Riverbend Journal

  Maybe as short as a year ago, I would likely have only been able to look at the writing on this postcard, ponder what secrets it might hold, and then move on without every knowing. But with the rapidly accelerating Artificial Intelligence world, those days are relegated to the dust bin of our history. I simply uploaded this very image into Google's Gemini with the instruction to translate the German to English and in about three seconds, knew exactly what it said. Dearest Klärchen (Little Clara), For the New Year, I wish you all the very best that one could possibly imagine, and much enduring success with the German language. I hope your little trip went well. Did you also think of me sometimes? Your Else is looking forward to a happy reunion on Thursday. I don't know who Else is/was and likely A.I. won't solve that one for me... at least right now.  I thought I would test A.I.'s abilities further and upload this postcard which has nary a marking describing where this...

  Just when you think you have things figured out.  You may recall that before Christmas last year, my daughter had her third dead battery in a little over two years since she has been using that vehicle for commuting to college. The last time it happened, I bought a battery from a local store and made the 90 mile drive up there to replace it. After I got it going, I drove it to the local dealership to have them do an "thorough" battery test on it only to find out $300 later that their thorough test was to hook a multimeter up to it while running, nearly identical to the one I had used earlier to do the same thing.  She made it home for the semester and then left again for the spring semester without issue. She parked her car for a month out in the parking lot and went to use it only to find out it was completely dead again. At this point, I'm confident that there is some draw being put on it that is enough to use up the battery in a few weeks time. I am not confident tha...

Seated is John Kuck, my great great great grandfather, with my great grandfather Victor on his lap and son George, my great great grandfather, standing with his hand on the shoulder of wife Elizabeth. I thought I would give you some of that backstory on why I am so terribly excited to see what pictures or other things might be revealed in the "big box of Kuck pictures" that were removed from a hoarders house and now reside somewhere in Colorado in an architectural salvage shop. When I began my family tree search over a quarter century ago, I didn't know any of the names beyond my great grandfather Victor. My grandparents didn't have much to go on further since my grandfather was just a young boy when his grandfather died and wasn't really into knowing his ancestors better. My search though soon turned up the names of George Kuck and his father John Kuck, my second and third great grandfathers. However, they were just names on a computer screen for me and would rem...

  Above is the third postcard on the first page I scanned of my great aunt Clara Kuck's postcard album and what she wrote on the back. As I alluded to in an earlier post, many of her postcards were like this and weren't actually sent through the mail or if they were, were included with a letter written to family as there are no addresses or postmarks to be seen. They appear mostly to be souvenirs or to show family members some of the sites she was seeing while in Germany. Indeed there is a postcard where she encourages her sister Bertha to save all her postcards for her upon her return. Clara Kuck was in Germany to study at Berlin University though I do not know what she studied. I also don't know the exact timing or the length of her stay though I do know she made it there sometime in 1911 and was come by early summer of 1912. To give you some context, Clara's mother had died the year before in 1910 which may have stimulated this journey to some extent. Her father John...

Back when I first was in communications with the Good Samaritan who mailed me the albums, I also reached out to contact the salvage store where they found those items. I was told that the items had been found in a house belonging to a hoarder and largely hadn't been sorted through though she was pretty sure there would be more things and that they would let me know when they were gone through. I wrote back and sent a couple pictures of the family I was interested in, John Kuck and his first two wives, hoping that they might recognize them and allow them to be separated for me to obtain at some point. They thanked me for the reference and then lapsed into silence. A couple weeks went by and I hadn't heard anything back so two things crossed my mind. First, I have done 25 years of research on this family and that is hard to transfer to a new stranger with just a few photographs. Two, at least two of the albums had already been sold to the Good Samaritan. How many other things wer...