Wordless Wednesday - Us Mem in Leeuwarden

Broersma Family Crest?

I recently got to take a trip to the Netherlands with my dad to visit the towns and villages where our family was from. On one stop we were looking around in the church in Allingawier, which is in Wonseradeel in the province of Friesland.


Inside the church in the entry way, up on the tower was this coat of arms and inscription:

Alsmen schref 1634 en een
heeft Jelle Tiercks Broersma van
Allinvier aen dese toere geleyt
den eersten sten tot momory
van het heeft hi sin wapen hier
boven geset den 3 Yulyo
1635

It basically says that on the 3rd of July 1634, Jelle Tjerks Broersma laid the first stone in the tower when it was being constructed. Now we haven't been able to connect this Broersma to our Broersma line. Our Broersmas did live in Allingawier and the neighboring villages, but if this Jelle Tjerks is a part of our line, then he would be at least 2 generations further than we have documented in our direct line, and more likely 3 generations back.

I would love to connect to this Broersma, but I kinda think that we won't be able to. You would probably have to be rich to get the privilege of laying the first stone in a tower and getting an inscription about you. Also there is a coat of arms which would be awesome to have.

RIP Grandma Wisner

A few days ago, on 22 June 2013, my wife's grandmother Jennie Allene (Orrell) Wisner passed away. She was 89 years old. She had a nice laugh, kind of like a chuckle that I will always remember.

The Wedded Life

Last weekend when we were moving stuff out of my wife's grandma's house, one of the things that I came across was this book: The Wedded Life by J.R. Miller. It was with a little bit of luck that I came across it at all. It was on their shelves with a bunch of other books that we were putting out for the garage sale. It looked a little old to me so I took a closer look and saw written in pencil on the cover "Martha Morey weds Lawrence Wisner."


This would be in reference to my wife's grandpa's grandparents (or her 2 great grandparents). It looks like it would have been possibly a wedding present for them as the book is about how to have a good marriage, or how to be married. Also consistant with it being a wedding present is the fact that it was printed in 1894, and they were married in 1899.


Also inside in one of the front pages was a fill-out-page of wedding info, sort of like a Bible with family tree info. It had the date of their wedding and the witnesses and is made to look like a wedding certificate. I thought that was kinda cool, I already had that info. But the real treasure was what was just inside the front cover. BAM! 4 newspaper clippings - 3 for their wedding and an obituary for their son that died when he was 3.


I already had the date for their wedding, June 1 1899 and the basic info, but it's always cool to find them in the newspaper. Plus these give a little bit more detail about their life, how they were married and where they went on their honeymoon. In the obit it tells of how their son died, which I didn't know before. So anyway I was pretty excited by this find. Here are the 4 clippings from the book if you'd like to see more detail.

Cleaning Out Grandma's House

Yesterday a bunch of us in our family went down to Grandma's house to box everything up and move it out. Grandpa Lawrence Wisner passed away almost 2 months ago now, and it was decided that she should live with some caretakers since she can't take care of herself and she has lost memory.

I was looking forward to going through all of their stuff in hopes of finding old documents and pictures I had never seen before. I had asked them many times for info and docs and they gave me a bunch of info and I scanned some good stuff, but I thought that there had to be more. And there was!

I was working for quite a while in their office, I guess you could call it. I found a bunch of great old pictures and a few documents and newspaper clippings. They had some obituaries and wedding announcements that were great. And in one of them I was finally able to find out when Lawrence Wisner's parents were married. I had figured out the year, but I hadn't been able to establish the month and day, but with the help of their marriage announcement in a newspaper clipping I saw it - June 11, 1921.

It's going to take me quite a while to go through all the good stuff that we found, and it's going to be real fun.

Family Resemblance - The Morey Chin

When looking through family pictures of relatives during various times in their life, I often find pictures in which they look like another relative. Usually it is a parent or a child, but sometimes is a grandparent.

This example is of the "Morey Chin" - at least that is what I'm calling it. I don't know who it originates from but Martha Morey (1876-1939) definitely had it. It is a relatively broad and square jaw. Her son Raymond C Wisner (1900-1977) also had it. Here are some comparison photos.




You can see on the sides of the cheeks and jaw as they get older they both have 2 lines on either side. There is yet another person in this line that appears to have the Morey Chin to me, and that would be Raymond's daughter Millie.



After looking at these pictures, to me it seems that Millie's chin might look a little more like her grandmother's. Maybe that's because it appears that Raymond has a cleft chin, while the other two do not. That makes them have a smoother, rounder tip to the chin while maintaining the squareness of the jaw that Raymond has.

Writing An Obituary

My wife's grandfather Lawrence Wisner recently passed away and we knew it was coming. He had been in decline for the last few years, which I guess made it easier to handle the news of his passing. I can't say for sure with how it affected others in my family who were closer to him, but for me it didn't really affect me that much because I didn't have a lifetime of memories with him. He was only my grandpa-in-law.

There was, however, another side of me that kicked into genealogy overdrive. I quickly updated my database with his death information, added his memorial to findagrave.com, and started scanning in pictures to make a video to show at his funeral. I also started asking questions like "who is writing his obituary?" and "which newspapers will it be running in?" since he lived in multiple places.

So I took on the task of writing an obituary for him thinking that, hey, I've read a ton of obituaries, I should be able to write one and include everything that is pertinent to the story of his life and genealogy. I wrote the highlights of his life, where he lived, his military story, and also listed out his surviving relatives. I get done, feeling that it was a pretty balanced obit and not too long, only to start the battle of editing based on how much it would cost to run in 1 or more newspapers. Since I wasn't the one paying for it to be published, I felt pressed to justify every line, since it would affect the price.

In the end there were 2 obituaries, one in the Sacramento Bee, which was short and pointed to the mortuary website where the full obit could be read for 30 days (he had lived in the Sacramento area for almost the last 50 years). The other was published in the Mt Shasta Herald, and was the longer version (he had lived in the Mt Shasta area for around 20 years of his life and many of his relatives still live there). The Sac Bee was more expensive, and was a part of the Legacy.com system. The Mt Shasta Herald was cheaper, but less readers and not in the Legacy.com system. I wanted to make sure that his information was published somewhere so that future genealogists who would want to find his obituary could find it, and I think I accomplished that.

I guess as the future comes, more and more sources will be available online and newspapers won't be like they were a hundred years ago. They already aren't. But it just felt like if no one had taken the time to write even a brief synopsis of his life in an obituary, future generations might only know his birth, death and marriage dates, just like I have only found for many of my ancestors.