Revisiting the past keeps our ancestors alive. I’m Liam Kirby, and this is one of my Family Stories.

Transcript and sources

Revisiting the past keeps our ancestors alive. I’m KC Olson, and this is one of my Family Stories.

Transcript and sources

I never met my great grandfather. His friends called him Nellie. He died on my third birthday, when he was 82 years old. To be honest, the first time I heard anything about Nellie was when my dad showed me a bunch of his belongings. Among the things he showed me was a knife, inscribed “Nellie” on one side of the handle and “Rita” on the other; a holster for a Belgian pistol, on which was written another man’s name; and a certificate, typed out on a tattered, brittle piece of paper, signed with a written signature at the bottom and a typed one at the top. “Private First Class Claude E. Nelson of the 413th Infantry. Dated July 16th, 1945.”

Transcript

A picture is worth a thousand words but what can these words tell us? Perhaps they can tell us the story of something grand, or maybe something of a tragedy? 

That is the case with the photo I have here with me. A visual representation of a story in which a building went up in flames. A single, yellow-garbed firefighter running through the image while jets of water rained down onto The Walker Hotel. 

Revisiting the past keeps our ancestors alive. I’m Alyssa Snider and this is one of my Family Stories. 

Transcript and bibliography

Every family has a story, but not everyone’s gets told. Welcome to the Family Stories podcast–I am Caitlyn Pelikan.

Bibliography

Becker, Anne, and Detlef Mühlberger.  Analyzing the sociography of the membership of the Schutzstaffel [SS] in SS-Oberabschnitt Rhein using Access II. History and Computing, 1999. 

Davies, Norman. Europe at War: 1939-1945: No Simple Victory. Pan, 2008.

Englund, Erika. Life of Otto.  Recorded by Caitlyn Pelikan, 2023. 

Faust, Maurice. In Pierz We Serve. 1997.

Jaggers, R. C. The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Studies in Intelligence, 1960.

Kunst, Jonas R., Nour Kteily, and Lotte Thomsen. “You Little Creep”: Evidence of Blatant Dehumanization of Short Groups. . Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2019. 

Pelikan, Anton. Life of Otto.  Recorded by Caitlyn Pelikan, 2023. 

Ryback, Timothy. Dateline Sudetenland: Hostages to History. Foreign Policy, 1996. 

Stein, George. The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-1945. Cornell University Press, 1966.

We all have things we have forgotten about or don’t know we own in our homes. Papers, books, pictures, all forgotten on shelves or in closets. When I was eighteen, I found a black binder tucked in next to cooking and children’s books, inside my mom’s cluttered, almost to the point of hoarder status, apartment. Inside of it were pages and pages following the lives of men and their children starting in 1660 Connecticut. Pages and pages, about the Page family, my family.  

Every family has a story, but not everyone’s gets told. Welcome to the Family Stories podcast. I’m Margaret and let me tell you one of mine.

Bibliography

Lauren K. Thompson, Escaping the Mechanism: Soldier Fraternization during the Siege at Petersburg. Civil War History, (The Kent State University Press, 2017), 349-376

Handley-Cousins, Sarah. 2021. Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. The University of Georgia Press.

Robertson, J. (2001). Re-Enlistment Patterns of Civil War Soldiers. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32(1), 15–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3656484

Catalogue of Connecticut volunteer organizations : (infantry, cavalry, and artillery,) Hartford :(Brown & Grossin the service of the United States,1869), 376.

Russia. War. Mennonites? Every family has a story, but not everyone’s gets told. Welcome to the Family Stories podcast. I’m Claire Preheim and let me tell you about one of mine. This episode features my great-grandfather's time in World War I Russia. Today we’ll be diving into the world of Mennonites, pacifism, and conscientious objectors during the Great War.

Bibliography

B. Hiebert, A Crisis of Masculinity: North American Mennonites and World War I, (Ethnic News Watch; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 2008).

Harvey L. Dyck, The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective, (University of Toronto Press, ProQuest Ebook Central, 1996).

John G. Bergen, Memories of my time as a Soldier in Russia during World War I, (May 19, 1898- January 25, 1986).

John G. Bergen, Our Trip from Russia to Canada, 1926, (May 19, 1898- January 25, 1986).

Lynell M. Bergen, The Bergens: A Genealogy and Family History, (Canadian Mennonite Bible College. April, 1983).

Peter, Brock and Thomas P. Socknat, Challenge to Mars: Pacifism from 1918 To 1945, (University of Toronto Press. ProQuest Ebook Central, 1999).

 “The Right to Conscientious Objection to Military Service,” Amnesty International, (1 April 1997), Accessed on March 2nd, 2023

Burnt toast. Burnt toast was always one of my mother’s favorite snacks. I never understood the reasoning behind making a perfectly good piece of bread taste like charcoal, but it turns out, that it all tracks all the way back to 1875 in Wassersuppen, Bohemia to a boy named Franz Zeig, my great great grandfather.

Welcome to the family stories podcast, where we know that every family has a story, but not every story gets told. I am Evan Kivi, and today I will be telling the story of my family’s beginnings in the United States of America.

Music

“Smooth Rumble” by David Renda, Royalty Free Music Download (fesliyanstudios.com)

Bibliography

Khosravi, Shahram. “White Masks/Muslim Names: Immigrants and Name-Changing in Sweden.” Race & Class, vol. 53, no. 3, 15 Dec. 2011, pp. 65–80..

Levin, Joanna. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920. Stanford University Press, 21 Oct. 2009.

Prchal, Tim. The Bohemian Paradox: My Antonia and Popular Images of Czech Immigrants. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Rippley, Vern J, and Robert J Paulson. German-Bohemians: The Quiet Immigrants. St Olaf College Press, 1995.

Evan Kivi Oral history interview with Francis Ziegler. February 2023.

My great aunt Ruth’s central memory of her grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) is that when he lived with her family, he really liked to make a dried fruit concoction. He loved it, but she thought it was disgusting. This was the main thing she knew about him, until she began researching him through newspapers, census and immigration records, and records the Nazis kept during their invasion of Poland. 

Every family has a story, but not everyone’s gets told. Welcome to the Family Stories podcast. I’m Audrey Messinger, and let me tell you one of mine.

When I was young, my sisters and I would spend afternoons at the home of my maternal grandma Elaine - affectionately known to us as “Maga” - while we waited for our Mom to pick us up after school. Sometimes, Maga would tell us a story that had caught my attention early on: the story of her own grandma, my great-great-grandma Charlotta, and her involvement in a train wreck as a teenager. The details as Maga told them were straightforward: a Swedish family, with a mom and dad and a few kids, including Charlotta, was involved in a railroad accident as they were making their way to Minnesota. Charlotta’s mother and sister were killed in the wreck, and another sister was gravely injured, preventing the surviving family members from continuing on to Minnesota for many months until the wounded sister had recovered enough to travel.