52 Weeks of Ancestors Challenge 2021

  Week 4 - Favorite Photo This is one of my favorite pictures because it is the only picture I have of one of my “brick walls.” The man in the picture is Albert Bruce Lloyd, my 2nd great-grandfather. The children are my grandma Sene (Athena), my great uncle Ivan (highlighted last week), and my great aunt Rachel. I don’t know much about grandpa Lloyd except that he married Sarah Alice Bragg, and it was the second marriage for both of them. They produced one daughter, Anna Retta Lloyd (my great grandmother). Before he married Sarah Alice Bragg, grandpa Lloyd was married to an unknown woman, and they had two daughters: Francis and Flora.  Family lore has these two girls as twins, but that’s not the case according to the records - they were born three years apart. I found some distant relatives through DNA who descend from Flora, but they don’t seem to know who Albert’s first wife was either. This is complicated by the fact that there is an Albert Lloyd married to a Sarah Alice ba...

  Week 3: Namesakes: the Ivan's My son, Ivan, was named after two “Uncle Ivan’s” - one on my husband’s side of the family and the other on my side of the family. Ivan is currently working as a design engineer in Connecticut. Ivan Leroy Looker and his twin brother Olin were born in Watseka, Illinois in 1930. Watseka was a rural area, and Ivan’s father Olin Sr. was a maintenance superintendent at a factory (I can’t make out the kind of factory on the 1940 census, but I think it produced farm equipment.) My husband thinks Ivan went to college at Notre Dame, but I found a yearbook picture that places him at Millikin in Decatur in his early 20’s studying education.  Maybe he went to law school at Notre Dame as he became a lawyer. (His brother Olin attended Purdue and became an engineer; coincidentally, my son Ivan became a mechanical engineer, and my son Logan is the one interested in law.) According to my husband, Ivan Looker inherited a large piece of land from a client and had a...

  Week 2: Family Legends “Uncle Jim” is a much beloved character in my family. He is my 3rd great-uncle or as Ancestry puts it, my 2nd great granduncle. He was orphaned as a teen and he and his brother (my 2nd great grandfather) came out west along the Oregon Trail to seek gold in 1850. Jim was 17 years old, and Robert was 12. They moved from place to place, chasing gold and ended up in Idaho City, Idaho when this story takes place. This comes from the book Melvin Alsager put together about the Kirkpatricks.  “Idaho City grew with the Basin gold boom to a peak population of about 10,000 in just a few short years. A large number of miners including Chinese were from Oregon and California chasing one gold find after another. Jim caused quite a stir in Idaho City when he cut off the hair queue of [a] Chinese laundryman for stealing a chicken from him. The Chinese gentleman was upset because their belief was that God would not be able to pull him to heaven without his queue. Big J...

(Stormy Seas by Jordon Blackstone - found at pictorem.com) When I think of beginnings, I think of ancestors who immigrated to the New World - and also the birth of a child. This story has both. I was thinking the other day of women from the past that I have never met that I would like to have a tea party with.  Annetje Barentse Van Rotmer, one of my 10th great grandmothers, came to mind.  Most sources I have found indicate that Annetje was born of German parents in the area of Niedersachsen, Germany, somewhere between 1607 and 1611.  Other sources say she was born in Norway. She married a cantankerous Norwegian named Albert Andriesson Bradt in Amsterdam on April 11, 1632.  Bradt threw in with Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch jeweler, who wanted to establish his own fiefdom in the New World.  On September 25 th 1636, the family left Amsterdam on a ship called “Arms of Rensselaerswyck”.  They had two small children with them: Eva, my 9th great grandmother, an...