A TRIBUTE TO MY ANCESTORS

My Mom and her Mom were both born in Unity, Clark County Wisconsin. My grandmother took some time one day and taught me about her ancestors while showing me around the cemetery where her family had been buried. There were three sisters of her husband who died all in the same month in the same year, two of them on the same day, from diphtheria. Very sad. I saw the tombstone of my grandfather, who I never knew, but Grandma always said that he would have really liked me. He died six months before I was born. She felt it was important that I know that stuff, and I tried to remember everything she told me. I was sixteen then. Thanks Grandma, for introducing me to family history.

I knew that my parents saved all the family “trees” that we had gotten from family reunions and I had always thought I knew enough about our family history. When going through my parents’ house to prepare for an estate sale, and to sell the house, I re-found all the family trees, and lots of photographs. While looking through the older photos, I realized that there were quite a few I couldn’t identify. This led me to hunting in the family trees to try to figure them out. While really READING those trees for the first time as an adult, that led to more questions, and a desire to find out the missing parts as well. Regretfully, I had waited until I could no longer ask anyone in the previous generation any questions, but it has led to the most interesting of “hobbies; or, rather, obsession, passion, craziness? Thanks Mom, for saving the old photos, newspaper articles and family trees.

Thank you, Dad, for marrying my Mom, and having the best marriage ever to have come from Clark County Wisconsin. You once wrote that she was the sweetest girl this side of heaven and that you would wait for her forever. Thanks for providing a wonderful childhood and strong family foundation. Mom still is the sweetest girl this side of heaven, but I think she will be joining you in heaven soon. I hope that what I am doing with genealogy would make you proud of me. Thanks, Dad also for teaching me to be a hard worker and to be responsible.

Thank you, too great-grandparents, although I never knew you, you left a Christian legacy. You were founding members of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Spencer, Wisconsin, and I am proud to be descended from hardworking, immigrant farmers such as yourselves, who also had the courage to come to a new land, make farms out of wilderness, but still build a church and make Christian principles a large part of your lives.

Alma Bertha Louis (Ewert) Flink