Family Stories

Revisiting the past keeps our ancestors alive. I’m Liam Kirby, and this is one of my Family Stories. Transcript and sources

Revisiting the past keeps our ancestors alive. I’m KC Olson, and this is one of my Family Stories. Transcript and sources

I never met my great grandfather. His friends called him Nellie. He died on my third birthday, when he was 82 years old. To be honest, the first time I heard anything about Nellie was when my dad showed me a bunch of his belongings. Among the things he showed me was a knife, inscribed “Nellie” on one side of the handle and “Rita” on the other; a holster for a Belgian pistol, on which was written a...

A picture is worth a thousand words but what can these words tell us? Perhaps they can tell us the story of something grand, or maybe something of a tragedy?  That is the case with the photo I have here with me. A visual representation of a story in which a building went up in flames. A single, yellow-garbed firefighter running through the image while jets of water rained down onto The Walker Hote...

Every family has a story, but not everyone’s gets told. Welcome to the Family Stories podcast–I am Caitlyn Pelikan. Bibliography Becker, Anne, and Detlef Mühlberger.  Analyzing the sociography of the membership of the Schutzstaffel [SS] in SS-Oberabschnitt Rhein using Access II. History and Computing, 1999.  Davies, Norman. Europe at War: 1939-1945: No Simple Victory. Pan, 2008. Englund, Erika. Li...

We all have things we have forgotten about or don’t know we own in our homes. Papers, books, pictures, all forgotten on shelves or in closets. When I was eighteen, I found a black binder tucked in next to cooking and children’s books, inside my mom’s cluttered, almost to the point of hoarder status, apartment. Inside of it were pages and pages following the lives of men and their children starting...

Russia. War. Mennonites? Every family has a story, but not everyone’s gets told. Welcome to the Family Stories podcast. I’m Claire Preheim and let me tell you about one of mine. This episode features my great-grandfather's time in World War I Russia. Today we’ll be diving into the world of Mennonites, pacifism, and conscientious objectors during the Great War. Bibliography B. Hiebert, A Crisis...

Burnt toast. Burnt toast was always one of my mother’s favorite snacks. I never understood the reasoning behind making a perfectly good piece of bread taste like charcoal, but it turns out, that it all tracks all the way back to 1875 in Wassersuppen, Bohemia to a boy named Franz Zeig, my great great grandfather. Welcome to the family stories podcast, where we know that every family has a story, bu...

My great aunt Ruth’s central memory of her grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) is that when he lived with her family, he really liked to make a dried fruit concoction. He loved it, but she thought it was disgusting. This was the main thing she knew about him, until she began researching him through newspapers, census and immigration records, and records the Nazis kept during their invasion of...

When I was young, my sisters and I would spend afternoons at the home of my maternal grandma Elaine - affectionately known to us as “Maga” - while we waited for our Mom to pick us up after school. Sometimes, Maga would tell us a story that had caught my attention early on: the story of her own grandma, my great-great-grandma Charlotta, and her involvement in a train wreck as a teenager. The detail...