Riverbend Journal

I'm pretty sure if I went back through all 21 years of my blog archives, I would find a post with these three people shown and me pontificating on who they might be. I came across the originals again this past weekend as I was sorting through the stack of boxes of these sorts of things I have stored in my office waiting for me to sort through. They remain in the keep pile but I still don't know who they are and sadly the backs of these photographs are blank. Also, they are in a box that contains old photos of many branches of my family tree and so any context has been lost as well. I will most likely never know the identity of these three people. Yet I would like to keep their photos out there on the internet and searchbots on the very slim chance somebody someday might recognize them and assign a name to them. It has happened before with other genealogy things I have blogged about.  

I've probably had a credit card now for going on three decades. The first two decades were pretty much trouble free. The first half of the third decade things started changing but I adapted. I accepted that the mattress I was buying 100 miles from my home might look suspicious and would happily call them to unlock my card so I might proceed with the purchase. But the last five years seem to have changed things completely. My credit card number was evidently stolen again, for perhaps the third or fourth time. But this time was a little different. Previous thefts have usually resulted in a serious of increasingly bigger charges made or a signup to some automatic billing for some website I've never heard. This one was a single charge to a cabin rental place, in my own state none-the-less and something I might not have questioned except that it happened to occur while we were driving back from the cabin in Arkansas. I called the cabin rental place hoping that they could look it up ...

One last post on the Buchholz family before I move onto other subjects. First is a civil case brought against my 3rd great grandfather Albert Buchholz as printed in the newspaper. If you recall from a previous post. Albert was getting tired of farming and preparing to sell the farm and move into town around this time which is what sparked this case. I didn't find any results to the case in the newspaper archives but they are very hard to search for a couple reasons. One, there were about a thousand Buchholz extended family members living in the area so there are thousands of hits with almost every search. Two, it is hard to narrow down a search for specific information on Frederick Albert Ludwig Buchholz who also went by Friedrich, Fritz, Albert, A.F., etc. at various points in his life. Probably the only way I will know is to go to the county courthouse and try to track down the case somehow and see if records still exist. Albert died first leaving wife Amanda behind who wrote a w...

  Ira and Mary Buchholz Ackerson holding daughter Amanda I won't go into great detail with this story of my 2nd great grandmother, Mary Ackerson but will tell you the story of how she met my 2nd great grandfather.. She was born Maria Caroline Buchholz, named after her grandmother but went by Mary. She grew up poor and working on the family farm while doing outside jobs to bring in money for the family. One of these jobs was working as a housekeeper for her older sister's brother-in-law, Ira Ackerson and his three young children who were abandoned by their mother. Ira's first wife Bird Ingalls Ackerson went to see the Ringling Brother's Circus in a nearby city and never came back. The newspaper at the time theorized that she may have eloped to Chicago with a previous love interest but I never saw anything more on the subject until four years later when they filed for divorce, both living in the same town by then. In this case, it is obvious the connection between Mary an...

  Albert Frederick and Amanda Jane Buchholz Albert, as he went by later in life or Friedrich as his birth name was listed in church records or Fritz as the immigration people listed him, was born in Germany on 19 July 1850 in Pankow, Germany. Not much is known about his early life though according to the family history book, a school copybook has been passed down to his granddaughter and in it he wrote lots of things evidently including perhaps a previous marriage to someone of higher class and an illegitimate birth of a unknown boy. But it was written in high German and difficult to translate and three of his four living daughters would vow that he was never married before coming to America. Coincidentally, the one daughter who thought he had been married in Germany was my second great grandmother who, like all his children, was born here in Iowa and never set foot in Germany. My guess, having been a school aged male once upon a time, is that the copybook was a wishful thinking so...

  Johann Christian Buchholz 17 Nov 1815 - 21 Sep 1897 I am lucky to have a compiled history of my grandmother's side of the family done way back before computers and the internet were thoughts. I don't know the exact date though the author, the granddaughter of the man above, has been dead since 1965. I thought it time to combine my (modern day) research with her old school research and flesh out the story of one of my immigrant ancestors. Johann Christian Buchholz was born in Pankow, Germany on 17 Nov 1815. I don't know his parentage for sure though I have found one record listing a father named Johann Georg Buchholz. The problem is that it is a transcribed index and no way to affirm that the child Johann Christian Buchholz is my 4th great grandfather other than they have the same name. He was probably a farmer as listed in his immigration records and he and his wife Maria Elizabeth Buchholz immigrated to America on 28 April 1869 on the ship SS Westphalia along with their ...

As mentioned in the last post, I pulled and replaced the hall toilet with a new wax ring and even tested it out. I left to retrieve the kids from school and found a puddle of water in the bathroom again. AAAAAGH! So I turned off the water, mopped up the water, and spent a restless night mulling what could possibly be wrong. The flange is flush to the flooring and the toilet standard so a standard wax ring which I put on should have been adequate but evidently not. Perhaps it was the two piece reinforcement ring that was causing the issue. Was it leaking through the overlap in pieces or between the reinforcement ring and the old stripped out flange? Too many unanswered questions led to tossing and turning all night long. The following morning I stopped by the hardware store yet again and bought a thicker wax ring along with new flange bolts and covers, and a reinforcement ring that was one piece. Back home, I scooped out all the water in the tank and bowl... ugh, and after disconnecting...

  Not sure what is going on in our house but it hasn't been enjoyable. A couple weeks before our vacation, I went into the hall bathroom that our daughters use for something and noticed a puddle of water near the toilet. I cleaned it up and flushed the toilet a few times and it never came back so I chalked it up as somebody spilling water from the sink. A few weeks go by and then it happens again.  I repeat cleaning it up and flushing the toilet several times without nary a drop of water coming out and again chalk it up as something else happening. But the very next day my wife uses it and water came out from underneath immediately after she flushed so I finally admitted to myself that I was going to have to yank the toilet. However it was a national holiday followed by a Sunday and so I just put an out of order sign written on blue painters tape adhered to the lid and put it off for a few days. Fortunately we have two other toilets in the house. As we were enjoying the fire d...

For probably the first time I can remember anyway, we ended last year without any snow at all. We've had plenty of brown Christmas' over the years but never have we gone this long without at least some snow that melted right away. So our reward was to get pounded on New Year's day with an old fashioned blizzard. We spent the day downstairs in front of the fireplace reading, napping and playing games. I wish we got similar blizzards more often. The above picture in the patio outside our basement family room and underneath the deck on the backside of the house. I was experimenting with taking a "slow exposure" with my smart phone and this was one of the failed attempts. It supposedly can be done with some sort of an algorithm and a "live photo" but I think I need something in motion more obviously than snow. The tarped object is my woodpile, now probably eight years old and much reduced in size but with plenty more where it came from. After the blizzard, I...

 With the cabin now a full time living residence, it is too small to hold much in the way of stuff so the project this fall has been to build a storage building for all the outdoor gear. My dad built the building and had all but the finishing detail work done so my brother and I spent a morning helping him finish all the detail work. We boxed in the soffit ends and applied the fascia cover while my dad did the soffit. It is now critter tight and ready for use. Unfortunately, my youngest daughter had a cough that started getting worse and later that night became wheezing in nature. As we were approaching a holiday weekend and her pediatrician would be not available, we decided to error on the side of caution and leave the next morning, much earlier than planned. As it turned out, she was negative for both flu and covid and it was most likely a cold but she was given some medicine and was soon on the mend. A new to me hike that was in the works ended up getting cancelled due to our e...

As you might have guesses, our little trip away was to the family cabin where my dad lives and my brother was visiting. It was nice to get away from all the commercialization around Christmas. On our first full day there, we opted to go for a hike, the longest one we have taken our youngest daughter on thus far. Due to the popularity of the area, we chose a hike that is much lesser known and as it turned out, it was a fine day to do it as the temperatures were warm enough that a coat wasn't even needed, rare that time of year.  Above we are on an overlook looking over the river valley and a park camping area. Perhaps those with sharp eyes can see our vehicle parked on the grass alongside the road in the left center of the photo. It seems like a terribly far distance and indeed coming back, had there been a zip line there, I would have over ridden my fears and taken it. But in reality, it was probably only a half hour of walking to get from here to there.  Father down the trail...

Mary Meyer Kuck My third great grandmother Mary Meyer was born in Switzerland on 7 Jan 1837 according to her gravestone and death notice in the local newspaper. But between that date and the day she got married in Galena, Illinois on 30 May 1860, her life is a big blank slate. Why she immigrated, when she immigrated, where she immigrated are all questions that I don't know the answer to along with who her parents were. It has been a mystery that I have spent too much time over the last two decades trying to solve. The first record I have of Mary's life is her marriage certificate which has been no help in tracking down her parents. I have tried tracking down the pastor who married her to my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck but have never succeeded in tracking him down. I always thought that if I could track him down, I might be able to track down some sort of church record but that hasn't been the case.  John Kuck     Dealer in leather findings, saddles, hardware,...

I'm not sure how I went most of my life without hearing the term derecho until recent years. By definition, they are a line of intense winds that blow over a big area and cause lots of destruction. I couple years ago, it crossed my radar when some friends of ours suffered one and then last year, some hit closer to home though not were I live. Now I can say I experienced a derecho with several hours of heavy winds topping out at 82 mph! This time, it had been in the forecast for a day or two so I tucked the garbage and compost bins on the less side of the house as the expected winds were forecasted from and they survived. Fortunately the trampoline was now gone and no longer an issue and so other than making sure all the doors were securely fastened, there wasn't much to do but sit and wait.  At about 7:35 in the evening, the line of winds came and immediately the trees bent more than I have ever seen them bend and the above one snapped about 12 feet off the ground and fell over...