Riverbend Journal

  Back before we left for Colorado, the weather was just getting nice to where I could work in the garage whenever I had time and there were even a couple days where it got warm enough to glue which required a full 8 hours or so of above 50 F degree weather. So I got to cracking on the bookcase project by cutting out the various parts, all of which you can see on my workbench above. You can even see some of the beginnings of the joinery work started with the slots cut into the boards on the left.  There are different levels of woodworking like most hobbies I suppose. One can use joinery techniques that will definitely get the job done but may not hold up for hundreds of years or one can go all out and build something that might last hundreds of years but at the expense of more time. I chose the first route on this project with my choice of mostly using dominos to join things together.  By using dominos, which are wooden domino shaped pieces of wood, inserted into the slot...

  No deep dive with this post into what I am seeing in these post card pictures though I have no doubt I could spend hours doing so. I just selected these as being interesting street scenes with incredible detail and a delight for my eyes to look out when enlarged. Hopefully you might enjoy them too.

  I won't bore you with all the details but thought I would show you a few pictures from our recent Spring Break trip. On the drive out to Colorado Springs, we stopped in Victoria, Kansas to stretch our legs and to walk through the "Cathedral of the Plains" known formally as the Basilica of St. Fidelis. I always enjoy the opportunity to look at fantastic architecture while getting blood circulation in my lower extremities flowing again. Before stopping for the night, we visited perhaps the biggest Van Gogh painting and easel in the world in a small part in Goodland, Kansas. You can see my car parked behind it to the left.  Due to the heavy winds I wrote about previously and the poor driving conditions, we didn't do much on Sunday after we checked into our AirBnB other than do so shopping for breakfast making supplies. The following day we of course drove down to Florence to visit the salvage shop and pick up the Clara Kuck related items. Little did we know Florence is...

  While driving out to Colorado Springs was a lot of driving, 12 hours each way, it wasn't dull and boring. I had my phone packed full of podcasts so I could listen to them but mother nature also provided some entertainment as you will see in the above clips I took from the factory dashcam that came on my newest vehicle.  We purposely left late and drove only about 9 hours the first day and I wish now we had driven more. The second day we only had 3 hours left to drive on paper but it probably took closer to 5 when all was said and done due to mother nature. In the middle of the night I woke up and could feel my motel bed shaking up on the fourth floor of the motel. I thought it might be my wife until I got up to use the bathroom and saw the water in the toilet bowl sloshing back and forth. Then I knew it was the wind and it must be howling. Several hours later when we exited the motel, I knew for certain it was the wind because I had to use most of my strength to open up the ...

Although this shows the results of day three of our spring break trip to Colorado Springs, I knew most of my usual readers were probably most interested in this particular day. I was able to find the salvage shop and met Erin the owner soon after she opened for the day. She had prepped for my arrival as well and had an empty table in the back of her shop where she brought all the boxes of things she had sorted out for me and allowed me to sort though those things to see what I might like to keep. It was a lot of stuff to sort though and in the hour the four of us (my wife and kids were with me), we still barely skimmed through most of it. I decided the safest option was to just take everything and made that offer to Erin. She had done her homework too though and evidently there were a couple of first editions books in a box of books that had hand written inscriptions on the inside covers that were likely worth some money. We didn't discuss value but I knew she was in the business o...

  I started this post in early February when I screen grabbed the above shot off of Google Street View knowing that sometime in March, I would likely be there in person when I got word. My plan then had always been a sprint to just drive there, retrieve the other boxes and albums of the Kuck family (and descendants) and drive right back. But with spring break a couple weeks away (as I put the finishing touches on this post) and no real destination in mind, the thought of perhaps combining the two and making for a more leisurely drive came to mind. I wrote the store owner, definitely not pressuring them to be done sorting by then, and telling them that if this timing worked out to let me know. They wrote back saying it would be perfect and so the planning began. As you read this, later this morning I will be at the shop pictured above, located in Florence Colorado, and hopefully retrieving the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in genealogical research. Of particular interest to ...

March 2nd was overcast and kind of chilly out. The high for the day was only in the upper 40's. It certainly wasn't as nice as the last week of February when the temperatures were in the upper 60's. The forecast tipped our hand though with the next 10 days having chances of rain on all of them. So we decided to use that opportunity to start our garden for the year. My thought was that it was a bit early but worth a chance and the cost of seeds was largely insignificant compared to the labor which is essentially free these days as we had nothing better to do. So I got the tiller fired up, a job in itself for the first time since we have owned it, and was able to till the entire garden. It worked up so nicely, by far the nicest looking soil since we started this process a few years ago. The heavy mulching is starting to build up the organic matter so it is no longer chunks of clay and now feels quite loamy to the touch. I went ahead and worked the entire garden at least down ...

  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...