Some Backstory

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 remain that way for many many years.

Eventually, I found a picture of my great great grandfather George among some things my grandparents gave me and to this day, it is the only picture I have of him that is physically in my possession. According to my grandparents, when my great grandfather decided to move from Iowa to Florida after his retirement, they loaded all their possessions into two semis that were supposed to meet them down there, one holding basic essentials necessary for setting up a home and a second full of family possessions that had been passed down to them. When they arrived in Florida at their new retirement "home" in Fort Myers, it actually was a trailer in a park full of them, only one semi ever showed up. The other one, the one containing all those family possessions like inherited antiques and photographs, never showed up. It was never located either. My grandparents said that this was the reason my grandfather never had anything of ancestral value from his family.

Years later, maybe 15 or more years at this point, I got in touch with a fellow ancestry junkie like myself that was a direct descendant from John Kuck's younger brother Frederick. We traded some information back and forth and developed sort of a family relationship of distant cousins. Maybe a year later, she was traveling from the west coast where she lived back to Iowa and stopped by for a visit. She brought a handful of copies of photos in her possession including a couple of John and one of my great great grandfather George. Every picture of John was new and thus very precious to me. The picture of George was a three generation type photo with John, himself and my great grandfather George. That is the picture at the top of this post and the one I adore the most.

However, compared to most other branches of my family tree, I have hardly any pictures in comparison even with those I got from my distant cousin. Thus I have spent a large amount of time tracking down various surviving branches of the family tree, trying to figure out if any more exist. George had one brother and I tracked down those descendants of his to southern California. After many years of trying to get in touch, I finally had one return an email last year and it turned out to be a dead end. Her Grandmother Kuck had died in a car accident when she was young and they didn't know anything about her family nor knew of any possessions that anyone had. It was my first dead end. The other five siblings of George and brother Henry died of diphtheria as children so they were all dead ends too. 

John remarried and had three more children, of which Clara whom you all know about now, was one of them. She never had children but she had an older sister and a younger brother. Clara's sister did have a single child who would have two children, who at least one had several children and grandkids still alive, but I was never really able to track them down. Clara's brother Paul also had a family that still survives to this day and I did track some of them down but like the other branch, they just didn't know much about the family or had any pictures of this line. I was not surprised as based from my experience, males typically don't end up with such items. It is usually the oldest or youngest female in the family that become the keepers of family pictures.

This would point to to Clara's older sister Bertha since she is the only female descendant of John Kuck who had living descendants to this day. But there is a catch. Bertha's mother also died at a young age much like John's first wife did and he would get married a third time. The third wife brought two surviving children from her previous marriage to her marriage to John, one of them also female. By the time John died, all his children from the first two marriages were grown and living lives of their own in different cities and states. The only children living in his house were the two step children from his third marriage. Then as I have mentioned before, John died intestate without a will and my great great grandfather likely tried to pull a fast one so his estate ended up in the courts and got sold and divided by court orders. 

Who ended up with the family pictures?

That is a question that I still don't know the answer too but am very hopeful that they descended through his daughter Bertha from his second wife and thus to one of her many descendants, hopefully the one that ended up as a hoarder in whose house where the Store Owner found them and realized the value of so they didn't end up in a landfill as they likely would have had someone else found them. If this turns out to be true, this would literally be the find of my lifetime and possibly overcome the loss of a bunch of pictures in some semi that never made it down to Fort Myers, Florida.