KEEPING MEMORIES ALIVE INTRODUCTION TO THE
FAMILY HISTORY
As our children, Barry and Brad, were growing up, they became involved in a lot of sports and school activities. In one of our Christmas letters I wrote, "We've never seen the beaches of Hawaii or the gates of Disneyland, but we've been in every rink and gymnasium between here and North Dakota." We loved it and made many life long friendships with the parents of other participants. In 1995 the busy years were suddenly over. Barry and Brad were gone off to college and there were no more rinks and gyms to plan our life around. In early 1996 I started a hobby that resulted in this history book being written. It started as a project to get my picture albums organized. When I was finished, I had all these old pictures left over that were my Great Grandparents, John and Margaret Hirtz, and some of their personal papers and Grandpa's journals. What could I do with them? There were so many interesting things in them. Although Grandpa and Grandma Hirtz had died when I was in my early teens, their memory had remained an important part of my life. And I realized it was because my dad, John Mitchell, had continued to talk about them, and tell stories about them and by doing so he had kept those memories alive. At the same time as the idea for this book was forming in my mind, I found in Grandpa Hirtz's journal, a handwritten paragraph about coming to America in 1913 as an immigrant with little money and unable to speak English. I started to record his story. And one story led to another. I joined the Genealogy Society, started writing to living relatives and searching records for the nonliving. Initially I had an old 086 and the WordPerfect software. But soon I wanted a scanner for doing photos and a printer of a quality to print them, so that meant upgrading to a Pentium computer. And then there was software to make the presentation more professional and . . . so the hobby grew. Those first weeks I had stuff spread from one end of the house to the other. Gradually I organized each family unit into it's own three ring binder. There were many exciting moments in my research. I kept a chronological record of the search and wrote some of it into a conclusionary chapter. A mini-version of this chapter can be found in the story "Where the Grand Duke was ....". I could never have predicted how many different paths the search would take me down. I have more than a thousand hours into my project. I have mailed out hundreds of letters and packages, made dozens of phone calls, searched hours on the Internet and in Genealogical Libraries and sometimes learned about entire branches of the family from the smallest clue. It is truly very interesting. When I started gathering information for this book, I was surprised many times by the amount of information that was available - thankfully Terry and I came from long lines of people who were interested in preserving our family history. I am also thankful for the community history books where so many stories were recorded. I would like to thank all who allowed me to copy, scan and index their information, in my quest of "Keeping Memories Alive". In print, the book is over 5000 pages long, divided into eight volumes representing the two sides of each my parents and Terry's. It includes 17,000 people. However, this Internet version is just a peak at our ancestors roots. In the online trees, I did not include the birth dates to protect privacy. There is no such thing as family that is too far removed in the book. My goal is to hand down to my children and grandchildren, a book that includes all our ancestors and the descendants of those ancestors to the present day. I think we were only one generation away from this book never being able to be written, because my children would never have known where to begin. At least I could remember some of the old country connections .. and stories.
Val Hvidston,
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