Genealogy was a hobby of my mom's, and she found a lot! I want to make sure we don't lose these photos and stories of people who lived so long ago.
Here are pictures and anecdotes of the people in the order they appear in the family tree.
This is a picture of me that I use a lot. It was in my second grade classroom at school a few years before I retired.
One of my earliest memories was the day I learned to tie my own shoes. I was sitting under a table, and I was so excited that I bumped my head when I jumped up to run and tell my mom the news.
Carl was 6 years younger than me, and I loved him so much. I had wanted a "big brother" and I was thrilled when he got taller than me, when he was around 13. We got even closer when we grew up.
Winona was a great town to grow up in. We knew our way around it backward and forward, from the trainyard to the downtown, to the trails up in the bluffs. We played Indian Princess and Pioneer Family a lot in my neighborhood. We swam and skated in both the lake and the river. There were 28 elementary-aged children on my block and the next block north!
When I as a little bit older (Junior High and High School) I became aware of a number of unwritten rites of passage among the kids in town. To prove yourself you had to 1.) swim across the river (the Mississippi), 2.) walk across the Interstate bridge to Wisconsin, 3.) Climb to Sugarloaf, 4.) ice-skate across the lake, 5.) skitch to school on a car, and 6.) skitch on a barge. I did them all. (But they were all VERY dangerous and VERY stupid.)
I remember some early memories of my mom teaching me to cook, especially how to choose well-marbled meats, making a roux for thickening sauces and gravies, and 'folding' egg-whites for angel food cake.
A few memories about school: We were not allowed out of our desks, EVER. And we had to wear dresses every day, NO PANTS. (Later in High School we held a sit-in and got the dress code changed. I started dating when I as about 15 or 16. We usually went to movies, parties, or dances. I earned money babysitting. I had several regular families. The going rate was 35¢ per hour, but some of my regulars paid me 50¢.
I volunteered in Teen Corps, Adopt-A-Grandparent (at the nursing home), and Special Olympics. I was in a few school plays, also choir and orchestra. My best subjects were English and Art. I almost alays had straight A's.
The Viet Nam War flavored the entire culture when I as in High School. Hippies were against it. Lots of my friends were being drafted. I thought of myself as a hippie, a flower child, and a conscientious objector to the war. Carl's draft number as coming up. We were all tuned in to who might have to go next, who would be next to come home in a coffin, and how long the war might last.
I ADORED my second grade teacher Miss King. She was the reason I played school every day after elementary school with my dolls. But she is not the main reason I became a teacher. That was the result of two very irresponsible moments in my life. 1.) When I as in 6th grade (then still part of elementary school), our teacher said that we must go home that night and discuss with our parents which foreign language we wanted to take, choosing between French, Spanish, German, and Latin. Well, I forgot to ask my parents, and the next day, Mr. Hickethier went row by row, asking each person which one we wanted. He said he had to send this list to the Junior Hogh so they could plan for the right teachers for next year. The boy ahead of me said Spanish, so I said Spanish too. I had no reason at all. Fast-forward to college and situation 2.) Darla reminded me that we would soon have to declare our major, and once again, I hadn't given it any thought at all. I asked her what she was going to do, and she said she was going to be a Special Education Teacher. I said, "okay, I will too." Well Yikes! What a well-thought-out plan. Ugh! But that is exactly what I did. And with my Spanish, which was fairly fluent by then, I had the little extra skill which got me my first teaching job in the brand new Bilingual Program in Kenosha, Wisconsin, required by a new federal law in 1976. Lucky me in a time when there were too many teachers for the available jobs. And even luckier, I loved every minute of my career, right up until retirement. I did get my Masters Degree later on too, when Jessie was a baby, and finished right before Jolie was born.
My childhood pictures are here, here, here, and here.
This is my mother, Evelyn Marie Kast Christensen, who was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa.
When my mother Evelyn was little, she loved going to her grandparents' farm at Easter and finding her goodies in a field in a "nest" her Grandma Giebrich had made. She was also extremely lucky that her family was well-to-do enough to go on interesting and educational vacation trips, even during the Great Depression and World War II.
My mother earned her Bachelors degree at Drake University in Des Moines. She became a medical technologist in St. Paul, where she met my dad. They were married at "The Little Brown Church in the Vale," a semi-famous church in the midwest which has a song written about it. (Sometimes called "The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood.
Here's the link to one of many versions of the song. We sang it a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0yN8zG9dK8
After they were married, my mother became a full-time homemaker (stay-at-home-mom). She enjoyed sewing, cooking and volunteering. She made our clothes, curtains, bedspreads, dust ruffles, everything! She was also a terrific cook and did some canning and freezing. She told me a story about when they were in the early days of their marriage, she asked Dad after dinner what he would like for dessert, and he said anything would be fine. She pressed him, and said she would make anything he wanted. So he said, "Baked Alaska," which is very difficult to make. But she did make it. Dad was very surprised and impressed.
At age 50 she went back to school, earned another degree, and became a P.A., quadrupling her income! There are lots more about her and her family and her ancestors on her blog storiesbyevie.blogspot.com.
This is my Dad, George Milford Christensen, who was born and raised in Wilmot, South Dakota.
My Dad, George, told me that when he was little, his older brothers often pranked him. Once they told him that a cat who had kittens way up in the cupola on top of the barn would never be able to get them down. So Dad climbed up there, broke open the slats, and carried the kittens down. The mother cat carried the babies right back up there, and Dad got in trouble anyway.
He told about never getting enough to eat until he went in the army. (That was also the first time he ever stayed away from home overnight.) During college in the Twin Cities, he would come home in the summer for "Threshing Time" to earn some extra money. A number of farmers had bought a threshing machine, which they shared. They would all work together, threshing all the grain in each other's fields until everybody's was done. They worked from sun-up until sun-down. The pay for the boys and young men who helped was $1 per day plus a big breakfast, lunch, and supper.
He earned his Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees at the University of Minnesota. He was a college professor and psychologist at Winona State University. He also always had a few patients on referral from local hospitals in Winona and LaCrosse. He wrote several grants and started the Hiawatha Valley Mental Health Center in Winona. (This was written wrong in his obit FYI.)
He was an avid fisherman and hunter. We had a wide variety of wild game and fish as a regular part of our diet, such as walleye, trout, bass, sunfish, perch, and venison, duck, pheasant, rabbits, raccoons, and a few squirrels and a turtle one time.
He was born during the Great Depression, and as a result was very frugal and somewhat afraid of another stock market crash. He didn't like borrowing money because of not wanting to be in debt nor pay interest, so he bought a fixer-upper house for us to live in, and paid cash for it. He remodeled it completely ALL BY HIMSELF. He worked on it nights and weekends, and did everything, including plumbing, electrical, masonry, bathrooms, floors, tile, kitchen, drywall, siding and roof. He tore off two porches and rebuilt another one. He even added indoor plumbing in the kitchen, which had a pump at the sink, which brought water up from a cistern well in the basement. I went to the lumber yard with him MANY times.
My Dad's brothers, Clifford and Gordon, and their sister Eunice, wrote an unpublished book about growing up on a tenant farm in South Dakota during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression in abject poverty. You can read that post here.
These are my maternal grandparents, Doris Evelyn Giebrich Kast, and Donald Heydt Kast, my mom's mother and father.
There are many stories about my Grandma and Grampa Kast on my mother's blog. They have tabs of their own at the top.
Here are my paternal grandparents, Alma Jakobine Johanne Larsen Christensen and Lauris Kristiansen, my dad's mother and father. Grampa's name was changed to the American spelling Lars Christensen at Ellis Island when he came to the U.S. from Denmark at age 16 in 1905.
He passed away before I was born. Alma came over from Denmark with her parents at age 6.
Here is a notation from Ellis Island in New York when Grampa Lars arrived in the United States. His name is 4th from the bottom.
There is a book written about Lars and Alma's family and what it was like farming during the Great Depression. Several of my Dad's brothers and sisters wrote this "Saga." Look for it here on my blog.
I loved going to visit Grandma Christensen. She baked miniature pies with us, from picking the apples, all the way through baking and eating the pies. There was an old playhouse in the woods behind her house. We could climb the apple tree and eat apples right off the tree. And there was a wonderful laundry basket of dolls, doll clothes, and blankets in the closet under the stairs.
Grandma raised Aunt Marion, her step-daughter, from the age of 3. Marion was Lars's child from his first marriage. Marion's mother died either in childbirth or in the influenza epidemic.
Grandma and Grandpa spoke in Danish when they didn't want the kids to understand.
Going down one line on the family tree to the generation just before this, my great-grandparents, is my great-grandmother Flora Alice Cook Giebrich, my mother's maternal grandmother.
and her husband, my great-grandfather William Giebrich.
Here are Clara Ellen Judy Kast and Frederich William Kast II with their son, my grandfather Donald as a boy.
Great Grampa Kast outlived his wife by almost 30 years. In retirement, he opened a hamburger shop (a new thing in the 1930's in the midwest.) Here he is in front of his shop.
My mother's ancestors had been in the United States several generations before those on my father's side, which helped my mother in her genealogy research, but also probably contributed to a wealthier standard of living, including earlier generations having photographs. To wit, here is another extra photo of my great-grandmother Clara Ellen Judy (Kast) as a young girl with her sister Nettie, dressed for (probably) a dance. The gowns were fancy.
This is my dad's maternal grandmother, Alvilda Larsen. My dad grew up near her home in Wilmot, South Dakota.
This is my dad's paternal grandfather, Hans Kristiansen and grandmother Maren Jorgensen Kristiansen. They lived out their lives in Denmark. They are my Grampa Lars's parents.
The rest of the pictures are of my great-great grandparents, who passed away long before I was born. My grandparents and my mother are credited with carefully keeping these photos and records available to me, and to my children, grandchildren, and further descendants. Thank you.
Sarah Mills Cook and George Cook
Karoline Mayer Giebrich and Louis Giebrich. This is the ancestor about which there is a story here.
Mary Ferguson Judy
Mary Harnagel Kast
To see some extra pictures of ancestors and relatives who aren't specifically mentioned on the Family Tree, click here.
Next are some expansions including the descendants and siblings of my grandparents, my cousins and me.
My children's Dad and his side of the family:
Charles Nathan Kent
Chuck was born on December 9, 1937 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He died March 5, 2021. He had one sister, Colleen, who was actually a half-sister 12 years older than Chuck, born from their mother's first marriage, which ended in divorce. Colleen had 3 sons: Dick, Danny, and Dave, who we saw often.
Chuck was in choir in school. He had a beautiful voice. But his great talent, of course, was art. He excelled especially in calligraphy, cartooning, and lost-wax-casting of silver jewelry. He went to the University of Wisconsin-Milaukee, and started teaching Art at Washington Junior High in 1961 in Racine. He as the first person in his family ever to go to college. His first daughter Robin Lynn was born in 1961. Rebecca Ann was born in 1963, Heather Anne in 1966, and Holly May in 1968. Soon Chuck got his Masters degree in Administration and became the principal of Washington Junior High School. He and I met in 1980 and started dating. Before finalizing the decision to get married, we had to decide whether or not we would have children of our own. I whooped for joy when he said yes. I knew he was going to be such a good husband, a good father, and a good provider. We were married on May 28, 1983, and our two daughters soon followed: Jessica Marie on August 11, 1984, and Jolene Alisa on September 19, 1987.
Our wedding was in the back yard, and we paid special attention to all the details: the musician, brunch, my dress, the girls' dresses, our vows, dinner, etc. For our honeymoon we went to Mérida in the Yucatan Peninsula, and then on to Cancún.
Grampa Charlie Kent (Charles Benjamin Nathan Kent)
Grandma Gertrude Arn Kent
Grampa Charlie was born on February 17, 1907 in Williamsburg, Virginia. He graduated from high school but didn't go to college. He met Grandma Gertrude Arn at a diner where she was a waitress.
Very early on, he earned his living as an ice-man, delivering blocks of ice to people for their ice boxes (before electric refrigerators). Even though he was skinny, he could hoist a double-block of ice on his back (400 lbs.)! (There is a photo of this, which I don't have anymore.)
He prided himself on being able to memorize long selections of poetry. He also made silver jewelry and created beautiful weavings on his floor loom. He entered art shows all over the tri-state area.
I loved him dearly and during the 9 years he lived with us, we became close. We played Scrabble and cards, and he told me about his younger years. One especially funny story was when he was in grade school in Montana, where his mother Jesse was a cook on a ranch. His teacher "took a shine to him" and if she spotted him walking on his way to school, she would offer him a ride on her bony old mule. It was horribly uncomfortable, so he would always try to hide so he wouldn't have to accept a ride. Every time he told me that story he laughed until tears came to his eyes.
One very special thing about Gertrude was her beautiful penmanship. It was so perfect that the company that developed the Palmer method for cursive handwriting used her samples for their model letters. Here's a picture.
My Maternal Side
My Paternal Side
Here we all are at a family reunion, Grandma Alma with her kids, and the grandkids in the second picture (me with my eyes closed.. haha!)
Here are the family trees of my children's families.
This first one is Jolie's family. The labels are done from Alexandra's and Bradley's point of view and relationships. James will add the rest of their great-great-grandparents if he wishes.
This next one is Jessie's family. Just like the other one, the labels are done from the children's point of view and relationships.
