Wisteria

The topic for the next Carnival of Genealogy is  Business and Commerce and here is my contribution:  This is a sign outside my grandfather’s home in about the year 1957 advertising him as a contractor and builder in Michigan. Although not every family member over the generations did the same, nonetheless, the earliest known progenitor in the Timmer family, Luitje Jans Timmer was listed as a carpenter on the birth record of his son Jan Luitjes Timmer in 1814. Jan was born in Sint Annen (Ten Boer), Groningen, Netherlands. Jan’s son Hendrik was the father of John (Johannes) Timmer, my grandfather’s father. My grandmother told me that the name Timmer means “hammer” in Dutch, but I've seen the translation is actually carpenter. It was about the year 1811 when the Dutch were required to register a family surname (see my post here about Dutch naming customs ). Perhaps it was Luitje Jans who decided to use Timmer for a surname to signify his occupation. Some of my earliest...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/3856492622/ Being from the United States with Dutch ancestry, I was delighted to find a blogger from the Netherlands ( Peter's Blog )  via Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings blog a while back. It reminded me of the time I had a project that went global in the early days of computer-assisted genealogy research. I had been working on my family line of Kiel and gotten back to Harm Hendrik Kiel (1808-1891) and his wife Hendericka J. Siegers. I did this the “old-fashioned” way by requesting copies of death certificates and researching cemetery records on-site. (See my post here about my cemetery research on the Kiel family). In 1997, I got in touch with a gentleman via an internet posting on rootsweb.com. I lived in Florida at the time and he lived in California, clear on the other side of the coast. We corresponded several times by email as he was also descended from a Kiel family of Grand Rapids, MI. Although I felt it...

Carla, of sassygenealogist , published a post on her four sets of great-grandparents which consist of her eight primary surnames she searches for, entitled "My Eight Great Surprises" . The surprise was that she found out she was not as  "Southern" as she thought. It prompted me to think of my eight surnames and where they came from. They would be: Watts, Spencer, Hardy, Lovelace, Timmer, Bolhuis, Katsma and Kiel. Half are firmly Dutch as my mother was the second or third generation from the Netherlands. Her grandparents on her father's side came over on their honeymoon. Her Kiel family was here a generation earlier. The Watts and Hardy lines are firmly entrenched in Virginia clear back to the 1700s and likely English before that. The Lovelace line (also of English origin) can be traced from Kentucky back to North Carolina and then up to Maryland, but still not past the Mason Dixon line. The Spencer line is my most elusive after twenty years. While I can...

From the Muskegon Chronicle photo files I am visiting my mother and sister in the Muskegon, MI area this week. My mother grew up in Grand Rapids, MI and told us stories about how as children, she and her brother would go with their parents on the Milwaukee Clipper from Muskegon to Milwaukee. She remembers most clearly running around playing on the deck of the ship. She said they went everywhere on the ship and it was great fun. My sister mentioned that the Milwaukee Clipper was open as a museum now in downtown Muskegon, so her and I rounded up my daughters and our mother and headed over there yesterday afternoon. My mother is in a wheelchair and wasn't able to run around on any of the decks this time. Instead she explored the museum store and watched the video which included actual footage from back in the day when the Clipper was still in commission. She was hoping to see someone she knew, but didn't recognize anyone. The girls and I took the actual tour up and down th...