Dear Family,

I plunged back into genealogy this morning and found our grandfather again. You may remember that, in Taft, he had a habit of borrowing cars without first notifying their owners. That was later. This is from 1917:

Here’s the house he was living in at the time, on Main Street in Lodi:

Couldn’t stay out of trouble. From the Bakersfield Echo, 1919:

Mom’s birth announcement (the address is now an industrial area and seems to be a vacant lot):

And in 1902, his big brother Willie got into a little hot water, too.

But Granduncle Willie turned out just fine. He was an engineer on the Great Northern Railway and died at his post:

And that Great Northern wasn’t some mouse fart railroad, nor was the Empire Builder. Here’s a photo:

And, as to the Irish part of our background, I’ve been able to push about as far back as is possible for the Irish, to the 18th century. I’ve just discovered a “Margaret Lambert,” who married Patt Keeffe, who was born in Edinburgh, but I haven’t positively identified her as the same Margaret Lambert who would be our 4th great-grandmother.

Meanwhile, as to Grandma Kelly, I’ve found the German village, Geißelhardt, Schwäbisch Hall (I have no idea how German names work) where her grandfather, Michen Kircher, was born and baptized. It’s beautiful.

And this is the church (Lutheran), appropriately named St. Michael’s, where Michen Kircher (“Kirch” = “Church”) was baptized in 1831.

Given the last century’s unpleasantness (1939-1945), I’ve always been a little uneasy about our German heritage. But our ancestral village is in Baden-Wurttemberg, the home of Claus von Stauffenberg, played, not too ineptly, by Tom Cruise (Valkyrie),  who tried to blow up Hitler in July 1944.

And, by golly, we even have a sort of connection to von Stauffenberg. I got to do an inservice at Stanford twenty years ago, and we visited the Hoover Institution, whose archives include the X-ray of Hitler’s skull taken immediately after the bomb went off. I got to hold it in my hot little hands!


So there is your genealogy update for March.

Love,

Jim