I often don’t make personal posts, but this one I think pertains to what I do for a living. Photography is my first passion, but family history runs a very close second. For me, they are connected in so many ways. I would hope that someday one of my grandchildren would rediscover images from my life, either in albums, hard drives or computers, and preserve my memory with something very similar to this. By then I am sure that technology will come leaps and bounds.
This book took me nearly a year to put together and over 8 years finding all the information. I have been doing family research since I was a freshman in high school. I am very fortunate to have so many members of my family who contributed to the making of this book. Much to my regret, I am unable to make changes to this book. My computer crashed and lost the file for the book, but I still have all the information, which is most important to me. I learned a valuable lesson however, that life is fleeting and it is what we do with our time that truly matters. We can spend our whole lives trying to capture every moment, and miss what matters most, the people we love. Everything that we create in this life will fade, but the relationships we procure will last forever.
I would like to thank my family for allowing me to create this book. I hope that someday they value the stories in this book as much as I do. To know where we are going, we must know where we have been. This is only a small portion of what is yet to come over the next few years. I still have Stokes-Alger, Joss-Drews, Starks-Staege-Welle-Callahan, Shotliff-Culler-Reiter, Lutz-Wokenhauer family books to create!
