Family history sample

Here is a sample family history (ours, of course). Yours can be in any form; this is just a sample:

DEKEYSER FAMILY HISTORY

“We’ve uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.”

— Jimmy Carter

My grandfather’s grandfather left the village of Huldenberg, outside the forest that surrounds the Belgian capital of Brussels, around 1870, to come to the United States. He found himself in Wisconsin, Green Bay, which was then called the Bay Settlement. In Huldenberg, the family had been either a farrier (shoeing horses) or a blacksmith or both. I don’t know what he did in America or what brought him to Green Bay, but that’s where my Grandfather, William DeKeyser, was born and raised.

Grandpa’s dad, Henry, ran teams of horses pulling woodcutter-felled trees out of the snowy forest. Because it was easier to move them on snow than ground, much of the work was outside in the dead of the bitter Wisconsin and Northern Michigan winters. My dad, William Richard DeKeyser, tells of cooking in those camps as a teen. The seasonality of that meant that Grandpa’s father was not home much as he was in the camps, and when he was home, he was there much of the time. Grandpa’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 42 coming back from one of these trips.

That left Grandpa as a third-grade dropout trying to make money for the family to survive, this being right about the turn of the century. He did many things, we’re told, and helped his family through that tough time, though he never got much of a formal education.

When he was in his late teens, he played football for the first all-city team in Green Bay, before there was a National Football League. A photo of the 1910 Green Bay team is stuck deep in one of the memorabilia bins in the Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame, which I saw with my Dad, and it’s in a book titled “Before they were the Packers” “Green Bay, a City and its Team” that they sell at Lambeau Field. Dad told me once that when he was a little kid in Green Bay, Grandpa would run into Green Bay’s legendary coach Curly Lambeau in local taverns and talk with him as a former player would talk to a former coach. Yes, we have been lifelong Packer fans – for more than a century. (Top that!)

As he became an adult, Grandpa wound up working in canneries, and he developed some expertise in engineering how they were set up. Grandpa moved his family all around Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula Michigan every few years to set up a new one. He also tried farming in several locations. His reputation was as enormously competent, but he never made a lot of money. Dad once explained to me that Grandpa did not cut good deals with the people who engaged him to set up the canning plants, and that by the time his share was supposed to kick in, somehow the business had changed. I don’t know the details.

Grandma DeKeyser (Elsie Beno) also came from Belgian immigrant family: both she and Grandpa were third-generation Belgium Catholic Democrats and Green Bay natives. She, however, was Walloon while Grandpa was Flemish, and those tribes remained hostile. I’m told that the Benos wondered about hooking up with the DeKeysers in the early going.

I remember as a kid going to huge family reunions in a big park in Green Bay in the summer, with burgers, hot dogs and all the sodas a kid could drink. I remembered it as a DeKeyser family reunion, but Dad told me later that it was the Beno family. The DeKeysers later started doing the same thing, but in the Upper Peninsula. (We’re Yoopers.)

Grandma came from a family of tough, pioneers also, including the murderer (every family should have one). Evidently, Grandma’s grandparents were hell-raising, hard-drinking farmers. There is a story told in a University of Wisconsin master’s thesis on the early days of the Bay Settlement about Grandma’s grandmother getting drunk and closing down a local bar, whereupon the bartender hitched up a team and drove her home. Her husband, though, must have considered there to be some hanky-panky, because he chased the bartender through the snowy woods with a shotgun, cursing and firing. He missed, conveniently drunk.

As the story goes, he murdered his wife (not sure which one – he had two) and buried her in a cornfield. He got away with that, evidently, but somehow got caught moving the body after it had been buried. He was convicted, not sure of what, and hauled off to prison. As the story goes, he escaped prison and made his way back to the family farm, where he hid in a secret spot in the attic. That couldn’t last forever, though, so they dressed him up as a woman and took him to another town, where they put him on a train to Portland, Oregon. There, purportedly, I have multiple 6th cousins or so with a last name that they didn’t have when the family immigrated from the Old Country.

Grandma made it through 8th grade, and she always valued education. That’s why it’s amazing that all their kids got degrees, with the exception of Harold, my namesake, who as a bombardier in World War II was killed on a training mission out of North Africa. Bill and Elsie had four girls and then four boys, and the girls became either teachers or nurses. Two of the boys became teachers (one a superintendent), and Dad was an engineer.

Grandma and Grandpa’s farmhouse in the UP remains my most vivid memory of childhood. It was outside of Perkins, a wide spot in the road outside of Escanaba, a town of less than 20,000 and one of the biggest cities in the Upper Peninsula.

At the farm in Perkins, MI.

It was a dairy farm, and pure Americana. It was white two-story wood house with an attic and basement, where the furnace was. Grandma kept kids out of the dusty, cluttered attic by telling us there was a wolf up there. An expansive wide porch faced the long dirt driveway that lead to the road, where the school bus would pick me up when I was in kindergarten and living with them. Grandma cooked on a wood-burning stove – she had a gas stove in the kitchen also, but she considered that to be like a microwave, just for reheating. She baked bread in the wood-burner, cooked plate-sized pancakes. My job in the morning was to go out and get kindling wood for the stove, sometimes to get the cows up for milking by kicking them in the butt.

Grandpa had a couple of dozen dairy cows and one bull. There was a barn for them and another one for hay, which also had a rope hung in the middle for the cousins to swing from one side and land in the hay (perhaps not its intended primary function). Next to the house was an apple orchard, where deer would come up and steal fruit, a thievery they would regret come deer hunting season when they became easy targets for uncles with rifles pointed out the mudroom windows. There always was a string of them hung from the barn during season, and nothing was wasted.

There was a pond, several pastures, a chicken coop, a woodshed and other working sheds and the dense forest at the perimeter. A gravity flow gas pump sat in the middle of the yard. There were several cats to keep the mice population down, and the World’s Greatest Dog, Shep, a half-collie, half-German shepherd mix who would bring in the cows with extraordinary exuberance when Grandpa would say, “Shep, get the cows.” Shep also was the killing agent for gophers, and he survived that bitter Northern Michigan winter eating table scraps and sleeping in the barn.

What a dog!

My cousin, Barry Zimmerman, once told me of a study about what group of farmers best survived the Depression. It was the Belgians, and the traits they described were frugal and debt-hating – they paid quickly for their land and consequently didn’t wind up at the mercy of bankers calling in loans. They also were hard-working, family-oriented, church-going, but they also would toss back a beer or whisky or two (or three) and loved a good party. That so much sounds like my father’s family.

On my mother’s side were the city grandparents, Leo H. and Alice May. They lived in Milwaukee, in the top story of a three-story brick apartment building in Shorewood. Aunt Ada, my grandmother’s spinster sister, lived in the apartment building behind and would babysit us occasionally.

Grandpa May used to be a car dealer before the Depression, but he lost it all then and wound up a car salesman. He smoked big cigars that burned holes in his shirts, and didn’t say much to us.

Grandma May, on the other hand, was full of giddy life. She dyed her hair red and lived to be 97, traveling and enjoying life up until the end. She had lied about her age to keep working well into her 70s – and she worked for the local Social Security office in Milwaukee. How she pulled that off isn’t part of the detail of family lore.

Grandma still had some of the air of a woman used to more elegance. She had two fox pelts she would wear on her shoulders as a fashion accoutrement, with the metal-hinged jaw of one fox biting the tail of the other one to hold the whole in place. Grandma was fun. Except that morning when I was about 4 years old and she discovered me playing with the foxes on the dusty floor, engaging them in mock mortal, wildlife combat complete with growling and yipping. I never knew that old woman was strong enough to yank a kid that high with one arm.

Grandpa May was in World War I, and long after they died, Mom showed me a postcard Grandma received when Grandpa May’s troop ship made it over to England. I also have an artillery shell that he had made into a vase for Grandma May – quite impressively so – and I had no idea he housed an artistic bent.

The Mays had four children, Jimmy, Jack, Mary Ann and Patricia (Mom). Jimmy died as a child, I think of polio. We were not very close to this side of the family. Mom wasn’t close to her siblings, although she was with Grandma May.

Take-aways:

•  Not everyone has a farm family and a city family, but they’re generally different in definable ways.
•  What kind of person you are started long before the people you’ve known in your life were alive.
• Go Pack Go.