2024 Week 25 - Storyteller

             Is there a storyteller in our family?  I think everybody was a storyteller – they all told stories at one point or another in our lives.  I’m trying to be the keeper of the stories and documenting them as much as I can.  Some of those stories appear here in my blog.

Dad and his sister often told stories about their growing up in the various logging camps – hide and seek; go carts; driving a speeder, a car, and a pick-up truck, and having meals at the logging camps.  A lot of these stories are being written in my documentation of the Kludt family.

Mom and her sisters often tell stories about growing up – stories about their grandfather George, about their Dad and about their brothers.  Stories about living near a Girls Correctional facility, earthquakes (and the damage done to a school and having to attend different schools), walking to and from town either to go to the picture show or collect their Dad.

I heard a lot of stories when I visited family in Kentucky – especially about my great-grandfather, George Keesee and his Model A.  Also, heard stories about the Reisner family when my aunt & I visited family in Iowa.

2024 Week 24 - Hard Times

             So many of our ancestors suffered from hard times from the Great Depression, poor financially, and who knows what else.

     

  My maternal grandparents were married in 1932.  There’s a story that was supposedly told by my grandfather of when he was looking for work.  He would go down to the employment line and stand in line hoping for a job.  Then he noticed that the men that seemed to get hired were wearing bib overalls (I believe he said they were striped).  So, he scraped up the funds to buy a pair and wore them the next time he went to stand in line.  Sure enough, he was able to get a job.  They raised a family of nine kids mainly living on a farm.  I know he moved around a lot.  In 1935, they were living in McCleary, Grays Harbor County, Washington (this is where their second child was born).  By 1936, they were in Chehalis, Lewis County, Washington.  In 1938, they were living in Glenoma, Lewis County, Washington.  And in 1940 they were living on the Cline Road in the Big Bottom area of Randle in Lewis County, Washington.  Sometime between then and 1944, they moved to Salzer Valley just outside of Centralia.  The remaining children (four of them) were born in the hospital in Chehalis.  They lived on a farm.  They were still living on the Centralia-Alpha Road during the 1950 Federal Census. Sometime between then and 1955, the family moved to Rochester area.  Sometime during the 1960’s, the family moved to Albany, Oregon.  After retirement, EB and Fern moved back to Washington State to live on the property belonging to their oldest living son in Woodland, Cowlitz County, Washington until their deaths in 1985 and 1990.