GENEALOGY IN EUROPE: PART I

My husband and I just returned from 3 weeks in Europe and, having now had three weeks to recover, I am ready to share some of the amazing experiences we had, especially as they relate to family.

The family part of the trip occurred in the third week, but I must take a few lines to talk about the first two weeks. 

The first week was spent in Paris.  I had never been there before and wasn't prepared for all that I saw and encountered.  Paris has a well deserved reputation for being one of the most glamorous and sophisticated cities in the world, and in fact, Paris truly is magnificent.  My only wish was that I had been able to appreciate it when I was a little younger and more mobile.  Paris is not made for older people.  Still, there was so much to see that in one week, you could barely begin.  We visited two gardens: the Tuilleries and Luxembourg.  We saw three museums:  the Orsay, the Pompidou, and L'Orangerie - home to Monet's famous water lilies.  We visited two departments stores, two cathedrals, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.  We ate at an amazing assortment of restaurants and took a Seine River Cruise.  All were wonderful.

On one of the days, we took the train to Bayeux, in Normandy, where we saw the 1000 year old Bayeux Tapestry which records the victory of William the Conqueror in the longest  piece of embroidery in the world. 

We traveled to Lyon to take a river cruise for 7 days.  We saw Roman ruins, sampled the foods of Provence, went to local wineries, saw the Papal Palace in Avignon and an intact medieval village dating back to the 1200s.  It was a remarkable week.

Then we rented a car and drove up to the Lorraine region of France.  Here is where the genealogy part of our travels began.  We had made arrangements to meet a very colorful Frenchman by the  name of Jerome.  Jerome has dedicated much of his life to helping people remember WW II and the sacrifice made by so many.  He has built a museum that houses countless artifacts from the war, and has created many replicas and miniature displays.

 Jerome spent the day with us and took us first to the bridge at the town of Flavigny where a cousin of mine, Ralph Brennan, died in September of 1944.  There is a plaque on the bridge with Ralph's name on it. 

Because I was the first of my family to visit the memorial, the mayor of the town and a few other dignitaries came out to greet us and have pictures taken for the local paper. 

 

Jerome then drove us around the area and introduced us to a 93 year old man whose father had been mayor of Flavigny when Ralph's brother, Dominican priest Father Robert Brennan, asked if he could have a cross carved into the newly rebuilt bridge where Ralph died.  Decades after the cross was carved into the bridge, a plaque was finally placed on the bridge in Ralph's honor and a new bronze cross inserted into the space where the old cross was once  the only reminder of what had happened on that bridge. 

Basically, the story of Ralph's sacrifice is this:  On the night of September 10-11, 1944, Lt. Ralph Brennan was leading a group of men to try to retake the only remaining bridge over the Moselle River. (Having been wounded a few months earlier, he had only been back at the front for 3 days.) The Germans had destroyed all the other bridges in order to prevent the Allies, who had landed in Normandy a few months before, from marching further into France and ultimately to Germany.  Lt. Brennan and his men crossed the bridge at night and were supposed to be followed by tanks and reinforcements. They hoped these support units would help them in fighting the Germans who were waiting on the other side.  As so often happens in the fog of war, the reinforcements never came and the young lieutenant and most of his men were ambushed and either killed or seriously wounded.  Lt. Brennan was mortally wounded, though he didn't die immediately.  Having lost an arm and a leg, he lay dying near the bridge when a fellow soldier offered him a last cigarette.  He died that night and was buried in St. Avold, at the Lorraine American Cemetery very close to the German border.

 

When my husband and I planned this trip, we had hoped we would have time to visit that cemetery, but our schedule was so packed that we simply couldn't arrange it.  However, the next day, when we were driving to a small town in Germany to see some distant relatives on my mother's side of the family, we got lost.  When our GPS finally got us headed in the right direction, we found ourselves in front of the cemetery.  Though we didn't have time to visit Ralph's grave, we felt that fate had somehow taken us by that cemetery.  And in finding myself there, looking at the final resting place of a man I never knew but have heard so much about, I felt a closeness not just to Ralph, but to the entire Brennan family who is proud to count this hero as one of them. 

 

 

Richard Lippincott (1613-1683)

I never imagined that I might have ancestors who came to America before the Revolution. 

I never imagined it because my parents and grandparents were all Catholic, and very few Catholics (especially German and Irish ones) made it to America before the 19th century.

But I forgot one thing.  My paternal grandmother, Kathryn Marguerite Shaw,  converted to Catholicism after marrying my grandfather, Keech Brennan, and none of her ancestors were Catholic. 

I'm putting together her family history, and I'm discovering ancestors of many different Christian denominations: Puritan; German reformed; Quaker; Baptist and more.  Many of these ancestors were quite religious, and others were religious as well as rebellious, moving away from one denomination as they were disillusioned by it, and joining another. 

For example, my 9th great grandfather, an English aristocrat by the name of Richard Lippincott, born in 1613 in England, came to the colony of Plymouth in about 1640 and joined the Puritan Church.  He married, had several children and moved to Boston.  (Richard moved around a great deal which tells me he must have had considerable wealth.) His children, like other children of the time, had interesting names including: Remembrance, Freedom, Restore, Increase and Preserved. 

While in Boston, Richard got into trouble with the church, believing they were too militant, and disagreeing with some of their dogma, and was excommunicated.  Eventually, he decided the atmosphere was too hostile for him in Boston and he returned to England.  There he met George Fox, the Founder of the Society of Friends, and became a Quaker.  He was imprisoned in England for his beliefs, and eventually decided to try the New World again, this time in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams had established a religiously tolerant colony.  Eventually, he helped to establish a settlement in what is now New Jersey and helped finance the building of  the Quaker Meeting House in Shrewsbury.

According to the histories of the time, in 1672 George Fox came to visit Shrewsbury and stayed with Richard and his family.

While this story is mostly uplifting, in that Richard was a man of principle who followed his conscience, there is one part of his biography that is troubling.  Richard owned a number of African slaves, having purchased them from the Dutch, who were engaged in a lucrative slave trade at that time.  However, upon Richard's death, his wife, Abigail, freed all of them. 

I am descended from Richard's son, Remembrance, who became a prominent Quaker in his own right.  After many generations of male ancestors, my 2nd great grandmother, Rebecca Lippincott, was born in Ohio to Morgan Lippincott and Mary Elizabeth Warner.  Rebecca was the mother of my great grandmother, Emma, who married Clifford Shaw.  Emma was the mother of my grandmother, Kathryn Shaw Brennan.

New Adventures, New Ventures

The Brennan family history book is with the designer and pretty much out of my hands at the moment.  So I am keeping busy with other projects.  One is immediate, one is long term.

The immediate project is preparing for my trip to France, coming up in just a few weeks.  This trip will mostly be for fun, relaxation, and immersing myself in culture and shopping.  However, there will be a few genealogical opportunities.  One will happen just across the border from the Alsace Lorraine area of France, in Losheim am See, Germany.  There I will meet with some distant cousins and see the town where my Schulien ancestors lived and built a small "castle."  I have been in touch with the cousins and am really looking forward to seeing where my mother's maternal ancestors once lived and raised their families.  I keep thinking how much my mother, were she still here, would love this.  It's so sad that I can no longer share these things with her.

Another opportunity will happen in Nancy, in the Lorraine area of France, where a cousin Ralph Brennan, died during a battle in World War II. We will be meeting with a gentleman who is a local historian and caretaker of the WW II museum there. This would have meant a great deal to my dad and I am sad that I can't share this with him.

Finally, we will drive through the tiny village of Turpange in Belgium, where other ancestors of my mother (her father's Mueller ancestors) once lived.  Each of these will give me opportunities to learn a great deal, visit with interesting people, and take plenty of pictures. 

The long term project is the beginning of another family history book.  This one will record the history of my paternal grandmother's family.  Her name was Kathryn Shaw and she has an amazing family history that goes all the way back to the time of the earliest American colonies and before.  One line can be traced back to the time of William the Conqueror (1066) in England.  Others can be traced to the Puritans and Quakers in the American colonies.

In the meantime, I wait for the design to be completed on the Brennan book, so I can send it off to the printer, and then wait to see the finished product.  I believe it will be worth the wait.  I hope all my Brennan relatives agree.

Update: Brennan Family History Book

I have completed the writing of the Brennan Family History Book.  The Book has 12 chapters and 4 appendices.  It will be close to 200 pages long. About 160 pages are text, while another 40 are pictures. Six of the chapters are the genealogies of the descendants of Ned and Mary Brennan, my great great grandparents who emigrated from Ireland in 1860.  There is also a chapter on the history of Ireland and another on the history of Ohio, where Ned and Mary settled, raised their family, and died. 

This is the third family history book I have written.  The first two were for my husband's family - his father's Croatian side, and his mother's Swiss-English side.  Both were great fun to write, but not as involved as this recent book.  The reason this one is more involved is because it contains the names of more people and because I have been in contact with so many of them to gather information and photographs.  With my husband's Croatian family, I was mainly working with the descendants of his great grandparents rather than his great great grandparents, which means there were fewer people to contact.  Also, most of them lived in California.  With my husband's mother's family, there simply were fewer living relatives to contact. 

In this book, I have made efforts to connect with branches of the family that either did not know about each other, or have been out of touch with each other for decades.   My goal was to learn the names of every descendant, both living and deceased, of Ned and Mary Brennan. This involved making phone calls, writing letters, and sending emails, often to people I had never met, and sometimes to people whom I wasn't even sure were part of the family. I had to wait until I received a reply to find out if I had reached the right person.  I was always a little bit afraid that when I sent a letter or made a call to someone I had never met, telling them I was writing a family history book, that they might not believe me or think I was trying to steal their identities or sell them something. But for the most part, they were quite welcoming and enthusiastic.  And while I may have not been able to find a handful of descendants, I ultimately learned the names, relevant dates and occupations of over 500 people, over 350 of them living today. And a good number of those people sent me photographs.

The next step is to design the book.  Designing is different than writing.  Designing a book has to do with all the technical details of how a book will look once it is printed: size of margins, page numbers, placement of photographs, decorative details, etc.  This is a time consuming process and one I am not equipped to do.  In the past, I worked with a professional designer, but that proved quite expensive.  This time, my daughter in law, who owns the appropriate computer program to do this,  has offered to help.  I'm hoping it won't be too much work for her. 

After the design is complete, the book will go to the printers.  There, it will be transformed into a beautiful hard back book with high quality paper and excellent reproductions of photographs. 

So we still have a way to go before we see the finished product.  These things always take longer than we expect them to.  But the goal is now in sight, and I am looking forward to finally being able to share all of my research, writing and efforts with the rest of the Brennan family. 

Vacation of a Lifetime!

In 6 weeks, my husband and I will be visiting France, Germany and Belgium for 3 weeks. 

Most of the trip will be in France.  A week in Paris, a week on a Viking River Cruise in the south of France, and then a few days driving up to the Alsace Lorraine area.  There we will meet with a man who is in charge of the World War II museum in Nancy.  This is the town close to the location where a cousin of mine died during World War II. His name was Ralph Brennan and he and his fellow soldiers were attempting to take a bridge back from the German army.  In what can best be described as an ambush, most of the American men were killed.  The fighting was fierce, though, and that fighting distracted the German army, allowing the Allies to retake the town of Nancy.  Ralph died at the Bridge at Flavigny, and there is a plaque on the bridge with his name on it.  So we will see the bridge, visit the site where he died, and see the World War II museum, which they will hold open for us even though they normally close it for the season in September.  In this 70th anniversary of D-Day, it will be quite an honor to be so up close and personal to a World War II battle, and to visit the place where a relative of mine died in that war.  This trip will give me some final pictures and information to include in the Family history book I am writing.


Even as I'm working on my Brennan Family History book, though, I'm continuing to pursue leads in my other families, and so after a few days in Alsace Lorraine (including one day on the Route Des Vins) we will hop over the border into Germany to visit the town of Losheim, the town where my Schulien great great grandparents were born.  We had hoped to meet a 6th cousin, but our vacations days overlapped with his vacation days when he will be out of the country, so he has arranged for us to meet with an in-law of the family.  We will see a house once built by the Schulien men before they came to America, and will hopefully learn as much as we can about this family.  We only have one day there, but it is a small town, and hopefully will be very interesting. 

Then it's off to Belgium.  We will pass through a small town where my Mueller relatives are from, and then up to Bruges for two days.  Then we'll drive back to Paris for one day and fly home. 

I can't say what thrills me more - being in Paris, taking a river cruise, or learning more about my ancestors.  I guess it's the combination that is so thrilling to me. 

Two years ago, we went to Ireland to meet some relatives from my Brennan side - my dad's side.  Now we're learning what we can about my mom's side.  It's one thing to learn the names of ancestors on paper.  It's another to see the places they once lived, and to speak to relatives or people who know something about their lives.  I am so thankful that I will have this opportunity, and I will report back afterwards.  In the meantime, I continue work on the book and will report on that soon. 

Why I Love Genealogy

There are many reasons I love genealogy.  It combines my love of history with my skills at being a sleuth and my training as a therapist.  It makes me feel like I'm part of a much larger family.  It introduces my to so many people.  It appeals to my need for completion and organization.  But something I rarely talk about is that it helps keep those who have died alive - at least to those of us who write and think about them.

Right now I'm confronted with the serious illnesses of several people close to me.  I'm talking about the kinds of illnesses that will ultimately lead to death, though there's no way of knowing how soon.  I am, of course, hoping it will be far into the future.  But when you are faced with life -threatening illnesses in your friends and family you feel fear, sadness, and a sense of impending loss.  You know that at some point, you will have to say a final good-bye.  And as you heal from your grief, you find that you don't think about those friends and family members quite as often as you once did.  It's not that you don't still love and miss them, it's simply the nature of healing.  Life moves forward and the days have a way of being occupied with immediate concerns.  And while you will always remember your friends and family who have gone, the next generations who did not know them as well, or at all, may not even remember their names. 

When you do genealogy, you spend a lot of time learning about people who have already died.  You may even spend some of your days - days that might otherwise be spent outdoors with your grandchildren, or barbecuing with friends - tromping around cemeteries, in search of dates for ancestors who have been gone many decades, possibly even a century or more.   My husband and I have done that on many occasions.  And these trips have not only paid off in terms of finding long lost ancestors, they have been an opportunity to reflect on those lives - those persons who came before you, some of whom had to exist in order for you to exist. 

Those trips to the cemetery, those days spent in libraries poring over old records, those hours upon hours in front of a computer screen reading census reports that are over 100 years old, make me keenly aware of all the relatives of mine who have passed on.  These relatives were not so different from me.  They went to school, married, had children, laughed, cried, mourned, rejoiced, got old, got sick, and eventually died.  And today, they have been forgotten by most of their descendants - except for some, including those who do genealogy. 

So that is one of the important reasons I will always love genealogy. It is more than a search for names and dates, records and newspaper articles. It is a way of remembering, a way of keeping my ancestors alive in my mind, as well as in the minds of other family members. 

One of my Brennan relatives, Ralph Brennan, was a war hero in WW II.  He died in 1944 in the Battle of Flavigny near Nancy, France.  To honor him, there is an inscription on the bridge where he died.  It reads:

"Men die two times, once on the day of their deaths, the second time when no one speaks of them.  By this gesture, we hope that Lt. Brennan will not die a second time."

By my work on this Brennan family history book, it is my hope that my ancestors, and all the descendants of Ned and Mary Fahey Brennan, will long be remembered, and will not die a second time. 

Progress

Time to report on progress on the Brennan Family History Book. 

I have sent out numerous letters and received many responses.

I have spoken to about a dozen or more second and third cousins, and first cousins once removed, and have nearly completed each family tree.  In other words, I have nearly all the names of the descendants of Ned and Mary Brennan, whose first child was born in 1861.  Considering that I started with about 10 percent of what I have now, that represents a lot of effort.

The book is divided into several sections; six of those sections are reports on the six children of Ned and Mary and their descendants.  All I am missing are a few dates.

I decided a couple of months ago that in addition to reporting on names and dates, I wanted to include states of residence and occupations.  I still have a few more families for which I need that data, but I am getting close. 

I have also gathered quite a collection of vintage photographs to include in the book. 

I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I won't share all the other things I've put in the book, but I think everyone will be pleased. 

So I have a few more nagging phone calls to make and emails to send, but I'm hoping to have everything ready to go within a few weeks.  Then I'll need to prepare the word document for the printer by putting it into a design program, find a printer, and finally send it off to be professionally printed.

So it's still probably a few months off, but I am starting to get excited to see the finished product.  I hope everyone else in the family is too.