Join me on my genealogy projects journey, where I turn questions into documented ancestors. I share tools, strategies, and stories to inspire your own research and memory-keeping.
An 87-year-old family mystery, a misidentified woman in a Virginia court case, DNA matches, and an unsent 1939 letter finally helped me break one of my biggest genealogy brick walls. But the real story is about the generations of researchers who preserved just enough evidence for someone else to eventually finish the search.
Chapter III of Our Seven Children brings the Bohnenkamp family story closer to my own line, with brief but meaningful mentions of my grandmother Rosetta Caldwell, Wilbur Bohnenkamp, her sons Carl and Paul, and my father, William Douglas Bohnenkamp. This chapter is packed with Bourbon, Missouri rural history, Boone’s Creek farm life, family tragedies, land records, schools, cemeteries, marriages, and the kind of messy, vivid genealogical detail that makes old family histories so valuable.
In Chapter II of Our Seven Children, we shift to Reverend Sam’s maternal line: the Koch family. It is a story that begins with German immigrants, coffin makers navigating the catastrophic 1849 St. Louis cholera epidemic, and the fragile nature of family memory. Join me as I open a door to a branch of my family that had gone quiet, exploring how inherited trauma, lost stories, and rural Missouri history are preserved through a grandfather’s stubborn dedication to writing it all down.
Using DNA triangulation, census math, FAN-club research, and primary records, I reconstructed a lost Weasner/Wisner family network connected to the McDonald, Sturges, Morehouse, Goff, and Stewart families of Niagara and Upper Canada.
Old things do not preserve themselves.” In this series opener, I’m bringing Reverend Sam D. Bohnenkamp’s 1962 family memoir back into the light. Step inside a narrative that stretches from 1850s Germany to the brickyards of St. Louis and the rocky farms of Bourbon, Missouri. Chapter I follows the Bohnenkamp family through the heartbreak of a cholera epidemic and the grit of homesteading 120 acres in Franklin County. It’s not just a list of names—it’s a memory dump of barefoot summers, lost graves, and the stubborn survival of a Missouri family.