining negative emotions about what happened or are “truthtellers,” rigidly adhering to telling the truth regardless of the consequences for the people involved. Have you experienced this?

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2. Only with Permission

I also consider this position to be extreme. My resistance to it is likely because I dislike family secrets. This position allows an individual or individuals to insist that important family stories remain secrets regardless of how the other characters feel or the potential consequences. Secrets in the family typically exist because of fear or shame. Some family secrets can become quite toxic. 

For example, a friend of mine found out she was conceived through rape when she was in her early 50s. The truth helped her understand the distanced relationship she had growing up with her biological mother. It not only prevented her from building ties of trust with her mother and but also undermined her relationships with other family members who’d known the secret. The consequence was an upheaval in her identity that compounded frayed relationships with anger and resentment.

There is never a good time to tell an origin story that includes rape. However, I believe that keeping this secret for so long prevented my friend from being able to process it as a part of her identity and heal much earlier in her life. This “burl” was a closely-held family secret. I wonder what would have happened if the seeds of her story had been planted early in her life so that she could have asked the questions across time and as she was ready?

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3. It’s Messy.

Being human is messy, and families are incredibly messy. What to tell and when are fundamental decisions. I believe that to the extent that stories affect others, you have to balance the toxicity of secrets and honoring truth. 

One of the problems I have with keeping family secrets is that they create façades out of personal stories. Soon, we’re leading lives that are not our own. It makes it seem as though we never made mistakes—big or small. No one ever sees the hardships that affected us or how we overcame them. We always did it perfectly the first time. We’ve successfully fought off all of the villains in every story.

That story is never true, but pretending it puts a lot of pressure on children, grandchildren, and other younger family members when they’ve only ever heard half of the person’s story. It creates unattainable standards, and makes young adults may feel like failures, never measuring up to an expected standard of perfection.

Is that really what we want for our families?

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My own story

It has never been my wish to hurt others or make others uncomfortable by what I choose to reveal. This respect for others is part of my story. 

I am a survivor of an extreme case of post-partum depression that ran undiagnosed and unchecked for well over a year. We don’t often talk about post-partum depression in polite society because it contrasts too sharply with closely held ideals about mothers. It is hidden under an accusation every mother fears: the bad mother. You see it magnified by media reports of women with post-partum psychosis who kill or endanger their children. 

Because I work in a space with a strong history of insisting that women choose between having children and professional success, I felt it was vital for me and other women to share our stories. I chose to be unashamed of my experience, and, in doing so, worked to neutralize any attempt to undermine my credibility by revealing it as a secret.

However, my post-partum depression did much relational damage within my family. Telling my story involved other characters – my husband, children, parents, and sister. I knew I would have support and understanding from some, but certainly not from others. My PPD was a source of shame for some in the story. 

I chose to write my story anyway.

I wrote letters to each family member from whom I expected negative responses to explain why and what I hoped to achieve through writing it. I included details about where it would be published, and a copy of the article. None of those family members ever chose to discuss it with me, but I was at peace with my decision and still am for two crucial reasons.

First, if one of my daughters or my nieces developed PPD, I wanted her to know she was not alone. I didn’t want her to see it as a mothering failure. Second, through my story, I was insisting that women’s bodies should never be a source of shame in patriarchal workplaces like mine.

I am not proposing that my decision or how I handled it is right for every situation or every person. I hope it demonstrates my position of avoiding family secrets while considering and respecting the feelings of others.

How about your story?

As I noted in my last post, family storytellers are immensely responsible for deciding what stories will live on after they’re gone. We often decide what to tell and what to “forget.” Too frequently, once something is seen in print, it is considered absolute truth.

The responsibility of keeping stories comes with great power. It is also high-stakes and messy. Let’s continue this meaningful conversation. Join me in the conversation below, or send me a message.

Explore Kerri’s contributions to the Projectkin Community Forum, including this Family Burls series, our book publishing event, plus her Project Recipes.

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Our guest author, , joins us from Mountain View, California and writes . This is his second post for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

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When I arrived on a December afternoon in 2021, Grandma Kay was flipping through a photo album. She had been looking for a picture from her wedding day over 81 years ago. She had a couple of wedding photos of her and her late husband, winemaker Mario Gemello, prominently displayed in her Northern California home. This time, she was looking for a group photo from the reception. It was one that she rarely ever looked at.

She hardly knew any of the wedding guests in the photo. My mother’s parents, Mario and Kay Gemello, had known each other since grade school. They had an out-of-town wedding in 1940. Of all places, it was in Las Vegas, well before it became a destination for couples to elope under the guise of parental disapproval. 

This wedding was no secret, though neither of their parents attended. Destination nuptials were a creative way for the couple to combine their wedding and honeymoon—on the cheap. Grandpa Mario’s cousin ran a hotel in downtown Las Vegas, close to St. Joan of Arc Church. John Vinassa, the general manager of the Union Hotel, offered to plan and comp much of the festivities.

“I can’t find that photo with Silvia,” Grandma Kay told me. She was referring to Vinassa’s daughter, who was seven when the photo was taken. She was motivated to find the picture by a sorrowful event: Silvia had just passed away a few weeks earlier at the age of 88.

Over the years, my grandparents had gotten to know Silvia. She attended college nearby, at San Francisco State. She would settle in the Bay Area, marry, and raise a family in the East Bay.

“I don’t think the photo is in the album,” I told her, recalling that we had discussed it during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. My mom and I were splitting caregiving duties during the pre-vaccine era to help shrink the bubble around Grandma Kay, who was about to turn 100. I frequently used photo albums to trigger different topics of conversation. Otherwise, Grandma Kay often retold her “greatest hits,” the same five stories at the forefront of her memory.

We found the reception photo, among other loose pictures we’d looked at earlier. It brought back many memories for my grandmother, particularly transportation logistics in 1940. Getting to Las Vegas from Mountain View, California, under the pre-marital guidelines of Grandma Kay’s Roman Catholic upbringing was a challenge, she claimed.

“We didn’t have much money during the Great Depression,” she said. “And being Catholic, we couldn’t stay in a hotel together until we got married. So we had to make it all the way to Las Vegas without stopping,” she said with tension in her voice.

Las Vegas was a small town of just over 8,000 residents in 1940. Its small-town feel was even evident in its newspaper coverage: when Vinassa’s mother died a year earlier in her home country of Italy, her death made front-page headlines in the Las Vegas Age newspaper.

Grandma said that during her wedding weekend, Vinassa took the newlyweds for dancing, drinks, and a little gambling at the 91 Club on Highway US-91, the dusty road connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The 91 Club had a storied history, starting as The Pair-O-Dice Nite Club, a private club (Knock. Knock. What’s the password?) during Prohibition. It was the first nightclub on US-91, later renamed Las Vegas Boulevard.

A Centenarian’s Memory Lane

Grandma Kay celebrated her 103rd birthday on June 26th, 2024. One key to her longevity has been her daily exercise routine. During the pandemic lockdown, we’d stroll a half—mile loop around her favorite park.

It’s a nice tree-lined park with flat terrain and a combination of sunny and shady areas. One day, I couldn’t help noticing the cracks in the pavement. Using my camera phone, I snapped a picture of Grandma Kay pushing her walker over the cracked pavement.

When we got back to her house, I figured there may be a reporter at the local newspaper scrounging for one more story to meet her weekly quota.

“We should tip off the Mountain View newspaper about the poorly kept walking path conditions. That’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen,” I told Grandma Kay. “What’s the name of your local paper?”

“The Register Leader,” she said. That didn’t sound right to me. I scribbled a note to Google later.

“I went to high school with the son of the newspaper’s owner,” she added. 

I grabbed her 1936 high school yearbook, and we sifted through it. 

“That’s him! Lee Keene,” she said as if she was about to look him up in a phonebook.

“He’s probably close to, or over, 100 — like you. Think he’s still alive?”

“Probably not,” she said.

Then it dawned on me: the local paper was the Mountain View Voice. I Googled “Mountain View Register Leader” and found a historical website reporting that it was founded in 1903 and closed in 1964.

Would you be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work, too.

Our guest author, , joins us from St. Marys Pennsylvania and writes for . Rainey is a new writer for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

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Overview:

The St Mary's Catholic Church is the very reason the city of St Marys was founded in the first place.1 The early settlers were German Catholic immigrants who wanted to worship God in their way and retain their German traditions. Before St Marys was incorporated into a city in 1992, two places, St Marys and Benzinger Township, shared a borough. Both places shared churches, schools, and other institutions. To encompass both the former Benzinger Township and St Marys, I am focussing my study on the St Mary's Catholic Church, which served both the borough and the township before the incorporation that brought them together.

Location:

The church is located on Church Street between Maruas and Joseph Streets.

History of St Marys:

The Catholic church is the reason St Marys exists as a city. St Marys was founded by the German American Catholic Brotherhood of Philadelphia and Baltimore. At the time of its founding, the Know-Nothings political party was vandalizing churches in cities up and down the East Coast of the United States. Priests were being tarred and feathered. At the time, there was a lot of prejudice towards both German and Irish Catholics. Both groups traveled on “coffin” ships2 to the United States. 

The Germans emigrated from kingdoms where war and rioting hindered economic advancement. The Brotherhood bought 35,000 acres along Elk Creek from the Fox Land Company of Boston, Massachusetts. In October 1842, two parties, one from Baltimore and the other from Philadelphia, started their long trek to the site they purchased. One day, this would become the city of St Marys.

Before clearing the land, they settled at John Green’s farm. The women and children stayed at the Green farm until the men opened a path to St Marys and cleared enough land for houses and farming along Elk Creek, where South St Marys Street Elementary School is today. The wives, children, and possessions did not travel to the new homestead until December 8, 1842. 

The first woman to set foot on the land was Mary (Stockman), so the town was called Marienstadt or Marystown and placed under the guidance of the Virgin Mary.  The community and parish were closely related then. Every man, woman, and child in the settlement was German and a member of the Catholic faith.

In the beginning, there were 26 families, and they suffered many hardships.  Father Alexander joined the community to offer spiritual sustenance and keep them focused on their greater reward in heaven.  He reminded everyone of the Golden Rule.

St Marys was platted in a particular way because the settlers were advised to build their houses in groups and set up their farms as they had in German kingdoms. The farmland was surveyed and divided into 25-, 50-, 75-, and 100-acre lots despite the rugged terrain. The early settlers envisioned thousands of Catholics living here. 

Baron Gottlieb Heinrich Von Schroeter

In the leading history of St Marys and Benzinger township, Baron Gottlieb Heinrich Von Schroeter's contributions were omitted. However, the author of a book on the history of St Mary's church did his research and remedied the issue. Baron Von Schroeter played a significant role in settling St Marys as a refuge for Catholic Germans. 

Baron Von Schroeter was born in Holstein on March 25, 1805, the son of a well-to-do Baron from Mecklenburg.  He went to Rome and got married, but he soon separated from his wife. In 1836, while in Munich, a poor man introduced him to the Redemptorist Catholics.3 The Baron had inherited properties from a relative in Mecklenburg, which he sold to return to Rome and involve himself in the American Redemptorists. 

The Baron arrived in America about 1843 when the colony of St Marys was on the brink of failure. He joined Mr. Eschbach and Col. Benzinger in buying the land and an additional 26,000 acres from the Fox Land Company. Then, they changed the community structure from a commune to a semi-capitalist venture.  He visited Marianstadt many times and wrote a pamphlet that brought many German immigrants from the old country to this brand-new settlement in the wilderness. This pamphlet was written in 1846. Father Alexander, who secured the financial contributions of Col. Benzinger and Mr. Eschbach, owned the grist mill on Mill Street.

The Baron contributed much of his income to the settlement in St Marys as allowances for the priests and nuns. He convinced King Ludwig I of Bavaria to sponsor the community. Despite a visit to Pope Pius IX to make the request, he was not able to secure a special bishop for the settlement. Most of the Baron’s time in America was spent at Loretto, Pennsylvania, though he was also instrumental in creating St. Vincent College and Convent in Latrobe. 

The Redemptorists (1842-1849)

For the first seven years, the Redemptorists were entrusted with the colony's spiritual and sometimes temporal welfare. Many of the original settlers were from Baltimore, where the Redemptorists were from. Life in these early years was hard and there were times when both adults and children were starving. 

The children walked miles to the church school with no shoes and rags wrapped around them. St Marys was a very poor settlement for quite some time.  The terrain is rugged, so farming was difficult, and these people were in such an isolated area that they might as well have been in the wilds of the Rockies, even though they were west of the Allegheny mountains on the Allegheny plateau. The settlement would have floundered and failed without the missionary work and spiritual sustenance of the Redemptorists.

The first Holy Mass was given at the Walker house, which served as a boarding house for the new settlers as they arrived.  By 1843, Father Otto Borgess, a traveling missionary from Trinity Church in Philadelphia, ministered to the congregation. He was a familiar face because many had come from the same church in Philadelphia.

Over time, he was joined by missionaries, including priests and nuns.  The nuns were housed in a convent built where the Penn Highlands Elk Medical Center is today.  The convent was moved to its present location because the land was considered unfit for building. The picture below is a grotto, adjacent to the nuns’ burial space.

In 1849, the Redemptorists were called to take up missionary work elsewhere, so the Benedictines were sent to replace them.  

The Benedictines

The Benedictines came from St Vincent Convent and College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.  Father Boniface Wimmer came to serve the colony and later the Sisters of Notre Dame.  Originally, the parish was connected to the Diocese of Pittsburgh, but today, the parish belongs to the Diocese of Erie.  The Benedictines had more access to resources and were better able to serve the colony.  

The original frame church built by Father Alexander in the triangle formed between Center, Maurus, and Cross streets was destroyed by fire on May 10, 1850. Services were held in the schools until the land was chosen and the basic frame was built. Up until the present day, the Benedictines supplied the priests, and when the nuns still lived here, they were Benedictine nuns.

Rebuilding the Church

After the fire, Col. Benzinger and Mr. Eschbach surveyed the area and restructured the lots to create space for the new church.  They broke ground on Pentecost Monday, May 31, 1852.  Father Boniface Wimmer gave the blessing and presided over laying the cornerstone on June 27, 1852.

Every man, woman, and child in the settlement worked to build the church. Each street was assigned a day to work on the church, so their other duties (like farming, mining, or logging) were not neglected. Services were held in the unfinished church on December 8, 1853, and Christmas Day that year.

Father Joshua Young completed and blessed the church on July 12, 1854. In 1899 and 1910, the church resurfaced in new cement (stucco).  

Ignatius Garner paid for and built the organ in the church.  He arranged for the materials and the men to make the organ in the church in 1857.   He was the local representative of the land company Col. Benezinger, and Mr. Eschbach had created.  He was also the postmaster.  There were 1300 people in the colony. 

On a more personal note, Johann Wilhelm Gausman left provisions in his will to purchase the sacred art of the Childhood of Christ. Johann Gausman’s son, Heinrich Gausman, a carpenter, also donated money for one of the stained glass windows in the church. 

Along with building a new church, a new site for the cemetery was chosen. In November of 1860, a tract of land at the end of St Joseph Road was selected for the new cemetery.  The area was expanded, and in 1884, a chapel was constructed on the land. The cemetery includes examples of German blacksmithing, as well as creative forms of grave markings done by the poorer members of the community. The cemetery is vast so a review of the historic elements in the graveyard will have to wait for separate survey.

The schools

The first parochial school was located where the Penn Highlands Elk Hospital is now. It was built in 1844 by Father Alexander. It was a one-story structure with two rooms made with lumber from the first sawmill. Two Redemptorist brothers, Brother Xavier X. Burdych and Brother Joseph, were the first two schoolmasters. Only boys were taught here. Girls were not educated until the Benedictine nuns came to St. Mary's. After the church burned down in 1850, this school was used for church services.  

The first convent and school for girls were in the same place as the boys' school. Father Alexander erected it in 1847. It was also the convent for the Benedictine sisters. It was a two-story wooden building that was unpainted. In 1860, the Benedictine nuns built their own convent attached to the new church building that was started in 1852. 

St Benedictine’s Academy was behind the church on Church Street. This academy was for the training of future nuns.  The Benedictine nuns no longer reside in St Marys, but they have their private graveyard in an area behind the church.  The convent and the academy were recently demolished, along with the gymnasium to the former Central Catholic High School building. 

There were a few other schools for Catholic children, including Central Catholic, a middle school. It is the Parish Center today. Catholic Schools have been consolidated into two buildings: The Queen of the World Church on Queens Road, where all elementary children are taught, and the Elk County Catholic School building on Maurus Street, where middle and high school students are taught together.

Corpus Christi Festival

For the past 179 years, St Mary’s Catholic Church has celebrated the Corpus Christi Festival on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday in June. The festival is a procession that allows one to display devotion to the Christian Faith.

A monstrance is used to carry the Sacred Vessel through the town's streets. The clergy hold the monstrance above their heads while the congregation follows with songs and prayers. Altars are placed along the route, and the journey ends with a benediction and the blessed sacrament. 

The Church Today

There are churches of multiple denominations in the city today.  St Mary's Catholic Church (the German Church) has combined with The Sacred Heart Church (the Irish Church) and the Queen of the World Church (the newest church) to meet the needs of the sick and homebound, providing a quality education and assisting to the needs of the children in the Catholic system.  Recently, the church held a traditional Latin service.   

Other Elements of St Mary's Spiritual Life.

With so many churches in the area, one woman decided to bring the faithful together by hosting a music festival in Shawmut Park in the middle of summer. It is called Soulstock, and it has grown over the last five years to become an important event for the community. Soulstock 2024, takes place from July 26 through July 28th. 

Would you be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work, too.

Our guest writer, Marci Keats Rudolph, joins us from Nova Scotia, Canada, and is a returning writer for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

Follow Marci Keats Rudolph

My dad hardly ever spoke about Grandma Keats, but my mother was full of stories. She and my father moved in with her and Nan, Dad’s grandmother, at some point post-WWII. Mom didn’t know how to cook; she had been a career secretary at Lever Brothers1.

Grandma Keats taught her, and they bonded like friends. I say ‘friends’ because my mother’s face would look longing and wistful when she spoke about their time together.

According to Mom, Grandma was skilled in every domestic task imaginable and remained quiet and humble. I know she taught Mom to knit, and I suspect she tried to teach her crochet. These antique-looking crochet hooks I found in her sewing basket could be proof—or not.

I also have some very old knitting needles from my mother’s collection. The material in them wasn’t what I found in Eaton’s2 in my teens. That aside, she helped me learn to knit in Girl Guides.3 

If I’m sitting these days, I’m knitting. I thank my Grandma Keats and possibly Nan for passing on this delightful craft. From dishcloths to sweaters, blankets, and recently socks, I love working with all kinds of fibres. 

I am knitting this sock (the first of two, hopefully) for one of our grandchildren.

I love this quote from the poem:

The entire poem, the Sermon in the Stocking, may be read on MetaSorting.com.

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Our guest, , co-founder of the , now on Substack, joins us with his fourth contribution to the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate our members’ contributions to family history storytelling — in narratives, recordings, and more. Learn more about joining a future cohort here. Follow Ron Chan and subscribe to his new publication:

Chinese American GI Project

It's hard to choose from a lifetime of memories to share any single memory of my mom. as each is special. I remember

• the feeling of exhilaration at age five when I found the toy "Santa Mom" put in my stocking, or

• the look on her face when she found my pet turtle Gazebo under the stove shortly after, or 

• her open heart—and purse—towards any effort necessary for our family's well-being.

So rather than seeking one moment in time, I’ve tried to characterize a lifetime of lessons she provided as a mother and friend ... to shape who I am today as a man, a husband, and a father.  

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Our guest writer, Kerri Kearney joins us for a third in her series for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

Follow Kerri Kearney

In my first post, I introduced burls in tree bark as a metaphor for branches of family trees that spin “off in unanticipated and sometimes unwanted directions.”

In my second post, I described one way of storying family tree burls by sharing the example of a children’s book I wrote for my toddler (now adult) daughter.

In this post, I’d like to explore the power of regular old family non-burl stories as tools. First, however, consider the power of telling our family stories. As storytellers, we hold a profound and sacred responsibility because we often share stories about ancestors or others who cannot speak for themselves.

The story about a fairy princess I shared in my last post is an example. I wrote the book as an age-appropriate way to share how our daughter came into our family. In it, I framed her story to help her better understand her origins and how it has shaped her resilience. 

Stories endure across time, including past death. As we tell the story, we select what to include, what to “forget,” and how to position the characters. As a family story, these pieces are often accepted as “truth.” 

As an educator, mother, and family storyteller, I am particularly interested in how stories frame and influence our understanding of ourselves. I can’t think of a time when our knowledge of ourselves is more critical than when we are teens and young adults. This period is one of dramatic human growth. Development during this period, in many ways, sets the stage for the rest of life. 

Integrating the last two thoughts sets up space for essential considerations for us as storytellers. If stories endure even past death and we, as the tellers, are making decisions about how and what to tell, how might our family stories support the identity-forming work that naturally occurs during adolescence and young adulthood for our children and grandchildren? Allow me to share a very simple family story connection that mattered for my youngest daughter in a very big way. 

Take the girl out of the farm, but…

As a young professional, I left my home for “the city life.” That was partly driven by my choice to work in the corporate world. In my early 30s, I married my husband, an engineer, who was raised in a suburb of Detroit. We had three children, and by the time they started elementary school, we lived in Edmond, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City. While more diverse now, Edmond’s origin story is one of family wealth and narrow beliefs about social positions. 

While we were a middle-class family in north Edmond, our children were surrounded by peers of considerable wealth and material goods. Their middle school was large, and their high school was very large. All of these factors seemed to compound what might be ordinary middle and high school challenges. Our son, who is our oldest, navigated well. Primarily due to medical concerns, our second child attended an online school beginning in middle school.

Our youngest … loved horses, her dogs, planting and raising gardens, and cooking. While our kids had been on horses at my family’s ranch since they were very young, her interests led me to hire a trainer to teach her formal skills. She blossomed. She rode English, including jumping, helped with children’s parties (with a horse stylized as a unicorn), learned to ride Western, and did a few horse shows. By that time, she was entering the very large Edmond High School. And she faltered.

Riding horses during middle school was quirky. Riding horses, loving dogs, planting gardens, and cooking as a high school student in the north part of Edmond was … different — and not in a good way. She faltered. She couldn’t find people like her. She questioned her value within the social norms in which she was situated. She was beginning to crack. 

So I told her our family stories.

We are not a family from wealth and the city, at least not on my side and, not too far back, not on my husband’s side. We are farmers and ranchers. We are members of smaller communities where neighbor helps neighbors. We are animal people and hard workers. We are scrappy, resilient folk who are proud of our origins in land and animals. I realized that, even though she knew my parents had a ranch, she didn’t know who her people were… the ones who paved the way for her. She didn’t know where she came from. I still claim that she genetically inherited the farming and ranching genes. Learning about her origins validated her in some way. She wasn’t different. She was living in a different place.

Ultimately, I took her home to the family ranch, where she entered a rural high school, joined the Future Farmers of America (FFA,) and, with the help of her grandfather, started a breeding operation for show goats. Again, she blossomed.

My husband joined us soon after our second child graduated in Edmond, and I am writing this from the couch of a family ranch house and enjoying the spring semester of what is now her senior year. My daughter is a very strong young woman who is well-grounded and knowledgeable about who she is and where she comes from.

She will start college this fall in agricultural communications. Who she is today is partly formed from the crisis when she didn’t understand where she came from and believed herself to be failing because she was so different from her peers. Understanding her origins normalized her natural talents and interests.

My experiences with all of my children taught me that the people we come from matter in who we believe ourselves to be and matter in how we orient ourselves to the world. Disconnected from our family histories, we are floating in a weird vacuum in which it is easy, especially as young people, to begin to believe we are fatally flawed. 

Thus, I believe in harnessing our family stories as tools for grounding our young people's self-understanding. Should we claim this power, we have considerable positive power as family storytellers. 

Who are the young people in your lives? Do they need to hear your family stories?

This article is part of an ongoing series from . To review the series from part 1, start here:

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Our guest, of joins us for this very special cohort of military memories for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Explore all of the stories in the Members’ Corner and consider joining us to share a story of your own. Subscribe to Stacey’s publication here:

✨Chasing Moments & Collecting Memories

The Photo

On the back of one of the photos, Norm wrote, “V-E Night Roma,” adding his companions’ ranks, names, and nicknames. On the front is the date, May 7th, 1945, written in what I recognize as my grandmother’s handwriting.

But V-E Day is officially May 8th. So, either the photos were incorrectly dated, or maybe they’d been taken a few hours before the news officially broke across the globe. While I’ll never know for sure, there’s no doubt there was a celebration that seemed to include lots of revelry and drinking.

Until recently, I didn’t realize that this and other remarkable photos were “hiding” among the collection of Norm’s military images that I’d stored in a manila envelope after carefully removing them from the tattered pages of vintage albums.  That envelope and the rest of my grandparents’ photos were stashed away in a large wooden box, waiting patiently for me to rediscover and tell their stories.

As I started sorting and properly archiving the collection (scanning, documenting, saving, and backing up), I began to pay close attention to the details. I had seen all these photos before, but now I was seeing them through a different lens. 

I’ve never been much of a history buff or a great geography student. The conglomeration of all those facts, locations, and dates always seemed like a foreign language to me. So, it’s not surprising that the significance of these V-E Day photos had slipped by me. But now I urgently wanted to know more about my family, so history and geography would become big parts of my quest.

I learned that in early 1943, following a half-year of graduate coursework in chemistry, Norm enlisted in the Army to serve in World War II. He entered as a 2nd Lieutenant Battery Officer but was quickly promoted to Supply Officer, then Intelligence Officer in an Artillery Battalion, and finally 1st Lieutenant Chemical Officer as an organic chemist. 

During Norm’s grad school at George Washington University, he met and fell in love with a classmate, Greta. She was a graduate assistant teaching one of the chemistry courses he was taking. Not only was she a poised, striking beauty with beautiful skin, golden brown hair, and blue-green eyes, but she was also undeniably intelligent and cultured.

As she tells it,

“At first, I was not interested in him. He kept asking me out, and I’d turn him down. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He would follow me around campus, trying to get my attention. And he did, but not in the best of ways. He would sing every verse of that horrendous song ‘There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea’1 and annoy the heck out of me. Finally, I told him I’d go out with him if he promised never to sing that song again.” 

Victory…he won her heart!

They married on March 31, 1943, in Oklahoma, where Norm had been stationed.  By the end of Spring, Greta was expecting their first child as Norm was preparing for active duty. Now pregnant and soon to be alone, Greta moved to Chicago to live near Norm’s parents and have help with the baby. On January 10, 1944, my mom, Linda Rose, was born.

This photo of my grandparents hangs in my entryway. Norm is in his uniform, and Greta is donning a floral dress with a little belly pooch—an early baby bump, so I was told. However, the exact date and location were not documented. So, other than this single image, I don’t know if Norm would see Greta again before returning from Europe. 

Norm was deployed abroad as a member of the Allied Forces to help defend against and defeat the evil atrocities of war that led to an estimated “70-85 million deaths including about 21-25 million military personnel and 50-55 million civilians, many of whom died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation.”2

From my grandpa’s military record, I learned that he was awarded various decorations for his service, including a European Theater of Operations Ribbon (2 battle stars), an American Theater Ribbon, an Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon, a WWII Victory Ribbon, and a Meritorious Service Unit Plaque.

As I continued studying the photos of my grandpa celebrating on V-E Night, I imagined that he and his comrades must have been ecstatic that Germany surrendered. They would soon return to their family, friends, and pre-war lives. And for him, that also meant meeting the toddler daughter he’d only seen in photos. I remember my grandma telling me how my mom cried and cried when he first came home because she didn’t know who this strange man holding her was. 

But suddenly, the gravity and irony of this moment dawned on me, not just in our collective history but also in my grandfather’s. 

Like many couples, Norm’s “victory” in love with Greta began on a college campus, but had it not been for the unrest and upheaval in Europe, their paths never would have crossed.  

Greta had only been in the United States since 1939, when she emigrated from Austria after the Anschluss3 and Kristallnacht.4 Before the Anschluss, she was a second-year medical student at the University of Vienna. It was only because of the war that she was in America and would ultimately meet and marry Norm.

Greta’s younger sister also escaped Austria and emigrated to the United Kingdom (and later to the US). Sadly, their parents were not as lucky and perished in a Polish concentration camp after being transported from a ghetto in Opole.5 From records, it is believed that they were killed in early 1943.

The Bittersweetness of Victory 

On that historic day in May 1945, Germany surrendered its armed forces, and an end was declared to World War II on the Eastern European front. Certainly, it was a time for a victorious celebration.  

But, looking at my grandpa’s photos, I sensed the profound juxtaposition between the celebration and irony in the moment captured on film. Because of the war, my grandfather had met the love of his life, and honorably served in the Allied Forces. Though he helped to defend his country, the enemy murdered his wife’s parents. He’d never get a chance to meet his in-laws.  

Though these dichotomies would occasionally cast a dark shadow on their lives, Greta and Norm turned them into a strong foundation they could build on to raise a family and where their post-war lives could flourish.

Four years after the war, they welcomed a son and continued building a complete, adventurous, and active life filled with family, friends, and eventually three grandchildren. They were lifelong companions, married for over 50 years, and they meant the world to me. 

Just three weeks after Norm died in 1995, Greta passed from inconsolable grief and a broken heart.  They were genuinely inseparable… a “Victorious Love,” born from a world war and a “hole in the bottom of the sea.” Theirs was an enduring devotion and dedication to each other. 

Explore more stories in our Members’ Corner. Be sure not to miss the month's new releases focused on memories of family members who served in the armed forces worldwide.

Share your thoughts and memories in the comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author, shares this piece with your followers. As a bonus, it thanks Stacey and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. Thank you! ~Barbara

Our guest writer, co-founder of the , now on Substack, joins us with his third contribution to the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate our members’ contributions to family history storytelling — in narratives, recordings, and more. Learn more about joining a future cohort here. Follow Ron Chan and subscribe to his new publication:

Chinese American GI Project

Honor Flight Orientation: August 21, 2016

My dad and I went to the Honor Flight1 orientation today to prepare for our journey to Washington, DC. It was an incredibly wonderful and emotional experience. Each of the 25 vets chosen for the Honor Flight introduced themselves and explained how they served. 

There was much more to the casual eye, as all you saw was a group of tottering old men—one in a wheelchair, several with walkers, and some whose hands shook while holding a microphone. Virtually all were in their 90s. The eldest, at 99, spoke with honor. Army, Navy, Seabees, Marines, Air Force, and the lone woman, a WWII nurse, represented all service branches. 

• I sat beside a black soldier who told me about Army segregation.  He worked the supply lines at the Battle of the Bugle — the Nazi counter-offensive after D-Day, which turned the tide of the war. 

• There was a pilot who flew 18 missions in Europe, was shot down twice, and spent six months in a German POW camp. 

• Far-off places of pain and pride rolled off their tongues — Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Midway, Palermo, Berlin — names you only saw in history books or watching late-night war movies became suddenly alive. 

• A D-Day infantryman described reaching the beachhead, even as the soldier beside him dropped when a German bullet caught him in the head. 

In the sunset of their years, these frail old men remain the greatest generation. 

We leave Sept 8-10 to visit the WWII memorial—a monument built on the backs of those who served and returned or paid the ultimate price for freedom. Then, we will visit Arlington Cemetery, where we will witness the changing of the guard. The four oldest vets will lay a wreath in remembrance.

My father described being chosen to go on the Honor Flight as if he’d won the lotto. As his guardian/sidekick, it was made clear to me that I was not on vacation. I had a job to do to tend to his needs.  I am honored and humbled to be part of this milestone moment.

D-Day for DC: September 8, 2016

“D-Day for DC” was Dad's first journal entry as we started our trip to the WWII memorial with Honor Flight.

The USO greeted us at SFO with homemade blueberry muffins and hugged our vets. Dad and I took a proud portrait in front of a wall-spanning flag. A young Marine on his way to Hawaii spoke to Dad for a while, as Dad was based there en route to Midway in 1944. They shared stories that can only be forged through the camaraderie of service.

The group of 25 vets, the average age 93, the oldest 99, were greeted in DC with a surprise hero's welcome. Over 100 well-wishers sang the Marine Corps anthem, waving flags, high-fiving, and shaking vet hands, which was very stirring. Tears of joy and pride earned from their past shone on more than one face.

The bus had a police escort, and well-wishers spontaneously called, “Thank you for your service!” as the old warhorses paraded by with American flags flying. Any issues getting through the legendary DC traffic melted to our police escort.  

Our day had started at 3:30 AM, so we were exhausted by dinnertime.

Can Do! Seabee's Motto: September 9, 2016

The second day of our journey took the spirit of the Seabee motto, the division of service Dad served, as we went through nearly 100° weather.

Going to the World War II Memorial was not just a field trip.  These were veterans who lived it.  They felt the bitter cold of the Battle of the Bulge, slogged through the bloody sands of Utah Beach, and smelled the sulfuric fumes at Iwo Jima.  This was the primary purpose of the Honor Flight trip: Help the veterans find closure and honor.

Again, we had a motorcycle and police escort all day and got into the high-security Fort Myers without ID and search, ran red lights, accessed roads only for service vehicles, rode special freight elevators at the Smithsonian, and even pissed off a secret service vehicle forcing him to move aside.  

We also participated in changing the guard at Arlington and laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier.  

In the military tradition of the 21-gun salute of honor, the sentry walked 21 steps, stood in front of the tomb for 21 seconds, and then clicked his heels, signifying a salute. As he passed us the first time, he dragged his heel in a long scrape, an unspoken way of saluting the vets. As the 25 wheelchairs lined up and soldiered one after another, many from the audience walked down the entire line, shaking the hand of every vet and thanking them for their service.

At the laying of the wreath by the oldest vets, two defining moments for me occurred...seeing in unison all saluting at the sound of taps.  Then, when in the audience, two ladies turned with tears in their eyes as they gazed down the wheelchair row of silver.

We do roll call after every boarding the bus; most veterans say, “Yo,” but Marines grunt or yell, “Semper Fi!”  This was especially appropriate when we stopped at the Marine memorial, as half a dozen Jarheads were in the group.  Two were at the Battle of Iwo Jima, making this visit especially special and relevant.

Dad was one of two Seebees in the group, so the bus cut across four lanes to stop at the Seabee Memorial at Arlington with a Can-Do attitude to cap off an exhausting but once-in-a-lifetime day of touring.

At dinner, as a surprise to the vets, there was a “Mail Call,” celebrating a time before the internet and the lifeline between loved ones was a letter.  Dad received, as a surprise gift from my sister Melanie and me, 40 letters of recognition, including from Presidents Bush and Clinton, Senator Feinstein, the Mayors of SF and Oakland, Seabee's Rear Admiral, local civic offices, three letters from the VFW, friends from the Navy and Marines, and a second-grade class from Louisville, KY.  Other letters were intimate messages of empathy from the same branch as my father’s—Marines and Navy sailors serving in Korea, Vietnam, Middle Eastern fronts, and more.  Each thanked him for his heartfelt appreciation for the uniform and my father.

After reading the kid's notes and seeing their drawings, I had hope for the next generation. They are learning that freedom is not free. 

“The heroes are over there:” September 10, 2016

We were at the Vietnam Memorial, where 58,000 names of the honored dead were inscribed. 

A lady saw my dad with his Honor Flight shirt and WWII vet hat and said he was a hero.  Dad pointed to the wall and said, “The heroes are over there.”

Taps: September 10, 2016

Had morning coffee with “Doc,” a tail gunner in the European theater and a submarine hunter.  I asked what the highlight of the trip was for him so far. As he answered that it had been the wreath presentation for the unknown soldier, I saw tears welling up.  Doc told me of being a WWII honor guard and presented a flag to a fallen friend's mother.  He mentioned that he was “kicked out” of the Navy, which I thought odd since this was an Honor Flight. I soon realized the rest of the story. Doc was shot down, wounded, “kicked out,” and sent home.  I learned the definition of humility that day. 

The sound of fire is not unfamiliar to a tail gunner, but the sound of taps and each shot of a 21-gun salute hit Doc’s heart hard.

Anchor's Aweigh: September 10, 2016

We were greeted by a Navy choir at the Lincoln Memorial with a rousing “Anchors Aweigh.” Seabee Al Chan was grinning from ear to ear. Go Navy!

Every sailor, every officer, shook every vet's hand. For Dad, it was the new Navy meeting the old. An Army vet gave the Navy his highest compliment... “Thanks for hauling my sorry ass around.”

At our last stop at the Navy Museum, we were sent off with a color guard the same way we started, with the pledge of allegiance.

Thank You Letters: September 13, 2016

To: Rachel Wollard, 2nd grade teacher, Greathouse Shyrock in Louisville, KY

Here is a little background info you can share as appropriate with a second-grade class about the video I made of the wreath ceremony and the hero’s welcome the vets received upon arriving at SFO.

(September 10, 2016, via email)

Old Soldiers Never Die ... if they are remembered

Our oldest vet's, including an Army nurse, had the honor of laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery.  It was here the 25 silver soldiers took to heart Arlington Cemetery's credo to honor, remember and explore.  But they were not alone, as people lined up to thank the vets for their service. 

This reception was magnified 100 times over when we returned to SFO amid cheers, flags, welcome signs and songs from well wishers, USO, American Legion, VFW and 8 police forming a blue line in salute those who don't know they are heroes ... and honor those who didn't return.

The letters the kids wrote were heartfelt and made me believe that maybe there is hope for the next generation ... although I did share with the 25 vets some things that only a child's innocence can say...

• Have a safe trip to Washington DC.  Congratulations on being selected by Honor Flight.  

• Thank you for serving in the US Navy, I would probably get seasick for real. Are you seasick from your trip?

• Thank you for fighting, I can't believe you won the war.  You really did save us.  

• I hope we won the war.

• Did you win the war 150 years ago?

• I cannot believe you are still alive.  

• You are so lucky to be here.

• You saved our country, thank you so much.

• I can't believe you were married 66 years.  How did you be married for so many years?

• I wish I were like you.

• Your bravery has inspired many people, including us.  

• Thank you for protecting the USA.  You are everyone's hero.  We love America

Thank you for helping the kids understand that freedom is not free, and understand what these four words really mean. 

Also, for every letter I got from a President, Senator, Admiral or Mayor to my dad, I put a child's letter next to it in the ebook. I'll send a copy of it when I am done.  Maybe the kids will get a kick out of seeing their letter next to President Bush, or Ed Lee the Mayor of San Francisco.

Many thanks to you, Rachel and the kids for providing 25 silver soldiers the honor and closure they deserve.

Reply from Rachel, the teacher

I am grateful for the opportunity to give a tiny bit back to someone who gave so much for us.

My students enjoyed writing these letters very much and I enjoyed reading them. I got a kick out of some of their responses as well. They were from the heart and completely written on their own. I only helped with correct placement of the parts of the letter. I will share the video with them tomorrow.

Reading this email gave me goose bumps and I just want to say thank you to you and your family for your service and dedication to our country! 

Explore more stories in our Members’ Corner, and watch for new releases this month focused on memories of family members who served in the armed forces worldwide.

Share your thoughts and memories in the comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author, , shares this piece with your followers. As a bonus, it thanks Ron and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. Thank you! ~Barbara

1

All US veterans are eligible to go on an Honor Flight. Through private donations, Honor Flight pays for all meals, transportation in DC, flights, and hotels, but in reality, the veterans pay for this honor with their service. 

I had the honor of volunteering for four Honor Flights and seeing the trip through the eyes of a WWII, Korean, and Vietnam War veteran. The last flight I took was a memorial flight for my father. Honor Flight allowed me to get off the bus at the WWII Memorial first. I carried a photo of my father as a Seabee on Midway Island in 1944.

When my father, Alfred Chan, passed in 2023, instead of flowers, we invited friends and families to make donations to fund six Chinese American veterans to go on Honor Flights. On the Honor Flight to the WWII Memorial, these veterans marched in unison behind me as Dad's honor guard, holding a folded flag for the fallen. Through my tears, I remembered how, as father and son, we had marched together to the WWII memorial. I miss him so much.

For more information on Honor Flight and to enroll a veteran, please visit HonorFlight.org

Our guest writer, of Photogenealogy joins us with her first contribution to the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate our members’ contributions to family history storytelling — in narratives, recordings, and more. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here, and learn more about joining a future cohort here.

Follow Ann Larkham

I am incredibly lucky to have shared a special relationship with my nan. On sunny afternoons, she used to take me to the park, where I would go roller-skating. Then we would eat ice cream and sit on a park bench while watching the pensioners play lawn bowls. I loved those afternoons with my nan.

But secretly, I always hoped it would rain because then we would spend the afternoon by Nan’s fire with a cardboard box. It wasn’t just any old cardboard box, though. It was a box that held Nan’s treasures: ration cards, insurance documents, birthday and anniversary cards, invitations, telegrams, newspaper clippings, grandad’s World War II paybook, old diaries, and, most wonderful, old photos.

I was hooked on the stories my nan told me about the people in the photos and their lives during war and peacetime. Whenever it rained, I would raid the bottom of my nan’s wardrobe and drag out that old box. Then, my nan would patiently answer all my childish questions she had answered many times before, embellishing the stories she told me as she remembered more little gems of information. I was enthralled by the old photos and their stories. I still am.

The One Photo I’d Never Seen

I was really surprised to discover a photo my nan had never shown me; I thought I had seen all her precious photos. I only saw it after she left us when I inherited her box of photos. No one had written a name on the photo, and no one alive knew who the contemplative young man in uniform was. I was intrigued! I needed to do some research.

I started by looking in my family tree for possible candidates. There was only one, Thomas Holding, my grandad’s elder brother, who was born in 1896 and died in 1916. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website hosts Thomas’s commemorative certificate, confirming his parents' identity.

Rifleman Thomas Holding

Further research revealed that Thomas was a Rifleman in the 13th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and was killed in action on 14 November 1916, in the final days of the Battle of the Somme. I also learned that Thomas was commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial—just one of the 72,245 Commonwealth Servicemen who died at the Somme and have no known grave.

I also found much more information about Thomas, including the medals he was awarded, a copy of his will, and the war diary for his battalion on the day he died, describing the action that led to Thomas’s death. Despite all this information, I still did not know if the person in the photo was Thomas because the photo did not show any insignia that related the uniform to an army regiment or brigade. And I thought I would never know who the young man in the photo was. 

By now, however, I was fascinated by World War I, so I started reading all the books I could find about it. One of these books, Somme, by Lyn MacDonald, told the tale of why the Rifle Brigade became known as the “Black Buttoned Bastards.” This struck a bell with me…black buttons. I quickly raided Nan’s box, found the photo and yes, the young man in the photo had black buttons on his uniform!

Of course, this was not proof that the young man in the photo was Thomas, but the clues seemed to suggest it was: 

1. Found in a box of family photos 

2. Correct branch of the family 

3. No other candidates in the family 

4. Correct age 

5. Correct period of uniform and 

6. Correct brigade.

I hoped and believed I had put a name to the face in the photo.

I thought that was the end of this photo story, but while researching, I came across the Islington Online Book of Remembrance, where I learned that Thomas is commemorated on the Royal Northern Hospital Entranceway Arch in Islington, his hometown. I decided I had to visit.

While there, I also visited the Islington Local History Centre and Museum; I was put in touch with Mark, the Local History Manager for the Islington Heritage Service. He told me that a memorial service was planned to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Somme, which would be held in the Royal Northern Gardens, just along the road from the Arch, on 18th November. Mark promised he would keep me updated.

Mark kept that promise a couple of months later: I received an invite for myself and my family to attend the memorial service and unveil a new memorial plaque. I was honoured and delighted to be able to share the news and the invitation with my family. Thomas’s niece and nephew accompanied me to represent our family at the service: my mum, Pat, and our cousin, John. The organisers and the Mayor of Islington welcomed us at the Royal Northern Gardens.

The service was attended by local politicians, representatives of the emergency services and council, military personnel, World War II veterans, and families of the fallen servicemen. It included poems, prayers, the Last Post, two minutes of silence at 11 a.m., Reveille, wreath placing, and unveiling, and concluded with the National Anthem.

The service was extremely moving and provided a dignified and fitting tribute for Thomas and all his comrades from Islington and Finsbury who had died during World War I. We were honoured to be invited to take part in this special service.

After the service, we were interviewed by a journalist, and an article appeared in the Islington Tribune. The article included my precious photo of Thomas and told his story. I feel that I have helped to discover, remember, and honour a true war hero. 

I think my nan would have been proud of me!

Explore more stories in our Members’ Corner, and watch for new releases this month focused on memories of family members who served in the armed forces worldwide.

Share your thoughts and memories in the comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author, Ann Larkham shares this piece with your followers. As a bonus, it thanks Ann and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. Thank you! ~Barbara

Our guest writer, of joins us for a second publication for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Victoria’s suggestion that this post be held for Memorial Day was the inspiration for the military theme for our posts this month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here, and learn more about joining a future cohort here. Read Andrew Jr, 1923-1944 here and subscribe to her publication from the button below:

From Life with Victoria Olsen

Eighty years ago, in the spring of 1944, my father’s older brother sent his parents a postcard from Goodfellow Field in San Angelo, Texas, writing, “Here it is. Vultee BT-13: The one I fly. (Believe it or not.)” Multiple underlines underscore his excitement. He was stationed at nearby Foster Field Army base in Victoria (a coincidence with my name that I had never known until I started researching my father’s family).

Andrew Peter Olsen, Jr. had enrolled in The Citadel in 1941 as an Army Air Force cadet and enlisted in the Reserves in 1942. He moved to active duty in February 1943 and spent a year learning how to fly planes. He sent many photos home, like the one above, in which he looked young and carefree. He was 21 years old. My father, three years younger, remained in high school in Chicago.

Then on May 22, 1944, the day before he would have graduated as a single-engine plane combat pilot, Andrew Jr. died in a plane crash with his flight instructor. The army posthumously awarded him status as second lieutenant and sent his parents his wings.

What’s left behind

“The coffin was empty,” my father would say in hushed tones when he repeated this story to us decades later. Without the body itself, his parents kept every other scrap of documentary evidence about their son. In a folder marked “Andrew Peter Olsen, Jr.” there’s the original Western Union telegram they received in Chicago at 10:34 that night as well as a photostatic copy of it. There are three copies of the condolence letter from H.H. Arnold, General, U..S. Army and Commanding General, Army Air Forces, dated October 1944 (five months later). They kept letters to and from military officials and an inventory of Andrew Jr.'s effects, including the bill of lading for one crate of personal items, including 13 towels, 29 handkerchiefs, assorted clothing, four rolls of film, and a camera. His billfold contained $27.14, identification tags, and a religious medal. An officer in Section H, 2539th AAF Base Unit wrote to explain the various items Andrew Jr. had purchased and which ones were returned for refunds, duly forwarded. Plane tickets home worth $67.83, unused. Uniforms and a Valopak Bag from the Foster Field Post Exchange cashed out for $14.00. The funeral receipts show expenses at $300.75, to which the government contributed fifty dollars. The inventory included a damaged ring and a broken Longines watch, which suggests those items survived the crash but obscures the story. The letter writer, Summary Court Officer Paul J. Turner, added,

“I would like you to know that your son, Andrew, was a man who stood out from the other cadets. I saw him in church every Sunday and though I didn’t get to know him personally, one can always readily tell how a man conducts himself as to what type of individual he is. He would have been an excellent officer and it seems unreasonable on the part of our good Lord to take such men as your son and let others carry on who do not have the good qualities that Andrew had. It was God’s will and we have to let it go at that.”

This was among the best of the condolence notes. The one from C.P. Summerall, President of the Citadel, simply said,

“Your son gave great promise of a life of great usefulness to his country. It is paradoxical that he should have given his life so soon but it was for his country and in that I can see some comfort for no one could do more.”

I never heard an explanation of what actually happened from my father, but among the saved letters is an account, written by the local army chaplain Ralph G. Saxe on the day after Andrew Jr. died. Reading it, I had never heard these details before and they deserve quoting in full, in the chaplain’s own words.

“Your son took off from the field yesterday shortly before noon in the same plane with his instructor, Lt. James F. Clark Jr. It was to be his last flight, since he had only 25 minutes of flying time to qualify as a pilot. The formation went north of the field and above some light clouds, where, at an altitude of about 7000 feet, they practiced acrobatics. At that height, the outlook was beautiful—soft fleecy clouds below them— and after they had been up about 25 minutes, the formation divided and headed back towards the field, going down through the overcast below.

There was no indication from the top that a severe local thunder cloud had developed below them, and one of the instructors who was flying in another plane, told me that as they went lower, it got almost pitch dark, so that it was necessary to fly entirely by instrument, and the turbulence became so great that several times his hand was thrown completely off the stick. Although he was descending at a rate of 160 miles per hour, the plane was so tossed about that at times it was tossed upward in the midst of this descent. This plane emerged from the clouds at an altitude of only about 400 feet and then headed toward the field in a torrential rain.

A cadet who followed your son’s plane found himself caught in a tremendous down-draft which hurled him helpless toward the ground, and he fell in a few seconds from 6000 feet to 400 feet, emerging from the clouds at a rate of 300 miles an hour, and the airplane’s ordinary cruising speed is about 150.

Just what happened to Andrew’s plane will never be known for sure, but it seems likely he must have got caught between some of those rapidly rising or falling currents of air. The left wing was torn off in mid-air, and the parts of the plane were strewn along the ground for three-fourths of a mile. It seems very likely, however, that both he and the officer were unconscious, as neither of them were able to even loosen their safety belts.”

It’s an extraordinary letter. Beginning as if he were there, the author relates a series of events that juggle technical details and poetic impressions. The other pilots serve as supporting witnesses for a story of blameless death, just Mother Nature in all her unpredictability. The final paragraphs, as befits the chaplain, return to the comfort of faith and God’s care. Still, I can't imagine what his parents made of some of those grim details.

Later, I found Andrew Jr.’s death certificate, which lists the primary cause of death bluntly as “Amputation, Traumatic, Complete of head and extremities.” The secondary cause was “Evisceration of the thoracic and abdominal cavities.” It is one of the few records missing from Andrew Sr.’s folder—and it tragically, horrifically explains the central mystery of the missing body. It’s more than anyone wants to know.

What were the statistics for deaths like these, soldiers still on U.S. army bases? Pilots still in training? The question sends me scurrying to government records, historical and current. Before World War II the Air Force was known as the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). It didn’t become its own division of the military until 1948. One of the first things I found out is that Foster Airfield was named for a Lt. Arthur L. Foster, who himself was a U.S. Army Air Corps instructor killed in a nearby crash in 1925. The base was established in the spring of 1941 as a school for single-engine fighter pilots. Foster’s widow dedicated a plaque to her husband “who gave his life teaching others to fly” when the base was named after him in February 1942. Foster’s son then trained there and graduated shortly before Andrew Jr. did. Most students graduated as Warrant Officers but the top of the class left as Second Lieutenants, the rank posthumously awarded Andrew Jr. They flew North American AT-6 Texan trainers or Curtis P-40 Warhawk bombers in formations of as many as twelve planes. The base was gradually shut down after October 1945, though briefly reactivated in 1951 for the Korean War effort. It was finally closed in 1958 despite then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign to keep it open. It is now a regional county airport.

What does it mean?

On January 12, 1945 one of Andrew Jr.’s Chicago classmates, Lt. Thomas Hargrave Berry, also “met with a fatal accident” while training in combat flying at Key Field, Meridien, Mississippi. My grandparents wrote condolences and perhaps attended the funeral at Oak Woods Cemetery because they saved the In Memoriam card and a thank you note from Mr. and Mrs. Berry in the folder with Andrew Jr.’s records. Thomas had been born in Chicago a week after their son and attended the same high school; then their paths diverged until they ended in the same place. Andrew Sr. tore a clipping of his son’s obituary notice from the newspaper and pinned it to the inside of a Hallmark card inscribed, “Hi Dad, See you soon, Love, Andrew.” My grandfather’s birthday was May 25th so it may have arrived after his son’s death on the 22nd.

When the war was over my grandfather applied for Veterans Compensation from the state of Illinois for his son’s death. In an envelope marked in his careful all-capitals print “DATA FOR BONUS” are affidavits filed by people who knew Andrew Jr. in Chicago, like his aunt Anna, a family lawyer, and a neighbor at 7539 South Luella Avenue. The point seems to have been to establish that Andrew was indeed a resident of Illinois, despite dying in Texas and going to school in South Carolina. Everyone attests to his upbringing and his many returns for holidays and breaks. I can’t tell if they ever received the bonus. The last item in the folder is a manila envelope entitled ANDREW JR’S DIPLOMA AND COMMISSION, which were awarded posthumously. But inside the envelope is also a 8x10 headshot of Andy in pilot gear, taken in a San Angelo, Texas photo studio. In tiny red script Andy wrote, “To my own dear father with all my love from Andrew Jr. ’44.” It’s one of many such formal portraits of Andy, all large, some now water-damaged from my basement leak. The record shows it’s hard to overstate the effect of Andy’s loss on the whole family.

Among the documents in the dilapidated folder labeled Andrew Olsen Jr. another one set stands out: four handwritten pages of notes, stapled together with a business card for a State Veteran Counselor in Catskill, New York. It’s scribbled over with info about Andy Jr. like DOB, location of death, and service number along with addresses and phone numbers for requesting a KIA NCD report and the NPRC from St. Louis. The military acronyms are baffling and it takes me a while to realize that these papers were not saved by my grandfather in the 1940s. These are from the 1990s or early 2000s. My father retired near Catskill in the late 1980s and received nearby VA services himself (he died in a VA hospice in Albany in 2011) so he must have started this process of researching his brother’s death late in his life. What more did he want to know? What was left out of this already exhaustive record?

Much later I too would retrace my father’s inquiry, writing to the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) for my father’s, uncle’s, and grandfather’s military records. They added nothing to Andrew Jr.’s story, but documented his final pay check for $17.01, prorated for the month of May. It was a symbolic kind of closure for what had long been an open wound.

This story picks up on a tale started in a post on May 22nd, the 80th anniversary of his death.

From Life with Victoria Olsen

Andrew Jr, 1923-1944

Today marks the 80th anniversary of my father’s brother’s death during World War II. I’ll write more about the death itself for Memorial Day, but here I’d like to celebrate his life, which I only know through a photo album he left behind. No one occupies more of the Olsen family archive than its mis…

Read more

2 years ago · 12 likes · 5 comments · Victoria Olsen

Explore more stories in our Members’ Corner, and watch for new releases this month focused on memories of family members who served in the armed forces worldwide.

Share your thoughts and memories in the comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author, shares this piece with your followers. As a bonus, it thanks Victoria and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. Thank you! ~Barbara

Our guest writer, joins us for a second publication for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

Follow Ron Chan

Me: Chan Kong Chung

Though I’m known among Americans as Ron Chan, my Chinese name is Chan Kong Chung, 陳光宗. As a second-generation Chinese born in America, it might as well be “Made in the USA.” I am Chinese enough to respect the tradition of serving tea to my parents when we got married, but to my mind, education and life have always been comfortable living the American dream. 

I am American-born Chinese or “ABC.” Less complimentary terms for Westernized Chinese are “banana” - yellow skin on the outside, white inside. Or “jook sing,” Chinese for “bamboo pole,” as you have a Chinese exterior, but like bamboo that is hollow, devoid of Chinese culture. The immigrant and first-born generation rarely talked about their tribulations of the past - discrimination, hunger, and hardship. Second-generation American-born Chinese have generally drifted away from their cultural roots. Sacrifices made by our forebears fade to become distant memories. Understandably, succeeding generations rarely contemplate these sacrifices. They’re absorbed in their careers, children, and online presence. 

My Grandfather: Chan Kin On

I never met my grandfather, Chan Kin On, 陈健安. He died four years before I was born. He was just a photo on grandma’s bedroom dresser. But his picture spoke to me as I became enlightened on the immigrant struggle, sacrifices of leaving China, detention on Angel Island, and what it took to scratch out a living to feed a family of eight through the Great Depression and World War II. 

Because Chan Kin On had the courage to immigrate to America, the “Gold Mountain, 金山,” fifty-two of his descendants, including their spouses and children, owe him for all they have today.  

Had my grandfather never left China, I could have been pulling weeds in the hot sun behind a bamboo fence… a barrier keeping animals out, and a cage locking me into a minimalist existence. It could have been me, carrying buckets of water on a pole, trudging in the mud back and forth, irrigating a vast vegetable field daily. 

Chan Kin On spoke little English. He spent his days from sunup to sundown laboring in the sweltering Sacramento pear orchards in 100° F plus heat to help dig irrigation ditches, prune trees, and spray toxic DDT insecticide on fields he could not legally own.

This survival level of struggle is (thankfully) foreign to me and my children. We have the luxury of opportunity and choice borne on the backs of those toiling before us. I have written two English-language books on the Chan Family History, chronicling four generations in America. For years, I thought the Chan genealogy was done. 

I was wrong.

Out of my ignorance and inability to speak or write Chinese, I ignored research on our prior 150 generations and 4,700 years of our ancestral roots in China. After attending three Chinese Genealogy Conferences, I gathered the courage and knowledge to explore the Chinese side of our past. 

I turned my eyes eastward and set my sights on making a Chan pilgrimage to Guangdong (Canton) to gather the tools and knowledge to complete our history. I wanted to answer the fundamental question … where did I come from?

Au Wai Sheng, 欧蕙裳, my grandmother, gave me my Chinese name. I was born the eldest son of the eldest son of Chan Kin On. My name means the “light of generations, 光宗” meaning that the Chan family name extends to another generation through me.

So, my full Chinese name is 陳光宗

• 陳 - is the family name, Chan

• 光 - means light (n) or brighten (v)

• 宗 - means ancestors, family, or a relative with the same surname

My son Bryan is also the firstborn of his era, so he perpetuates another Chan generation. I have physically lived up to my grandmother’s name expectations. 

My mission to China was to visit our roots and Chan clan memorials to honor my grandfather, Chan Kin On. I wanted to live up to my grandmother Au Wei Sheng's expectations in both name and practice. 

My wife and I canceled a month-long vacation to Hawaii in 2018 when we discovered that Chan Kin On's 86-year-old nephew still lived in the ancestral village. Genealogy has a shelf life. Family elders hold the keys to our past. However, they are now either in the twilight of their lives or their stars have gone dark. I did not want to miss this fleeting opportunity to meet my uncle in China by waiting too long.

In China, the document our ancestors leave behind in their village to capture lineage is called a “jiapu.” The jiapu includes 1) information about births and deaths recorded in the village, 2) the ancestors' names and their genealogical lineage, and 3) usually the lineage of the most current generation of the clan. 

When Chan Kin On died in 1951, his village legacy and three American-born generations died in the village jiapu. He had never returned to capture the additions. This three-generation gap has critical significance, as over 3,200 years ago, Chan Mo, the progenitor (first) Chan’s in southern China, said, … 

The fundamental goal of this pilgrimage was to restore the missing three American generations in the village jiapu so Chan Kin On’s legacy could continue in China.

Village Visit

Genealogical Gold - Chan Family Jiapu

I arrived in our ancestral village, Miu Tiu, 窈窕, in Guangdong Province, prepared to photograph the family jiapu in my uncle’s home. I’d packed a heavy tripod designed for document copying and had a remote trigger to minimize vibration. An extra camera battery was important, as shooting photos drained the batteries in one morning. It took three hours to shoot it under natural light. The book was very delicate, so I had to take great care handling it.

It was emotional for me to see the jiapu. When I touched the cover, tears came. I felt the presence of a hundred ancestors. I traveled so far and spent so much time and money, but no price was too great to give up the feeling at that moment. 

The age-old riddle … if a tree falls in the forest, but there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Likewise, will our ancestor’s sacrifices be remembered if our family history is not chronicled?

To the hundreds of Chan generations in China who preceded us, I hope the fruits of three American-born generations bring you honor. 

To my grandparents, Kin On Chan and Au Wei Sheng, thank you for your courage and sacrifices in immigrating to America so that your children and all who followed could have a better life.

Our roots exist ... only if we do not bury them too deep.

Read Ron’s Members’ Corner recording from March 2024, including a clip of his father, Alfred Chan, recalling the end of WWII:

We’d love to hear what you think with ♡s and comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author shares this piece with folks who follow you on Substack. As a bonus, it thanks Ron and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. ⥐ Barbara (your )

Our guest writer, of Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge joins us with his first contribution to the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate our members’ contributions to family history storytelling — in narratives, recordings, and more. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

Subscribe to Kevin’s “Gemello Story”

I’ll never forget when I discovered my passion for unraveling my family’s history.

It was a Sunday afternoon in 2002. I was sitting at the kitchen table with Grandpa Mario Gemello. We were listening to stories on a cassette tape. The voice on the tape was his father, John Gemello, who died in 1980 at age 98.

What triggered this bonding project was some startling news earlier that year: Grandpa Mario had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. I wanted to document his story as a winemaker in the Bay Area for nearly half a century. Meanwhile, how much time my grandfather had left was a mystery.

But Grandpa Mario didn’t want to talk so much about himself, but rather his inspiration: that was his father. As a teenager, Grandpa Mario helped his father launch the Gemello Winery in Mountain View, California. This was in the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, a month after the repeal of Prohibition.

When Great Grandpa John Gemello was in his 90s, he lived with my cousins, Paul and Sandy Obester, who ran a Half Moon Bay winery under their own name. One day in the late 1970s, they had the brilliant idea of having great-grandpa retell his adventurous stories of the old days while they pushed “record” on a cassette tape.

He had quite a life: winemaking in Italy, working in coal mines in Germany, and getting letters from friends who had immigrated to the Santa Clara Valley raving about the San Francisco Bay Area opportunities.

In 1912, John Gemello kissed his wife and daughter goodbye, boarded a ship in the Adriatic Sea, and set sail for America. He told the family he’d send for them once he got settled and had the money to do so. He landed a job at Almaden Vineyards, run by Paul Masson, the famous French immigrant who pioneered the making of sparkling wine in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The money to send for his family was another fascinating story told on the tape. It was a chance encounter. He was playing cards at the Costa Hotel, a San Jose watering hole frequented by Italian immigrants, and he bumped into another Piedmontese immigrant: Giovanni Beltramo. The families were close back in Italy. He offered to loan my great-grandfather the money to cover his family’s travel expenses to America.

A Bay Area Institution: Beltramo’s

Beltramo’s historical significance in the Bay Area went over my head in 2002 when my grandfather and I transcribed the story from the cassette tape. During the pandemic lockdown, I reread the transcript, which triggered an urge to learn more about him. Unfortunately, my grandfather lost his bout to cancer in 2005.

I asked my mom if the Beltramo name rang a bell. “Of course! That’s the family that ran the Beltramo’s Wine & Spirits store. It was on El Camino in Menlo Park forever.”

Filling in Holes from the Tape

Forever? Almost. The Beltramo store had a 134-year history before closing in 2016. On its last day of business, it generated a lot of local media coverage. The articles often quoted Giovanni Beltramo’s great-granddaughter, Diana Beltramo Hewitt. I found her on LinkedIn and reached out. She was happy to share her family’s history with me.

She explained that, like my great-grandfather, her ancestor, Giovanni Beltramo, came to America because a friend wrote him letters about opportunities in the Santa Clara Valley. His voyage in 1880 was 32 years ahead of my great-grandfather's.

One night in 1913, at the Costa Hotel card table, Giovanni Beltramo asked my great-grandfather why his family hadn’t come with him.

“Didn’t have the money yet,” Gemello told him.

Beltramo, who was 53 then, asked the 30-year-old Gemello if he had hoped to send for them later. Gemello answered, “Of course!” 

Beltramo knew all too well the challenges of trying to make it alone in a new world. He offered my great-grandfather a loan of $190 for first-class tickets from Italy to San Jose.  He accepted.

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The Sprouting Of A Tree Branch

In 1915, John Gemello landed a job at the Picchetti Winery on Montebello Road in Cupertino as his bachelor lifestyle ended. He also needed to rent a house to accommodate his wife and daughter. 

When I first listened to the cassette tape with my grandfather in 2002, we created a transcribing system to accommodate my great-grandfather’s heavy Italian accent. We’d listen to a segment, and then Grandpa Mario would hit stop and translate as I’d type into my computer.

To find a home for his family, John Gemello found an empty house adjacent to the Picchetti Wintery. When he inquired, he discovered poison oak on the property had spooked a potential tenant.

“So the landlord offered the house to my dad,” Grandpa Mario said, noting that the poison oak didn’t bother him. “They moved in - New Year’s Eve, 1915.”

Grandpa Mario found many of those details trivial. “I don’t think you need to put all that. You could say they moved in on New Year’s Eve, 1915.”

Then he added, “he also said that it rained for four consecutive days after they moved in. But you don’t have to put that either.”

I agreed, and we moved on. A few minutes later, a thought hit me.

“Hey, Gramps, you might think the weather was not that significant when they moved to Montebello, but think about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“They moved there on New Year’s Eve, 1915. It rained for four days. Eight months and 27 days later, you were born.”

We’d love to hear what you think with ♡s and comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author shares this piece with folks who follow you on Substack. As a bonus, it thanks our member and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. Thank you, ⥐ Barbara (your )

Our guest writer, Kerri Kearney joins us for a second publication for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

Follow Kerri Kearney

In a previous post, I used burls in tree bark as a metaphor for branches of family trees that spin “off in unanticipated and sometimes unwanted directions.” This tends to happen as a result of messy human events such as “divorce, adoption, an affair, an unexpected pregnancy, remarriage, surrogacy, foster care, and many other[s].”

While I am very interested in the genealogy aspect of families, I live and breathe in the space of storying our families. I think it is important to consider burls within that space. 

Storytelling has been a tradition for centuries, and various cultures and families are the original human structure. Stories in families have been used for various purposes, but I am particularly interested in them for their power to teach, both in the present moment and across time.

Stories as a source of understanding

Stories preserve lessons and communicate values, beliefs, and human learning. They also can be a rich source of understanding of personality, hardship, and overcoming that is rooted in our ancestors. Science is beginning to show that some of those experiences are passed to later generations through our DNA. Thus, stories may serve an additional purpose of self-understanding. Stories give life to family trees.

While the answer for each family storyteller is highly personal, often with careful consideration of the complications of “telling,” I will share an example of a beautiful burl in our tree and how I handled it.

The “When to Tell” question

My husband and I chose to build our family through both adoption and biology. An early consideration for me was “when to tell,” which is a decision that all parents must make via adoption (and several other family circumstances). After educating myself and deep consideration, my stance was that I was a keeper of the information about the circumstances of my children’s adoption and their biological families.

My husband and I didn’t want there to be a specific time when our children found out they came to us through adoption; instead, we wanted to situate those circumstances as just a normal part of their stories. With that in mind and, by then, with two toddlers who were adopted, I set out to write them children’s story books. 

A child’s fairie story as a touchstone

My daughter, who has consistently permitted me to share her book with others, loved fairies. Her book tells the story of a young fairy woman who became pregnant and, due to circumstances, ultimately chose a human couple as her child’s parents, a difficult decision for her.

The storyline is solely based on my daughter’s conception and arrival into our family. For example, the book opens with a scene of dancing fairies; her biological mother was a dancer. The illustrations in the book depict her biological mother’s real hair color and other characteristics that were known to me.

The story also highlights the fairy mother choosing human parents. That moment highlighted her decision to give her daughter parents, my husband and me, who were quite different from her. I did my best to capture what she told me of her hopes for her child. In the book is also the story (and illustration) of when my daughter’s two mothers met for the first time in her hospital room after my daughter was born.

Kerri shared a project recipe for how she went about writing and producing the fairy story for her daughter with the Projectkin community in 2023:

Project recipes like this are presented each month. To learn more, explore the upcoming schedule here: Projectkin.org/events.

The finished book went onto my children’s bookshelf in their playroom, right beside another similar effort for her older brother. I’m not going to suggest that writing the story was easy for me, nor was it easy to read it to her the first time. I worried whether I got it right and whether it was too much.

As a toddler, my daughter loved the book because of the beautiful fairy illustrations; the words didn’t mean much to her then. But as she grew, I sometimes found her on the playroom floor reading her book. Over time, she began to ask questions about her story. Those conversations were not always easy, and my desire to protect her from hard things was real. But her fairy book was a consistent touchstone. It was the story she had always known. Time and maturity meant that I was helping her understand greater details about where she came from and how she came to be ours.

Today, my daughter is a college student and 20 years old. Her child’s book remains a treasured possession. In some ways, her book gives her roots that those of us raised by our biological parents often take for granted. Her story did not just begin in our family.

My daughter’s story represents one of multiple burls on our family tree. And just as the wood inside of a tree burl is valued for its beauty by fine craftsmen, I deeply value our family burls. They are our stories of resiliency and strength. They bring to life ancestors who were free thinkers and ahead of their times . . . those who bucked the social norms of their time and persevered. They tell of the strength of commitment and love.

While I acknowledge that there can be a number of careful considerations for many burls, I continue to believe burls should be “storied.” Shouldn’t they?

We’d love to hear what you think with ♡s and comments. Tapping “Restack” and mentioning our author shares this piece with folks who follow you on Substack. As a bonus, it thanks Kerri and helps us get the word out about Projectkin. Thank you, ⥐ Barbara (your )

This article is part of an ongoing series from . Read part 3 here:

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These kinds of stories about military experience can be complicated, yet they’re important. National service means something, especially when lives are at risk in that service. These aren’t all tidy, heroic packages, though. When I look back on my family history, I find a legacy of Quakerism and stories that intertwine valor, service, and pacifism. This experience is complicated. These are the stories that need to be told.

A few years ago, during a Ponga event, a US veteran taught me the phrase “holding space.” As I learned, holding space means creating a safe space to talk about uncomfortable stories. In-person conversations can involve being fully present and open-minded and respecting silence while a story comes together. It’s a way to prepare a focused environment for listening and empathy.

I want our Projectkin Members’ Corner to create a virtual version of that safe space. Someplace we can share and respect these important stories. I think of the importance of memorial services that way, too. Eulogies, wakes, and receptions let us share memories and find closure. Military honors are a country’s way of extending national condolences.1

Honor your loved ones and share their stories.

During the month of May, I’d like to focus on this theme for our Members’ Corner and invite you to contribute your own stories. I’ll share the collection in our Members’ Corner, giving each story focused attention and celebration.

You may have already read some military stories in our Members’ Corner, for example:

• “Cause of death – explosion or the fate of a soldier, Carl Victor Forsman” — by

• “Alfred Chan: World War II Chinese American Congressional Gold Medal Honoree” — by

The idea for this as a theme for the Members’ Corner was triggered by a submission by . As she submitted a story about her uncle in April, she asked that I hold it for release until May. She wanted the story shared on Memorial Day, May 27th, 2024.

That got me thinking. Earlier this week, April 25th, was Anzac Day. VE Day, celebrating the end of WWII in Europe, is just over a week away, on May 8th. V-J Day is celebrated in August in most of the world and on September 2nd in the US. Armistice Day, celebrating the end of WWI is recognized globally on November 11th, also Veteran’s Day in the US. Each of these days is important. They connect us personally to historical moments through the memories and artifacts of our loved ones.

May Members’ Corner Theme: Military

It didn’t take me long to realize that I should make stories of experiences in the armed forces a theme for the May cohort. Here at Projectkin, it will be an honor to help you celebrate these stories during the month of May. Victoria’s article will be the first submission. I already have a few submissions, and I’d love to include yours. I’m also looking into cross-posts; let me know if you’re interested in that as well.

But wait! April comes first! The first of our April2 Members’ Corner cohort will be out on Tuesday, April 30. Learn more about how this program works here:

The key idea is to give our members an easy way to start sharing their stories. All you need to do is get me your files before midnight on May 21, 2024.

See the article ☝️ for details on submitting your article. It includes an easy-to-use form to send me your text (as .doc, Gdoc, or even a .txt file), image files, and recordings (.mp4 video or .mp3 audio, for example). Using the form helps ensure that your written and visual materials stay together — and reminds me how to reach you 😉. I share the articles in the cohort in email in the order in which I receive them.

Do you still have questions? I’d love to hear from you:

Our guest writer, joins us for his first time in the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Ron lectures widely on how to bring family history to life using traditional and AI techniques. He is the founder and executive director of the Bay Area Chinese Genealogy Group, a published genealogy author, and co-founder of the Chinese American GI Project.

Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Learn more and submit your own stories here.

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Congressional Gold Medal

20,000 Chinese American GIs served in World War II from the shores of the Pacific to the battlefields of Europe, defending American values of freedom. Nearly one of five Chinese Americans served. Forty percent were not even US citizens, as the Chinese Exclusion Act declared them unfit to be Americans. Their acts of heroism, bravery, and sacrifice have largely been ignored, or forgotten. Until now.

Finally, after 75 years, Alfred Chan, and his World War II Chinese American comrade at arms were recognized with the highest US civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal.  Finally, they received the honor and respect they deserved

Here is one sailor’s story.

Growing up Country

 Alfred was born June 24, 1924, in San Francisco, California. He was the eldest of six children of immigrant parents, Kin On Chan and Au Wai Seung. Alfred’s Chinese name means, Beautiful View of the Clouds. He grew up on a ranch in the Sacramento Delta, in Courtland, California. When he was old enough to work in the orchards with his sharecropper father, Alfred toiled in the sweltering, 100-degree sun, digging irrigation ditches, picking, pruning, and planting pears, all for a dollar a day.

Alfred remembers, those were hard days. Hard years. Everyone worked. From youngest to oldest. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. He grew up around heavy machinery, learning how to drive and fix tractors and trucks at an early age on the ranch. Drafted in his junior year in high school, a rugged country boy, Alfred was well suited to serve in a Navy Seabee Construction Battalion, their motto being, We build. We fight. Can do! 

 In 1944, Alfred was shipped aboard the carrier, USS, Hancock, destination Midway Island. There he helped build critical infrastructures for the invasion of Japan such as airfields, munitions depots, and island fortifications. He felt “fear, boredom, and home sickness, but I will kill or be killed.” Alfred celebrated VJ (Victory over Japan) day on Midway Island upon Japan’s surrender. He didn’t remember much that day “as the beer flowed freely”.

Racism

 Growing up, being Chinese was not easy. Alfred was forced to attend a segregated Oriental school. He knew what it was like to go hungry after being refused restaurant service, or to stand out in the cold, being refused a movie ticket. In wartime, tensions were especially high against Asian Americans. Alfred was the only Chinese American on Midway Island, and remembers he how was confronted by an angry Marine, who said, “I’m going to kill me a Jap (sic).”

Postwar

 For 38 years Alfred served his community and country, working at the Alameda Naval Base and the City of Oakland (California). He was a commander, founding and life member, of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), East Bay Chinatown Post #3956. He closed each VFW meeting with, “Let there be no future wars. God bless America.”

Alfred (98), and his companion May (94), were together for 75 years. 

A Son’s Reflections

 Dad and I went on an Honor Flight in 2016 with 24 other veterans to the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. To walk with soldiers, who felt the bitter cold of the Battle of the Bulge or dogged the bloody sands of Utah Beach was an experience of a lifetime. When we went to the Vietnam Memorial, where the names of thousands of the fallen are inscribed, a lady stopped to thank dad for his service. She called him a hero. Dad pointed to the Vietnam Memorial wall, and said, “the heroes are over there.” That moment, I felt the depths of my father’s patriotism.

Dad was a typical Chinese American father of the 1950s. He said few words, and rarely expressed his emotions. He never spoke of his service. Dad worked six days a week to make ends meet, but still gave my sister and me, his Sundays. We made trips to the park, Lake Merritt, and the Oakland (California) duck pond. He was proud of his children who graduated from college, as he did not.

Dad provided a lifetime of example, instilling in me the value of work, love of family, and respect for country. There is no better legacy a father can leave a son.

Video Music Credit: Skylar Grey, “Coming Home” Diddy - Dirty Money

Do you think you might be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work. Learn more:

Our guest writer, of The Preserve Your Past podcast joins us as part of our first cohort in the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

Explore "The Preserve Your Past Podcast"

Leaving a legacy with your powerful personal stories

Storytelling is a universal practice we use to pass along our memories to future generations.  Whether or not you consider yourself a writer, everyone has a lifetime of stories to share and getting these down on paper assures that they will live on.

As an author, storyteller, and podcast host, I welcome guests from around the globe each week to share the stories they’re leaving as their legacy. We pull back the curtains, get real and raw, going behind the scenes and discussing the story-telling processes they use. You’ll get plenty of tips and tools (and lots of inspiration) to help you write your own stories.

I joined Projectkin to surround myself with enthusiastic family historians who are also passionate about "preserving their past."  I am excited to be inspired by and learn from others as well as share any of the tips and tools and creative ideas that could benefit someone else.  Writing and researching can be isolating endeavors, and so I look forward most of all to being part of this dynamic community.

I hope you enjoy this podcast episode. I look forward to getting to know more of you as members of Projectkin and collaborating with you in projects as part of my own Preserving Your Past group on Facebook.

is one of our members here at Projectkin. You can follow her here:

Follow Melissa Ann Kitchen

Do you think you might be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work. Learn more:

Our guest writer, hosts the acclaimed Journeys into Genealogy podcast joins us as part of our first cohort in the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

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I’ve been looking for the place where my great grandfather Horace Aubrey Cox was baptised in 1842, yet it doesn’t appear on modern maps. It is somewhere in the parish of St Mary, Lambeth in the County of Surrey, or what is now London.

Looking for Albert Place

I’ve known of Albert Place address for several years but not been able to find it. Trying again recently I used a couple of websites that I’d like to share with you.

Firstly a Google Search for Albert Place brought up The Hunt House and “Old to New Street names 1857 – 1929”  

Looking for Albert Place on there amongst the dozen or so results is Albert Place in Lambeth (type CTRL-F and add your search words on a PC or CMD-F on a Mac).  

At some point before 1912 the name has changed to Sidford Place.

So where is Sidford Place?

A site I have visited before and highly recommend is the National Library of Scotland, this may sound unlikely but they have the best collection of maps covering the UK.

One of the extremely useful tools is the Side by Side viewer. This shows a modern map next to an older one covering the same area, moving the cursor over one or zooming in does the same action on the other. 

Search using the magnifying glass and then you can choose which maps to display, from an OS Six Inch 1840s-1880s (the one I used) to a One Inch 1885-1900 Outline amongst the most useful for showing old streets. 

And if you want to try it yourself, here’s the link. On the left you see Albert Place, and on the right, Sidford Place.

William Cox died sometime between 1846 and by 1851 his widow Bessey and 2 sons have moved to Somerset to live in the same place as Bessey’s sister and brother in law.

Next mystery is to find his exact date and place of death!

Other potential sources

• Rayment Society: Inner London Street Name Changes

• The Camden Society: Camden area names (PDF document from 2016)

• Another site is the British Newspaper Archive, this is a subscription site but you can search for 3 items for free

• And to see what some of the old London streets looked like around 1900-1920, explore Spital Fields Life. It’s worth signing up to the newsletter here as they share some amazing old photos of London life in the East End.

Do you think you might be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work. Learn more:

Our guest writer,ofjoins us as part of our first cohort in the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

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Where were the women?

As I was growing up, I liked learning about history.  In 1970, I was in 5th grade and jumped into American History with both feet.  I learned about explorers, the Pilgrims, and pioneers.  As a ten-year-old, I thought based on what I was taught from the textbooks, that men were the only people who existed in America. 

My experience was that women were not mentioned in school history textbooks.  The exception was Betsy Ross, the token woman who brought her sewing skills to the table of rugged individualists establishing America.  I thought about how she must be lonely being the only woman in America.  My ten-year-old mind pictured all the men coming to America and the women staying in Europe.  I mean, if there were women there, they would have been included in the textbooks, right? 

In all fairness, I do remember learning about Harriet Tubman and clinging to her story because she was a woman.  Two women.  That is it.

Later, in high school, feminism was on the rise, but there were still no changes in my textbooks.  By then, I knew there were women in America, but as far as I could tell, they didn’t do anything of any significance. This was again, based on what I was reading in the textbooks.

Fast forward to 1994.  I am 34 years old and have returned to college. I decided to take a Women’s History class. It might be interesting to learn about a few women who might have played a part in American history.  I go to the bookstore to pick up my textbooks for the semester.  The cafeteria is right next door.  I grab a coffee and sit down with my new text-filled treasures.  I open the book with essays about women in history.  

Oh, my goodness!  What? 

Essay after essay about women who played major roles in the development of the United States appeared as I flipped through the pages.  Wait.  There were this many women?  I began to feel great about the women who were people I could relate to and at the same time, felt resentment that I was just now finding out about them.  

I showed up early to get a good seat on the first day of my Women’s History class.  That’s what you do as an eager thirtysomething student.  On that day, the teacher changed my entire understanding of women and their roles in history.  I found out that the women were actually there in history in a significant way, but had been invisible in my early education.  I fell deeply in love with history during that class.  That semester I changed my major to U.S. History.  

I can still remember the woman who I chose to write my report about, Ida B. Wells.  Her strength, intelligence, and significance inspired me.  Where was her story when I was 10 years old?  What would my conceptual understanding of the world have been like if I had grown up knowing about women like her?

Fast forward to 1999. 

I become a 5th grade teacher.  One of the subjects I get to teach is U.S. History!  This brings me great joy.  I am a brand new teacher filled with that beautiful feeling of being able to fill children’s minds with knowledge.  I open my teacher’s edition of the U.S. History textbook with a mixture of excitement and anticipation of the content that I will use to create a love of history for all my lovely 10-year-old students.  Wait.  What? Where are the women?  Are you kidding me? 

Oh heck no!  

On that day, I started writing my supplemental curriculum that most definitely included women.  By the time I retired in 2020, there had been some movement in the curriculum to be more inclusive, but of course, more is needed.  

Now, it is 2024 and I spend as much time as possible researching and writing about my family history.  I love that I have a history about my Hinkson family line that has been written about by my great-granduncle and others of his generation.  It has given me an incredible foundation to build upon.  

Guess who I am focusing on when I write my family history narrative?  No.  It is not a woman, but a man.  I say this with my head hung low.  What am I doing? 

The research on Richard Summers Hinkson my 2-times great grandfather comes much more easily than it does for Mary Frances Sharp Hinkson, my 2-times great grandmother, because that is how history has been written.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love learning about Richard Summers Hinkson, but again, I ask.  What am I doing?  I’m making Mary Frances Sharp Hinkson invisible! Ugh.  

A New Mindset

Enough of that. Mary Frances Sharp at the very least deserves equal billing in my family history narrative.  With this new mindset, I got out my pen and paper, sat in my comfy chair and started writing.

Mary Frances Sharp was born in Turkey Creek, Benton County, Missouri on October 12, 1850. Mary was the 2nd child of John Sharp and Amanda McCall.  The Sharps were from Virginia and the McCalls were from Georgia.  Mary’s siblings included Leonard Ballou Sharp, Sarah Sharp, Elizabeth Sharp, Thomas Jefferson Sharp, and Samuel Madison Sharp. Mary wed Richard Summers Hinkson on June 21, 1868, in Amador County, California.  

Writing by hand always makes me drowsy.  I set down my pen and lay my head back for a moment.  I am soon woken by a voice.  I open my eyes and across from me seated on a wooden rocking chair that I don’t remember ever being there before is my 2-times great grandmother, Mary Frances Sharp Hinkson.  For a moment, I am disoriented and I don’t hear what she is saying. 

“Child, are you listening?” she says leaning toward me.

I sit up straight. “Yes, I am,” I answer. I realize that I am about to hear from Mary herself.  I am excited and reach down to grab my pen to take notes.  I can’t find the pen or the paper anywhere.  It is too important to worry about taking notes.  I would just have to remember everything she said.  Here is her story.

Mary Frances Sharp Hinkson’s Story

I was the first to smell smoke.  Our two-story house was the only one for miles in a place called Delhi.  Our land bordered on one side along the Merced River. We had all just sat down at the table to eat supper.  Richard sat opposite me at the other end of the table.  Budd, John and Frank sat on one side.  They were all grown men by then.  My daughters, Jessie, and Eva, my son Louis, and my granddaughter Patricia, sat across from them.  Patricia was about 5 years old then. The smoke confused me at first.  The smell wasn’t coming from the kitchen.  It seemed to be outside.  

I set my fork down.  “Richard, I smell smoke,” I said as I got up from the table.  Richard set his fork down too.  He pushed his chair back, got up, brushed past me and went to the back door.  I heard the wooden screen slam behind him as he pushed through it to get outside.  Richard came back in through the door.  His eyes were wide and alarmed. 

 “A spark ignited the roof shingles,” he announced.  He told everyone to get out of the house.  

“Eva, take Patricia to the tree away from the house and stay with her,” I said.  

“Yes Mama,” Eva answered as she held out her hand for Patricia and made her way out the door. Budd grabbed his shotguns out of the room off the kitchen and then held the door while we all left our house.  We all were out in a few seconds.

Richard, Budd, John, Frank, Louis, Jessie, and I all ran for buckets in the barn.  By the time we were able to get some water into those buckets, the whole house was on fire.  We formed a line and quickly passed the buckets to each other from the well to Richard. He threw each bucket of water at the flames that were lapping up our two-story house.  Our efforts and our buckets of water made no difference. The rage of the fire that was taking our home was winning.  Finally, all we could do was stand in disbelief, watching.  In what seemed like a blink of an eye, our house was a smoldering pile of black ashes.  

It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized that all the pieces of furniture, my spinning wheel, clothing, and many things my family had brought from Virginia, and Richard’s family brought from Missouri were all gone.  We lost every material thing we owned but the clothes on our backs. But by the grace of God, we all got out safely.  Now, all I had left of those family treasures in our attic were my memories.    

❦ — ❦ — ❦

I was 9 years old the year we left our farm in Missouri to come to California.  Papa said that there was plenty of land there and we would have an adventure crossing the plains in our covered wagon.  So all of us, Mama, Papa, my brothers, Bill and Thomas, my sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth, and I were to leave the life we knew, gather very few of our belongings, and head to California. 

Mama didn’t want to leave Missouri, but she went along with Papa’s plan.  Papa was always in charge and Mama didn’t question him.  Mama was like that.  She had been bound to a Mr. John Potter as a housekeeping apprentice when she was 11 years old. Her Papa had died. Mama and all her brothers were awarded by the court to become apprentices to different families.  I’m not sure what happened to Mama’s mother.  She never spoke of her. The only brother who was also bound to John Potter was her little brother, Wilson.  I think my mama was just so happy to have a family, none of the details mattered to her. So she was always quite agreeable.  

To me, the trip didn’t feel like the adventure Papa had promised.  It was hard.  We walked every day for many miles.  It took us almost half a year to get to California.  

When we first got to California, we lived in a place called Elliott.  It was the year 1859 and Mama and Papa found us some land and built us a small house.  We started farming but soon left to live in the foothills.  We lived in Drytown for a spell, then moved to Fiddletown which was in an area Papa named the Shenandoah Valley.  It was a lovely place in the hills of California.

Unlike my mama, I was inclined to have more of an opinion in my marriage.  My husband, Richard called me “the Boss.”  Everyone thought he was joking, but in our marriage, Richard was in charge of worldly matters such as work, community, and politics. When he would come home from everything happening out in the world, I was the one in charge at home. Richard knew it and so did our children… 

I start to blink.  Mary is drifting away.  I open my eyes fully.  I am here on my comfy chair.  The wooden rocking chair and Mary are gone.  I look down and my pen and paper are on my lap.  No!  I quickly shut my eyes.  Come back, Mary!  Please come back!  Nothing.  My heart sinks a little. I miss her already.  I have so many questions.  I grab my pen and start writing everything I remember from her story.   

Do you think you might be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work. Learn more:

Our guest writer, joins us from Nova Scotia, Canada as part of our first cohort in the Projectkin Members’ Corner. Monthly posts from members celebrate their contributions to family history storytelling — in all its forms. Posts may be written or recorded (audio or video) will be shared for free each month. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.

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I once knew this poem completely. It stirs me whenever a line from it is spoken or comes to mind. The poem wraps itself around me like the fog and I have no wish to move away. It speaks to my feelings about 2024.

The New Year

Making plans for a new year (always, for me: God willing) is an optimistic and happy task. I think of possible day trips, meals with our children and grandchildren, swimming, visiting, or any number of ordinary wonderful things. This year, less so.

If Eliot’s poem seems fatalistic, sometimes it is. Sometimes though, I find it calls to me and urges me to experience life with gratitude. I am deeply grateful for the individual love and relationship each of our children give us. 

2024 Spring and Summer

They tell us it will be even hotter than 2023.  That thought gives me shivers as human beings will be suffering even more than they are now. We had one, very hot (for Nova Scotia), windy day in late May. A spark from a backyard fire pit ignited an inferno that travelled 70 km in 30 minutes. I’m sure many people have had this experience - running from a wildfire. This was my first wildfire and hopefully my last. It is recorded in photos and in writing for my children and grandchildren. Events like these are part of our family history. 

The Love Song and My Ancestors

Reading Eliot’s poem today brings around thoughts of my ancestors; in particular my paternal line. Just after the large wildfires were under control last year, we departed for Ontario where I found many of Dad’s ancestors’ graves and learned a great deal about a few of them.

Standing on the farm of my three times great-grandfather was an experience I’ll never forget. He immigrated from Long Island, New York sometime around 1815. The plot of land (photograph) had been settled since about 1800. There are more tales waiting and I hope to uncover more of them in this year of uncertainty.

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