Category: history

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Living in the trees

For quite a while I’ve been lurking in the shadows, watching as a new web company called Geni.com developed their site.

What is Geni? It’s is a “social networking” site, sort of like Facebook or MySpace, but designed around family trees.

The idea is that you get as many family members as possible to sign up. Their profile pages are actually part of the family tree. You can share photos, news, send greetings and gifts … lots of fun ways to stay connected with the rest of your family. And of course, everyone can work on the tree: add new branches of the family, correct stuff that might be wrong, add photos or stories of a deceased loved one… the possibilities go on and on.

Anyway, they recently unveiled the feature I had been waiting for … the ability to import family trees created in other programs. I have been working on my own family tree since last fall, and now I could put it on Geni and invite my own family members to come explore it (and expand and improve it)!

I’ve been surprised how many have actually responded to the invitations and joined up. Already there have been a lot of fixes and changes.

Best of all, some of my distant relatives (whom I never even knew before this year) are also joining in. I am really looking forward to being able to stay in touch and see photos of their families.

(By the way, if you’re in my family and you haven’t yet gotten an invite from me, please just drop me a line. I may not have your most recent email address, which I need to invite you to our tree)

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A memory slipping away

How is it that the war once known as “The Great War” has become the forgotten war?

Many disparate interests have gradually gotten me to think about World War I over the past few years. For example:

  • Two of my favorite authors both fought in WWI: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
  • John Becker, my triple-great-uncle, would have served in the Navy during the war, if he hadn’t been murdered.
  • The city of Ferguson has a monument in January-Wabash Park to honor its citizens who seved in WWI.

Everything I’ve ever read indicates just how horrible a conflict it was. Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme and later caught trench fever. He admitted that some scenes in “The Lord of the Rings,” like the Dead Marshes, were drawn from his experience in northern France. The imagery of these scenes is vivid and repugnant. I can’t imagine how awful the real war must have been.

There is just one living American WWI veteran left: 107-year-old Frank Buckles. I learned this from a recent article in Newsweek, The War We Forgot.

When Buckles dies, another pivotal moment in American history will slip into the ether. Most folks probably wouldn’t realize it. We have no national monument to the veterans of WWI.

I don’t know what, if anything, can be done about it. But it’s something that weighs on my mind.

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The murder of John Becker

Ninety years ago, a sailor was found dead in Chicago, bloodied but still warm. His name was John Andrew Becker and he was my great-great-great-uncle.

Small John Becker portrait from the Chicago Tribune in 1920.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I have uncovered many names as I have fleshed out parts of the family tree, but it has at times been hard to learn about them as individuals. In the case of John Becker, the murder generated newspaper stories, military reports, police files, coroner’s inquests, and much more. This tragedy has offered a chance to learn more about a person in the family, and the people connected to him (for good or ill) at the time of his death.

What follows is my re-telling of John Becker’s murder based on reading many newspaper reports, a transcript of the Cook County coroner’s inquest board, John Becker’s military personnel file, various death certificates, and other material.

In coming days I will also write about the process of discovering this story for anyone who’s interested.

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