Riverbend Journal

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...

  Unidentified woman I've debated on what to write or even if to write this post for awhile but think I will proceed anyway. It is likely the last post on Clara Kuck's photo album (I'll do some posts on her postcard album coming up) for awhile anyway. The subject I wish to write about might not be for everyone and the last picture I might be appropriate for impressionable kids around. Though it isn't too graphic, I do think it is a bit risqué, especially considering it was taken around 1918 when times were much different than they are today. So without further ado: The album has 146 pages of photographs with three to five photographs per page which equals a lot photos. If you take out all the photos containing male family members or married men, which aren't numerous to start with, you are left with maybe a handful out of nearly 500 photos that contain single men and of those, none are of just one man but usually a young man among a group of females. To me this stri...

  Along with the other projects I have been working on, I have been slowly designing new bedroom furniture to replace those we still have that I bought decades ago as a young single man with not much money. They have held up well despite being cheaply made and will likely still be of service to one of our children until they start obtaining those sorts of things. Although you can't really see the joinery, it is all there, the tenons, the dadoes, the figuring out how I am going to build it.  When I was a working engineer with access to expensive software, this job was a bit easier but after retiring and losing access to said software, I spent about a decade mostly sketching things on paper in a notebook, making lots of notes and then still spending lots of head scratching while I was mid-build trying to figure things out. The end goal was usually accomplished but it wasn't a terribly efficient way to progress and mistakes inevitably get made along a way.  "The difference b...