I’m heading back to Seattle from Wisconsin tomorrow. My mother and I found a ton of family, both dead and alive, in Shawano, Brown, and other counties. I’m slowly starting to write about the trip on my new genealogy family history blog, so you can follow the adventures and our discoveries there.
This has been an amazing adventure. First and foremost because I was able to share this with my mother. To trace your family’s history and roots with a parent or grandparent is an amazing gift and privilege. Because of her determination to track down the living, while I spent all of my energy tracking down the past, she found several living relatives, descendants of our ancestors, and we were able to meet with some of them.
The most amazing thing was the fact that just about every other person, and sometimes two or three in a row, that we met in Lessor, Shawano County, Wisconsin, was related to us in some way. Talking to two local historians, they pointed to two other living relatives related to us, and talking to others to get more information on the area and history, we discovered that we were related by marriage to them! Incredible!
Standing in the cemetery in Lessor, surrounded by the names of people long gone whom I’d only seen on paper was a hair-raising experience. Across from the cemetery and down a tad was the family home still standing where my grandfather had spent his later teen years living, working, and going to school.
We were tracing the past of two of my mother’s family branches: Anderson and Knapp. In the Lessor Township of Shawano was the Anderson, Svendson, and Blickfeldt connections, with all their branches. We spent the first part of the trip focused there, gathering massive volumes of birth, death, and marriage certificates, some land, court, and probate records. Then we headed to Green Bay for more research and visiting living relatives, then north tracing the Knapp family branch.
My great uncle Wayne Knapp wrote at least three books on his life growing up in Northern Wisconsin, and his daughter had given us great copies of hand drawn maps of Wayne’s memory of the area. My mother and I dug up old plat maps of the area. While nagging the archive assistant’s that they should know where the “mud hole” and “frog ponds” were on the map, we were able to locate the area and traveled up to the wild and woolly northeastern wilderness of Wisconsin.
We found not only the empty clearing of the old homesteads, but also the mud hole and frog ponds, along with a popular falls in the area, Strong Falls, where we have photographs of my grandmother and her mother standing in front of it. We took turns taking each other’s picture standing in the same spot in front of the falls.
Along the way, I also picked up two soon-to-be-well-fed ticks, one on my leg and the other on my side, and we spent too much time on the phone with my husband back in Alabama and on the web figuring out the right way to get rid of them and what to do about Lyme disease. Once again I am too informed on a subject I want nothing to do with, so I’ll have information on what you should do with ticks, soon. SIGH.
Oh, I have tons of stories and lots of photographs and all kinds of news to tell about the adventure. I have YEARS of material gathered that needs to be processed and will be publishing it on our family history site. Stay tuned!
I’m not sure about a camera that does the thinking for me, but one that does all the focusing for me, too? Hmm. I love 
News is out everywhere over the past few months. 
I love crafts and have thoroughly enjoyed tatting, sewing, crocheting, quilt-making, and doll making while traveling. My favorite has been tatting, something that is very easy to do and mindless, as my hands can be busy tatting while reading a book, watching TV or a movie, or listening to a book on tape while driving 8 hours across country.
I asked a lot of people, and even picked up a few books. Unfortunately, the drawn fingers and threads are really confusing and I needed someone to actually show me. I’ve had many people say they will, but follow through and our travel schedule makes it difficult.
First hit were razors, nail clippers, scissors, metal nail files, and knitting needles, among other metal and sharp objects to be snatched from airport security lines. Boxes and boxes filled up with tiny metal sharp and pointy things. 
Knitting
Tatting
Scissors
Every element must help to relate the story. An elk in the woods snorting steam out of its nostrils, bellowing out its lust to the world during rut. Because we know it’s rutting season, we know it is the fall. We know it’s cold because of the billowing cloud of mist from the hot breath hitting the cold air. We know it’s early morning because the light is low in the sky, back lighting the steam, and it’s cold. We have a sense of space and time and understanding about the photograph. Yet it is timeless. It doesn’t matter if it was photographed in 1880 or 1980 or 2080. The image surpasses time. It is its own story.
I know I left you all hanging with the 
We headed to Three Sisters, a wonderful mountain town designed for quilters and tourists. There is an annual quilting festival held there that increases the population by millions each July. We walked through the town, did a little shopping, my mother got her nails and hair done, and I just walked, shaking off all the nasty stuff. Unfortunately, my mother’s hair turned out to be another ordeal and that took her another couple days to shake her stress off.
Strawberry Hill along the Oregon Coast near Yachats is one of my favorite tide pool areas. At the campground I found nearby, they had tide charts and I discovered that our luck was holding and that the next two days were the lowest tides since last year and it would be June before there was a lower tide level. Amazing!
Most of the wonderful micro-ecosystems jammed packed into holes and crevices in the rocks were gone, empty, dried out. The once white and glowing sea foam was brown and oily looking. Garbage was trapped in little crevices among the potmarked black rocks.
The next day, we drove the famous 17 mile road up to the top of Hurricane Ridge, reminiscing about the many trips Brent and I made there for the first three or four years of our life together. I showed my mother the spot where I proposed to Brent, and where he proposed to me and we both accepted. I finally got a cell signal and called Brent and said, “I have only one question for you. Will you marry me?”
Back home in Everett, my mother who had been whining for days about missing her old cat coming in and out from under the covers all night, waking her up, and how she couldn’t sleep so well without his constant interruptions, she’d gotten so used to them. The first four nights back, she complained about not sleeping through the night because the cat kept waking her up throughout the night wanting in or out of the covers. It’s interesting what we remember as precious when we are away from it, and how much it irritates us to realize that it’s annoying when we’re back in the thick of things. I’ve long stopped romanticizing my life away from travel when I’m traveling. It is what is it is, whether I like it or not, and I missing things, but I know the memory changes with travel time and distance.