Although we've named our enterprise "A Long Line of Loves" realize that there will be more..er..Moore, Lattimore, Wyatt, Minner, Foster, Threlkeld, Travis, Wofford, Morse, Higgins, Lair, Yeakey (and all spelling variations thereof). And that's just on Dad's dad's side. On his mother's there are Adams, Creed, Reed and Graham for starters. These families are early settlers of this country and many took part in the Revolutionary War. All took part in the move westward since they ended up in Kentucky after independence.
On Mom's side are Cairns, Anderson, Leavitt, Schumann, Schlag and Berner on her dad's side and Rasmussen, Wesnes, Sunde, Gjerding, Felichs on her mom's. The Leavitt's are old New England settlers having arrived shortly after the Mayflower according to one cousin. Our Cairns immigrant, William, came from Scotland about 1800. The Schumann's and the Berner's arrived from Germany in the mid 1800's and the Rasmussen's from Norway in the early 1880's.
So you see our family is representative of the history of the settling of the United States, certainly the early English and Germans came for trade or religious freedom, the Scots-Irish and the Scots looking for land, similarly the later Germans and the Norwegians looking for a better life.
I began actively researching our family only about 7 years ago when cousin Jackie asked me to go to the vital records here in Dane County to see if I could find a death certificate for Sarah E. Leavitt (Leavit, Levit, etc), the wife of John Verner Cairns. I didn't find it, but I, like many before me, caught the bug (became obsessed).
I had picked up a few tidbits from Mom and Grandma (Mom sang, "My Grandpa was a sailor, so a sailor I shall be" part of a poem she wrote...that was my first clue about the Rasmussen's). I had notes I had taken about the Rasmussen family in a discussion I had with Grandma. I had a copy of the Cairns family tree prepared in 1915 and one of the Schumann's prepared in 1984 for a reunion. I had a copy of the Sunde family prepared by cousin Larry as a result of a trip to Norway in the 1980's I knew my Grandpa Love was born in Kentucky and moved to Missouri as a young boy and that Grandma Love was raised by her aunt and uncle after her mother died and her father moved away. Beyond that, I knew little.
Since that time, I have gathered a lot of information (most of which is sitting in piles on the floor of my bedroom...I swear I WILL get organized...another good reason to have a blog..organization becomes rather necessary when trying to put together a post). I have gotten a Love family tree, not sure from where, Love information that brother James put together from his research, information on the Leavitts from cousin Jackie, Cairns info from letters in the Gertrude Cairns Collection at the UW River Falls, Family Search.org, Ancestry.com, genforum.genealogy.com, digitalarkivet.uib.no (Norwegian Archives), Middleton and Mazomanie cemeteries, the Wisconsin Historical Society Library and Archives and more. I hope I can share all of what I know and have learned in this blog.
Genealogy is like a puzzle or a mystery waiting to be solved. Finding the pieces and fitting them together is what makes it fun and exhilarating even knowing there will always be untidy loose ends and those people you can never be sure are "yours". I seem to have headed toward a "journey" theme here echoing iLuv's. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.
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