What I Know

I found out yesterday that my great great grandfather's Uncle Martin, indeed came to the United States in 1849, along with two or three of his brothers.

Education 2012 Chicago Teachers Support

Education 2012 Chicago teachers support

I am not a babysitter. I earned a B.A. a M.A. and have 46 graduate hrs past that. I have 35 years of teaching. experience. Can I learn more? Yes. Should there be accountability in the classroom? Yes. Should businessmen and politicians come tell me how to do my job? HELL NO! Kids are not business! Test scores are NOT the only measure of success in a classroom. Not all kids are created equally. Backgrounds are different. Experiences are different. Fewer than half of my students have a computer at home and most of those cannot access the internet. Not all classroom resources are the same. Many, many factors determine student success in the 21st century. So before you try to tie my paycheck to student test scores please make sure that All my kids have food at home so they can eat dinner. Make sure that they have parents who don't drink, do drugs, don’t have to have second jobs to make ends meet, are home at night for love and supervision. Make sure that parents don’t abuse their kids emotionally or physically. Make sure that high school kids come to school sober and dressed in clothes that do not like they just got off a “pole” somewhere or the boys…tired of seeing the prison-style pants rocking somewhere between the hips and knees.  Make sure that every child has “Leave It to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best” home life. Make sure EVERY home has a fast computer with internet access. Make sure to fund after school arts and sports programs for EVERY school age child and require attendance...but I thought you wanted less government programs and yet you cut, cut, cut funding for education. Yes to good, research-based, data-driven classroom teaching. Yes to fair teacher evaluation systems. No! to cutting education budgets. And Hell no tying student's test scores to my paycheck. And make sure that the benefits that teachers are offered are at the same level as other “state employees”  (separate issue).  Make sure that if a classroom teacher sees a need and makes reasonable requests for materials that they are ordered in a timely manner so that she does not need to spend $200 out of pocket for said materials.  Come watch me teach.  Come help me teach. Better yet, go to my friend’s class that has 43 10^th graders for World History and help him.  Don’t offer Elite programs to only certain kids.  Make them available to everyone.  This is a GIANT can of worms or a HOT Mess.  Oh, another thing the Chicago teachers are gripping about is losing a mere 25 days of instruction due to testing.  Try 46 days in Texas.  Check out the school calendar, it’s all there in black and white. LET EDUCATORS EDUCATE!  We love your kids.  GO Chicago Teachers!

Jean Eduard Frederich Ruhling

Jean Eduard Frederich Ruhling

Jean Eduard Frederich Ruhling was born in Cassel, Germany in 1845. His father was Ruhling and his mother was Marie Krafft.  Jean’s father was a merchant in Cassel. Following his mother’s death, Jean Eduard decided to move to America.  His father had remarried and he had reached the age when he could be conscripted into the German Army, which he did not want. 

• Compulsory military conscription was unpopular.  Many young men emigrated without permission in order to avoid military service. It has been estimated that more than fifty percent of young men of military age emigrated illegally.
• The largest share of taxes and military personnel came from tradesmen, farmers, artisans, and laborers. Many did not want their children to feel the brunt of upcoming wars, unemployment, indebtedness, and impoverishment.
• Relatives or friends who had already emigrated sent positive reports back to their hometown. Their reports encouraged others to follow.
• It is estimated than about 20,000 Hessians emigrated to America in 1854. Of the number, over 9,000 were from Hesse-Kassel.
• From 1848-1854, approximately 773,000 Germans emigrated to America, with nearly 2/3 of them from Hesse-Kassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, the Palatinate, Baden and Württemberg. 

·          These mid-century immigrants had enough resources to finance their trip, but not enough to keep them rooted to their hometowns. The promise of land extended from America was exactly the promise they were looking for in areas increasingly squeezed for the needed space for farming.

·         Economics wasn’t the only motivating factor for these nineteenth century immigrants, but it was the most important. Political upheavals, climaxing with the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Western Europe, drove some Germans to seek new homes. Although the legend of these activists has lived on in German-American communities, historians have shown that the so-called “forty-eighters” barely caused a bump in the German emigration numbers. Similarly, religious persecution pushed only a relative few to leave their homeland.

The above information is from the German Interest Group - Wisconsin Newsletter, 14, 4 (February 2007).

According to the 1900 Census, Jean Eduard Frederich left Germany in 1863.  He arrived in New York City.  He tried many different jobs.  Since he could draw very well, he obtained work in an ornamental Iron company.  He developed a real talent for design and opened his own business making elaborate fences and gates for large estates outside the city.  He was granted naturalization on  October 9, 1872.

Why I accepted the challenge to Write about my family

"The McCrackens of Texas and Other Nuts "

  

 Pride of ancestry is not merely a fad.  Neither is it ancestral worship.  An anonymous writer in the Journal of American History has expressed a sentiment that is perhaps universal among civilized people.

Says he:  “To read genealogy may be to thinking and reflective mind like walking in a cemetery and reading the inscriptions on the grave stones.  Each of the names in the table of one, or on the stone in the other, is only a memorial---perhaps the only memorial ---of a human heart that once lived and loved;  a heart that kept its pulsations through some certain periods of time and then ceased to beat and has mouldered into dust.  Each had its joys and sorrows, its cares and burdens, its opportunities wasted or improved, and its hour of death.  Each of these dates of birth, marriage, death, oh, how significant!  What a day was each of these dates to some human family, or to some circle of loving, human hearts!  And the presence of death drives the mind to thoughts of immortality.  Memorials of the dead are memorials not of death alone but of life also.  They died, therefore they had lived.  And as the mind thinks of the dead gethered to their fathers, it can not but think of the unseen world which they inhabit.

“All these names are memorials of human spirits that have passed from time that flows between, walk the brave men and beautiful women of our ancestry, grouped in twilight upon the shores.  Distance smoothes away defeats, and, with gentle darkness, rounds every form into grace.  It steals the harshness from their speech, and every word becomes a song.  Far across the gulf that ever widens they look upon us with eyes whose glance is tender, and which lights us to success.  We acknowledge our inheritance, we accept our birthright, and we own that their careers have pledged us to noble action.  Every great life is an incentive to all other lives.”

What shall be said, then, about the perpetuatiopn of memorials?  Must we keep green the memory of those who have lived, left a record, and have gone before us?

After all, “If a man die, shall he live again?”  Surley in more senses than Job meant.   Memorials and minumints are fleeting if we compare time with eternity, but the inscriptions that are written in the hearts of men endure through the ages.

So with the family tree if it be worthy.

Allen, W. C.. The annals of Haywood county, North Carolina: historical, sociological, biographical, and genealogical. S.l.: s.n.] ., 1935. Print. pp275-276.

From the time I can remember, ancestors have been important to me.  I knew my great grandparents and had a sense of who they were as individuals and how the two sides of my family came to be linked together. That is, I thought I knew. My father had a book that has been passed from my great-grandfather to my dad and I was always surprised to find our surname in the book and information about the McCracken family.  That was not a common surname in this area, so looking through the eyes of an eight year old and seeing the story in print made me feel special.  My mother, too, had information, although not printed in a book, but it was real just the same.
Following the untimely death of my brother, Paul, this past spring, and my cousin's son, my mother and uncle have urged our family to set a date for our fourth official family reunion.  My daughters and I finally took the bull by the horns and set a date, rented a house and informed the rest of the family. As a special treat for my family, I decided to learn as much as I could about our family history and present my findings at the reunion.
Armed with my various family trees, pictures, and a great ambition, I set a goal to visit the National Archives here in Fort Worth every Wednesday during the summer.  I also set every Thursday to go to the Family Search Center.  I met that goal and found myself wishing for more summer and less school year.  I found records to document the information that I already had, cemetery archives, and even the courage to write to Georgia for a copy of a will, hoping to prove my great-great grandfather's death.  My information grew from a spiral notebook to four three ring binders documenting relatives on both sides of my family.  I have discovered that if I want to delve further into the maternal side of my mother's family, I will need to learn German.

Currently there are 781 people in my family tree from including both sides of my family.