This calls for a Bacon Celebration!

Sometimes it feels like you've struck gold.  That's exactly how I felt tonight in my quest for our family geneology.  I have been filling out our extended (very extended it seems at times) family on the Brammer side. 

I guess I should start out by saying that after reading Uncle Herbert & Uncle August's writings on life growing up I left with the impression that our Great-Great Grandparents Han Heinrich & Anna Maria Brammer (Alice's Mom's Parents) had 4 children and I lost track if they had left Germany with all 4 or if 2 died before they came to America.  The bottom line is, I took from it that only 2 of their children had survived: our (Great) Grandma Stahnke and our (Great-Great) Uncle George. 

The other night I was looking over some of the documents that Uncle August had gathered from Churches in (what was then East) Germany and translating them (I never thought my one semester of college German would come to any use - boy was I wrong.  Mom and Dad - every cent you paid to my college education paid off in my ability to translate.  Damn, I'm funny.)  and I read the names of the 4 children of Hans and Anna: Wilhemine, Otto, George and Dora.  (kay, so each of them had extremely long names, but you know what I mean.  So these names ring a bell for me, both the German Passenger list and the New York entry passenger lists show Wilhelm and Maria coming to America in 1884 with Minna, Otto, George and Dora.  Now I'm doing the big "Huh". 

THEN I find the name Wilhelmina Lessman on the website that has the Gravestones for the Evang  Evangelical Lutheran Immanuel Church in Nebraska for a Wilhemina Lessman with a note that says her maiden name is Brammer and I'm like: HOLY SHIT!!  I can't beleive this is happening: not only is there a sibling that I didn't know ever survived, but they lived and married and had about a billion children.  Okay, so I'm super sarcastic.

So I'm following Minna's family on ancestry.com and decide to pursue one of her Children named Mary Martha Lessman.  Well, Mary married a gentleman named James Kophamer (a name I've seen before) and there is this Picture:

Holy Crap! That's Aunt Bertha on the far right, and that sure looks like Uncle Anson on the far left.  Wait a minute!  I've been looking at snapshots from this wedding for over a year!  This is the wedding of Grandma Alice's Cousin Mary to John Kophamer.  Finally I know who is in these pictures:

These are the Wedding snapshots of Grandma Alice's Cousin Mary Lessman to John Kophamer, or our 1st Cousin twice removed.  These were posted on Ancestry.com by our 3rd cousin.  I need to reach out.  I have read the name Kophamer so many times on pictures and eslewhere that I am so thrilled to make the connection to how they relate to us.

Man do I just LOVE doing this!

Scanning Documents

Last night I scanned Uncle August's Biography that was written for his retirement? his 50th year as a pastor?  I think it was written around 1977, so someone will have to job my memory.  I was able to scan it as a PDF file and I'm also putting it into a Word format so that... well I'm not sure why I'm doing both.  It must be a "Just Because" moment.

I know if dad reads this next part, he will have a flipping fit, but I struggled last night to throw out an old picture.  No not the picture above!  The baby on the right is Albert John and I've made the assumption that the baby on the left is Jerome Ommen, Albert John's cousin (Gladys Stahnke's son) because it appears that Gladys and Alice would have had a close relationship at this time, and both Jerry and Albert John were born a few months apart in 1929.  The picture I threw out last night was from this same series of photos but both boys had turned so that it was a shot of the backs of their heads.  Typical babies, right?  Yet I stood over the trash can holding a picture of no value (to us) that Grandma Alice obviously kept for the rest of her life and I wondered if I was doing the right thing; I have the hoarding gene!  Help me!