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Archiver > OREGON > 2000-12 > 0975963365


From: "Jack D. Davis" <>
Subject: Re: JUNK BOX REVEALS FAMILY SECRET
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 12:56:05 -0800
References: <2d.46c2596.275d5bc0@aol.com>


One word...WOW!

Jack D. Davis

Web Site and Art Gallery: http://www.pond.net/~hmds/
Genealogy: http://www.pond.net/~hmds/play/index.htm

There is always more than one right answer.
----- Original Message -----
From: <>
To: <>
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 12:42 PM
Subject: JUNK BOX REVEALS FAMILY SECRET


>
> JUNK BOX REVEALS FAMILY SECRET
>
> by Sue Webb Bodishbaugh
>
> My mother-in-law cleaned house to move from a large home to a
> retirement home and gave me three boxes of what she called
> "family junk." Each box was a treasure in itself: one was wood,
> handmade and beautifully carved by my husband's grandfather and
> namesake, when he was in shop class in grade school. One black
> and red tin box (grandpa's money box in his 1923 grocery store)
> later was found to have come from Germany in the 1800s and
> inside were the treasures including more than 100 letters, birth
> certificates, German smallpox inoculations dated in the 1840s
> (giving the city/township where great-grandpa was born and his
> age, as he was "9 months of age at this time"), Civil War
> letters written to and from the battlefields. I digested and
> gloried in this new information for a month but, as usual, so
> many answers produced so many questions. Then three of the
> oddest things happened.
>
> First, I went to our Family History Center and asked for help
> obtaining copies of microfilms from Edenkoben, Germany.
> "Edenkoben?" the nice lady asked. "Yes," said I. "Well, why
> don't you just ask Charlie Doll. He's over there. His family is
> from Edenkoben." As DOLL was one of the names mentioned in the
> letters, and Edenkoben was a tiny dot on the German map, I was
> floored. Not only did Mr. Doll have the microfilms on hand, but
> also he gave me the address of his cousin who authored the
> history book 1600 YEARS OF EDENKOBEN, so we could correspond,
> and he helped me with my beginning German language reading. Like
> any good teacher, he didn't do it for me; he just showed me the
> way and picked me up every now and then when I faltered. I am
> still amazed when I remember that night. "This genealogy stuff
> is a piece of cake," I thought. Ha! It was a classic case of
> beginner's luck.
>
> Second, after stumbling over the tiny writing in faded purple
> and blue inks written forward, sideways, and between the lines
> in a foreign language, I passed a few copies through my law
> firm's International Department. The paralegal, all of whom
> knew German, assured me these were not written in German. A
> month later, I lunched with three letters spread before me,
> pondering my next step, when my boss passed behind me and
> laughingly said, "That person writes just like my mother!" Both
> daughter and mother are from Baden-Baden but it just so happened
> that mother was a teacher in a private girls' school in a
> certain short time period in Germany during which three-forms of
> the German language were required to be "proper." One was
> Sutterlin/Zutterlain, the language of these letters. So, in her
> mid-80s, with one good eye and a very large magnifying glass,
> dear mother translated my letters to her daughter who typed them
> on her laptop and brought them to me on a disk. Mother would
> only accept a very small fee for the letters brought many
> delightful memories of Germany. She not only translated but,
> ever true to her teaching background, gave me historical
> information I otherwise never would have known: "When she says,
> 'I knew you since you first got your three little scars . . .'
> she is saying she knew him when he was nine months old, as that
> is the age at which children were vaccinated for smallpox, and
> in Germany, they made three little cuts or incisions, one above
> the other, not like they do here with the round poking," and,
> "When he says he is looking for a place in St. Louis, he means
> he is looking for a job. That's how we said it." What a blessing.
>
> Third, family stories were told but I could not find to verify
> great-grandfather and great-grandmother's marriage record or
> their son's birth record. Late one sleepless night, propped up
> in bed with my reading light on, I poured over the letters in
> the three boxes on my lap. I was noting the dates and franking
> on the envelopes, trying to put them into some sort of order and
> silently cursing my husband's uncle, as he had just told me,
> "Those old letters? Mom kept them in the attic and on rainy days
> we used them to play school and made paper planes out of them,
> sailing them out of the attic windows into the mud. There were a
> bunch of them at one time." Ugh! I removed them from the box one
> by one. The bedside light struck the bottom of the box from a
> side angle and all of a sudden I noted a line of stitching -
> black box outside and in, black bottom, black stitching?
>
> All envelopes immediately came out and in the bottom I found,
> form-fitted and hand made so perfectly as to fit the box bottom
> so tightly that it took a letter-opener and tweezers to get
> beside and gently lift out a black leather pouch that held. It
> contained the marriage certificate and birth certificate. They
> showed that grandpa was well on the way when the couple used
> great-grandpa's railroad passes and eloped to a town where no
> one knew them. How they explained this 10-pound child's
> premature birth is unknown. The beautifully decorated, elegantly
> written marriage certificate could not be displayed on the wall,
> for folks were known to count months on their fingers and they
> might talk.
>
> For grandpa's entry into World War II to train American pilots,
> and with his "German sounding last name," great-grandma had to
> do a lot of things, one of which was to file a delayed birth
> certificate. I found it right away and it, of course, contained
> "the" family history, doctored to fit the need.
>
> My mother-in-law got the biggest kick out of this, as her
> mother-in-law was so prim, proper, and always such a perfect
> lady. She'd died in the early 1950s and for 50 years the family
> had passed the boxes around from Arkansas to Florida to Maryland
> and back to Florida, stored in great-grandma's dresser, without
> finding that "hidden treasure."
>
> After all these years, we finally unraveled the threads of the
> ERION/KAYSER/BODISHBAUGH family story. (Had to do it -- pun
> intended!)
>
>
>
>
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