Riverbend Journal

Unknown perhaps no longer? Not long ago, I discovered this photo in a folder I had designated as unknown. That folder was a subfolder of pictures that I had inherited from my grandmother so I knew any answer as to the identify of the house or the people was likely to be found somewhere along her line. So I started clicking through folders of pictures along her line and maybe 15 minutes after starting, I got my first major clue. This is a picture of my great great grandparents, my grandfather in the light suit jacket and my great uncle in the dark coat and hat. They are standing in front of the same house though the trim and railing cap have been repainted with white paint versus the dark paint in the photo above. So immediately my mind turns to the possibility that the first photo is of my great great grandparents along with my great grandmother and her older brother. Above is a picture of my great grandmother and her older brother Clay. Clay looks very similar to the boy sitting in th...

  Perhaps you might remember a close up of this picture in a blog post that I recently wrote about trying to track down the original from a descendant who wrote the book that it is in? It is a picture of Albert Frederick Buchholz and wife Amanda Jane Thomas Buckholz, which I wrote about in a blog post close to five years ago . Well I am happy to say that persistence paid off and in a big way. Not only did I get a copy of the original picture, I got 17 more photos of this family. I feel like I won the lottery! Albert and Amanda Thomas Buchholz - 5 Sep 1902 For reference, Frederick Albert Ludwig Buchholz, who went by Albert or by A.F. most of his life, is my 3rd great grandfather and is one of my original immigrants from Germany along this line. He immigrated as an 18 year old young man with his parents so I don't know if it is proper to call them the original immigrant or Albert, but I guess I have always tended to side with the youngest of the family to make the journey. They immi...

It was tough finding a solution about protecting the farm through generations as a whole and we spent all of last winter going back and forth on various ideas before we finally came to something we could all agree upon. In order to complete our idea though, we were going to have to involve others more specialized in their knowledge base than we were and that would take time. As of this writing, we are 90% of the way there and hopefully in a month, we will have completed something that will better the world we all leave behind and leave a bit of a legacy. In short, the first half of our solution was to create a trust into which we put all of the farm. By doing so, it ensures that the land will all stay together and per our wishes, never be broken up and sold at least during our lifetimes. However, tax bills are still due and succeeding generations will still have the ability to dissolve the trust and sell it off when the hassle of maintaining it becomes not worth any potential income an...

Such is probably the circle of life, growing up I never thought about my legacy. When you are young, death is an abstract concept. But as I get older and death goes from abstract concept to a certainty with a ticking clock, it starts to fill up more of my idle thinking. What do I want the world to look like when I am gone? I grew up on a farm and for the most part, know nearly every inch of it well because I spent time on every inch of it turning seeds in the soil into a crop that could be sold for money to pay the bills. After I left the farm for a career in engineering, the farm continued to grow so I don't know some of the newer parts like I do the original parts, but it feels like a home to me. For those on the outside, it is a piece of dirt that grows crops on it during the summer but for me, it is decades of my life and the memories that we made on that land.  So it was a bit of relief and not much of a surprise when my parents told me that they planned to give us the land so...

John as I always envision him  John would have been 80 today and meant so much to me that I thought I would write a bit about him for a special post. I first heard John before I met him. My dad, a hard working farmer who rarely spent time indoors when I was awake, would often play John's record on a rainy day when farming wasn't feasible or perhaps a Sunday when we were taking the day off. Thus it is no surprise that when I play record, now in digitized form, I do so most often on those rainy days or as a bonus, rainy Sunday afternoons. Hearing his raspy voice has always soothed my soul and brought me a bit of peace. I always thought of John as sort of a private family thing. I had never met anyone in my life growing up that knew of him. That changed on one vacation when I was looking through our host family's CD collection and found an album of John's that I had never heard. I asked if I could play it and they agreed, even singing along to some of the songs and sort of...