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Ed and Harry Dansereau, playing piano together circa 2010.
They ran toward danger

They ran toward danger

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This is the first time our family tree has pointed me to an episode of Dateline. Oh, how I wish it weren’t so. At first, the name Harry Kirk Dansereau caught my eye. (You may remember Marie Antoinette Dansereau from this family story. Her half-brother Edward was Harry’s father.) After the name caught my eye, his obituary utterly charmed me. Harry’s grandchildren wrote his obituary together. They told of his birth in Baltimore, and education in New Hampshire, Maryland, England,…

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bag of receipts
A bag of receipts

A bag of receipts

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What stories will be revealed as I go through this bag of receipts? The clear plastic bag was in among the family archives we brought home from Mom and Dad’s house in 2021. With the initials M&D written on a card in Dad’s handwriting, I expected it to be filled with his parents’ paper memorabilia. It was soon clear Dad labeled the bag to show it contained odds and ends from his long life with Mom. And it was meant…

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1985 Dad's blueberries
‘Homecomings’

‘Homecomings’

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In this 2004 poem, Mom remembers her youngest child’s return from the hospital as a newborn in 1964 and again from serving overseas in the Marines. Homecomings Soon after you were bornyour Father took your brothers sister berryingyour Grandmother steadied the housefor your homecoming and for the berry pickersthe two of us took off to bed after the admiration partyand the blueberries went into piesa succulent sleep in a hot ovenon a summer afternoon Years later on another summer afternoonwe…

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1945 Missing Andrew Wagner
The telegram

The telegram

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Leo and Minnie Wagner waited a long while for a son. They’d married in 1909 and settled down on a farm a few miles west of Gary’s ancestors here in southern Indiana. Minnie was a Mehling. In our family tree, she is Gary’s first cousin, twice removed. By 1922, Leo and Minnie had five daughters. That July, though, a son was born. Think of the love and care Andrew Matthias must have received from all those sisters! The next year,…

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1918 Harry Nighingale's WWI dog tag
The dog tag

The dog tag

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This story is dedicated to anyone who has ever become frustrated working on a family tree: Don’t give up. A year ago, we put together the story of Harry M. Nightingale. He fought – and died – in World War I. His connection to our family tree is through his widow’s second husband. We’re family. Harry wrote an incredible letter home while overseas. His mom gave it to the local paper to share with its readers. (That letter is reprinted…

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1944 Joseph Verrow
Cousin bait

Cousin bait

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The term “cousin bait” is intriguing. What it means, in my case anyway, is that a magnificent bonus while researching your family tree is connecting with a living relative you’ve never met. One example is second-cousin Richard, from Grandpa Cassidy’s side of the family. Another is third-cousin Irishman Adrian, who recognized a painting of his family’s homestead during an online search, which led him to this blog. And now … way over on the other side of our family tree…

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Camp Devens postcard, public domain
A tangled tale from WWI

A tangled tale from WWI

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Got a bit of a head-scratcher here … Let’s start with my brother Dave. He emailed us recently with a story from a letter our Grandma Cassidy sent him back in 1976. The details are fascinating, but I’m not sure the dates match up all that well. That said, maybe a relative will see this and help us untangle the specifics. Because, as I may have mentioned, it’s a great story. Dave relays some information from Grandma’s letter: Grandma’s older…

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Pepperell Mill in Biddeford, now a campus with condos and shops
The story of Augustus

The story of Augustus

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He was assigned the rank of Musician in the U.S. Army when he enlisted from York County, Maine, during the Spanish American War. I asked Farmer Gary, who reads a lot of military-history books, if that meant he was a drummer. “Bugler, probably,” was his reply. That makes sense. From the start, I’ll confess to not (yet) finding a place for Augustus in our family tree. The more I dig around, though, the more it becomes clear his story is…

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Mom, Dad, Bill at Christmas
‘SATURDAY NIGHT IN CAPITALS’

‘SATURDAY NIGHT IN CAPITALS’

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When I wrote about my godfather, Bob Caplinger, last year (“The West Virginia Hillbilly”), I had a feeling there was something more. There was something else my parents had saved and I just had to find it. There it was, in amongst our family archives. In 1991, Bob wrote an autobiographical short story, dedicated it to my parents and younger brother, and dropped it in the mail to them. Here it is: SATURDAY NIGHT IN CAPITALS A short story by…

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1945 Vince in Belgium
The liberators

The liberators

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He was part of the Greatest Generation. The generation that fought the Second World War, in the hope there would never be another. Members of this generation, those who returned from the horrors of war, were often quiet about what they’d witnessed. Perhaps they were just too busy catching up with their lives back home. Most probably, though, they didn’t want to bring the trauma they’d seen back to the surface. This may have been the case with Gary‘s uncle…

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