Alvin Gauthier was going about is workday as a postal carrier in Grand Prairie, Texas, when he stumbled upon something unusual in his parcel hamper: a Christmas card sent in 1944.

Gauthier sifted through the hamper and found several other loose letters written in 1942 and 1944, all of which were signed by Marion Lamb. There was also a tattered envelope postmarked 1942, and addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. Harvey Lamb, Jacksonville, Arkansas.” It was stamped “U.S. Army Postal Service.”

As a Marine Corps veteran, Gauthier felt a personal connection to the wartime letters. He know they would probably mean a lot to the writer’s relatives. “I had to find the family,” Gauthier said. 

He searched online and found Marion Lamb’s obituary from 2010. Reaching out to a local news station in Arkansas, they ran the story. Soon Gauthier was in touch with JoAnn Smith, Marion’s sister. “I was shocked,” said Smith, 84, the only one alive of her six siblings. Marion was the eldest and had no children; he had served in the military from 1941-1945. 

To shorten the story (it was a lovely long newspaper article), JoAnn Smith’s nephew had the letters in his possession for decades and in mid-April had mailed a large package of family artifacts to his cousin, Debbie Smith (daughter of JoAnn Smith). The package that landed in Alvin Gauthier’s mail hamper hadn’t been properly sealed and many of the letters had spilled out. “Of course that’s what happened!” said Debbie Smith.

To end this tale, Gauthier made the 5-hour drive from Grand Prairie, Texas, to

Jacksonville, Arkansas, to meet the Smiths and hand deliver the precious letters. It was a very emotional meetings; they all shed tears as they hugged. 

If you wish to read the story in its entirety, just Google the particulars. Don’t we all just love a warm-fuzzy genealogy story????

 Most likely your colonial ancestors were familiar with opossums……….. perhaps they ate them too?  Sometimes in thinking about blog post topics that might interest you, I get to musing about things we know little about but what our ancestors might have been quite familiar with. Such as opossums. 

The word opossum is derived from the Powhatan language and was first recorded between 1607 and 1611 by John Smith. They were described as a “beast in bigness of a pig and in taste alike.”

While there are over 126 species of this marsupial, only the Virginia Opossum is found in the U.S. and Canada, and is commonly referred to as “possum.” 

Opossums are non-aggressive, never carry rabies and when threatened or harmed, they will “play possum” mimicking the appearance and smell of a sick or dead animal. 

Opossums are mainly found in the Eastern U.S. and along the Pacific Coast. They eat insects, rodents, birds, eggs, frogs, plants, fruit and grain. Female opossums can give birth up to twenty babies but depending on the mother’s number of teats, not all will survive.  A possum is a marsupial which means the joeys are born early and must make their way into the mother’s pouch; they are weaned at between 70-125 days when they detach from the mother’s pouch.  

 For a long time, there have been opossum jokes:

What do you call a possum laying in the middle of the road?

Obviously, it is a Himalayan possum.

You did find Himalayan in the middle of the road……………

I was once told that most every American has a good portion of German DNA in their ancestry. I know I do. 

I discovered the German Genealogy Group (GGG) some years ago and have been a member ever since. I am astonished by the MANY FREE searchable records they offer!

Total Database Records (includes all nationalities!): 23,323,444 (FREE to search)

Please take the time to explore our site and its features.

Membership in the German Genealogy Group (which is based on Long Island, New York) is a modest $15 annually and brings to you the monthly Der Ahnenforscher newsletter. This publication includes member stories, timely articles, German recipes and upcoming GGG seminars. 

The April 2024 newsletter directed readers to a really interesting link/website dealing with German Funerary Laws. I printed out the 10-page handout to really study it! Click to www.germanyway.com/history-and-culture/germany/the-german-way-of-death-funerals

Another similar link was titled “What’s With Germany’s Strict Burial Regulations?”Click to https://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/funerals/germany-burial-regulations.htmIf

If Americans collectively have one-fourth German ancestry, that usually means YOU and certainly ME, and GGG is the group for you. Click to www.germangenealogygroup.com and plan to spend a couple of delightful research hours. 

Quoting from a bit by Lisa Louise Cook in the Family Tree Magazine, Mar/Apr 2024:

“Would you like to discover a previously unknown photo of your ancestor? Thousands of people have done just that using the free dead Fred website,  www.deadfred.com. This archive includes user-submitted photos that are either unidentified or have spotty information, and you can search it by surname, place or other related keywords. If you find a photo of a direct ancestor, Dead Fred will even sent it to you for free. Take a second look through your own photo collection and start posting those unidentified pictures. Someone else may just be able to help solve the mystery!”

If you’re like me and enjoy “treasure hunting” in thrift shops and garage sales, we HATE to see family photos just casually and anonymously up for sale. Whenever possible, I gather up as many of these as I can and package them up and send them to Dead Fred. Idea for you too???

Don’t most of us have old picture postcards included with our ancestors’ memorabilia? We have a lovely batch from 1911 when great-grandmother Ethel visited Yellowstone (traveling in horse-drawn carriages and wearing long dresses and huge hate). The first known printed picture postcard, with an image on one side, was created in France in 1870 at Camp Conlie by Leon Besmardeau (1829-1914). Conlie was a training camp for soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. Below is an image of that card:

 I learned much about picture postcards from a webinar by Katherine Hamilton-Smith, the St. Clair County (Illinois) Gen Soc in early 2024. 

“The years 1890 to 1915 were the Golden Age of postcards; they were an absolute craze,” she explained. “Everybody collected them and would show them off to family and guests. Everybody who could afford them, bought them.” 

There were so many types of picture postcards!  Auto courts, Motels, Restaurants, Gas Stations, Churches, travel destinations, fashion, trains, cars, airplanes and ships, places, disasters (tornados, fires, shipwrecks) and commemorative events (opening of Panama Canal). Anything and everything might show up as a picture on a postcard during that Golden Age. Entrepreneurs quickly saw an opportunity to make money and would take a photo of a place and then make and sell those postcards. 
Hamilton-Smith further explained that “postcards were a visual documenting history of a place in time…… not of people but of places.” 

Today people collect specific postcards for other reasons than connections to their family history. 
Do you have any old family-sent or collected picture postcards??

About twenty years ago, we were blessed to be able to take a tour to Egypt. Of course it was marvelous…….. but this post is not a travelog.

Upon my return, and being a genealogist, I got to wondering about Egyptian genealogy. I went to FamilySearch and found just what I expected: about six resources listed in the catalog and most of recent origin. Out of curiosity, in March 2024, I went again to FamilySearch to check the catalog for what’s new in Egyptian genealogy.
And by gosh! There were 87 items listed……… 87 potential sources for those with Egyptian ancestry. Two of the listings appeared to me to be in Arabic. There were 29 suggestions for history; six for genealogy and even one for Jewish history. 
Proving what? FamilySearch continues to seek out the records of the world’s peoples and make that information available to one and all. 

Our perennial other favorite, Ancestry, began in 1983 as a book publishing company. (The first edition of The Source by Arlene Eakle was published in 1983.) Ancestry went online in 1996 and has expanded exponentially ever since. Ancestry launched Ancestry DNA in 2012 and to date, over 25,000,000 DNA kits have been registered. 

Between 1997 and 2023, Ancestry added 41,000,000,000 (yes, billion!) records from 88 countries to their website; this averages out to 2,000,000 million per month. Besides adding new records, Ancestry keeps adding new features, all to help us find our ancestors.

Point of this blog post? If you’ve not checked BOTH FamilySearch and Ancestry recently, you should.  If you’re sincerely seeking answers, that is. 🙂  

Today:  The Spruce Railroad Trail is a 4-mile paved walking/biking trail along the north shore of Lake Crescent in Clallam County, just a few miles west of Port Angeles. It’s now part of the 134-mile Olympic Discovery Trail and hundreds walk this trail regularly. 

History:  Built near the end of World War I, the Spruce Production Division was organized to build a railroad line to transport spruce wood from the western Olympic Peninsula to the nearby lumber mills and ultimately to aircraft manufacturing plants in the east. The railroad was completed in 1919, a year too late for its intended purpose; it was abandoned in 1951.

Why spruce wood? And why Clallam County?

Spruce wood was the best for constructing airplanes………. and remember that World War I era planes were made of wood………..for it would not splinter, shatter or snap. And it was light and strong, perfect for the job.  

Demand for aircraft in Europe during World War I soared. The Aircraft Production Products Board of the U.S. wanted 3,000,000 board feet of lumber per month. 

(Here is a pix of 7,000,000 board feet……. it’s a wonder there are any spruce trees left!)

Sitka spruce was the ideal wood and was found mainly in WA, OR, CA and Alaska. The largest source was in Clallam County.  Harvesting of the wood began in July 1918 and provided all sorts of jobs, especially loggers and lumbermen. By the end of the war, nearly 100,000 people worked harvesting spruce wood for warplanes but the need was gone by the time the project was fully underway. The day after the armistice was signed (12 Nov 1918) the Spruce Production Division shut down and the many workers went home to find other jobs. 

The project cost $10,000,000 and did produce 88,000,000 board feet of wood which was enough to manufacture 12,000 warplanes. 

Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

with the cross of Jesus going on before.

Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe:

Forward into battle, see his banner go!

Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war.

With the cross of Jesus going on before. 

I’d bet that most every 19th century hymnal, Catholic or Protestant, carried this beloved hymn. I’d bet that many of my ancestors and yours loudly sang these lyrics.

The words were written by Sabine Baring-Gould (1832-1924)q`, a Roman Catholic priest, in 1865 to be a processional for children walking from the church were he was curate to a nearby church in Yorkshire. “It was written on great haste,” Baring-Gould related, “and I am afraid that come of the lines are faulty.” 

The song/hymn became popular after the lyrics were put to the music of Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) in 1870. 

The hymn has been associated with war: soldiers going to war, beginning with the Civil War (as shown in John Paul Strain’s painting). In 1912, presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, included this song and said his party was “going to battle for the Lord.”

When Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met in August 1941 on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to agree to the Atlantic Charter, Churchill chose this hymn for their onboard church service. 

As I energetically sing that hymn today, I do imagine my forebears belting it out with gusto. Bet yours did too.