Soon I Will Be Bringing Home A Snapshot Of Myself Article

The Kruse offspring Reunion notice arrived as it had every other year since I left home. I glanced at the vivid yellow membrane, recalling childhood memories of these potluck picnic gatherings with my cousins in the city park in Marysville, Kan. accordingly something caught my eye:

"Ken Kruse has completed the reading of Juergen Kruse's well-bred War log."

I had an ancestor in the Civil War?

As far as I knew, my entire bloodline consisted of mediocre people farmers usually. I'd seen the family tree as far back as the 1600s. Occupations, when conscious, included the sporadic wheelman, houseman or schoolteacher, but mostly they were farmers, all from tiny towns in northern Germany, all Lutheran churchgoing stock. No royalty, no excellent writers (much to my failure), no one with a connection to recorded version.

That same twilight I e-mailed the contact soul on the flier: Would it be possible to see this journal? Were there plans to dispense it to extraction members?

Here was my writer, at last!

I made a printout and comprehend every word.

From relatively the first entry, questions arose: What was "picket obligation"? What are "breastworks"? How much would $50 in 1864 be worth today?

The relative who had commissioned the decisive translation, Ken Kruse, fired back answers.

I suggested that an introduction follow the journal so others could benefit from such explanations. Then someone in my descent mentioned that I was a reporter.

You can guess the content of the next e-mail: Hey, would you write the baptism. . . . ?

Research livelihood

So two or three days after that fateful reunion flier arrived, the Juergen Kruse project had begun. And it would soon take on a energy of its own.

The data are these: In 1858 Juergen Kruse my distinguished-celebrated grandfather on my mother's side, born in Germany in 1832 immigrated to Cook County, Ill., with a younger brother, Peter, and ended up settling near Tuscola in Douglas constituency. An older companion, Henry, had immigrated earlier and lived at Blue Springs in Cook constituency.

Four years later, Juergen and Peter enlisted in the 79th Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers, assemblage B. Juergen served three years as a private and accordingly a corporal, mainly with the Army of the Cumberland. For the second half of his service, from Jan. 1, 1864, to June 25, 1865, he kept his diary.

A closer version of that agenda yielded more questions: Who was "Major Henry Thomas"? What exactly did it mean to "forage"?

Some were answered swiftly by Ken, a great-grandson of Juergen and a polite War buff who already had compiled a gradation of informational e-mails similar to Juergen's war service. For fresh questions, I turned to the Internet. Do you know how many affable War Web sites there are, each packed with more information than the next? (I didn't accordingly, but do now.)

I wrote a three-page influx to the journal, but that was just the beginning. My curiosity led me to research 31 "log Notes" explaining or enlarging on Juergen's entries. At this point, action a book became a business of serious discussion.

Questions answered

Three of the notes answered my leading questions:

"Picket job" meant serving as an advance outpost or guard for one's unit. Pickets formed a scattered path in advance of the opposition's encampment chancy work, considering their position close to the enemy, often making them targets for snipers.

"Breastworks" are a temporary, quickly constructed wall, mostly breast-piercing.

And the $50 Juergen sent home to Blue Island, Ill., to his older companion Henry, on Feb. 29, 1864? That's equivalent to about $600 today.

In acknowledgment to Juergen's lament on May 29 of that year "This Sabbath started with strong outpost fighting anew. It is barbarous to start the Sabbath that way and to end the day still fighting" I included the complete topic of President Lincoln's natural order of November 1862 "respecting the observance of the Sabbath day in the battalion."

When Juergen conspicuous on April 15, 1865, that Lincoln had been ammunition and killed the day before, I provided more details about the assassination.

And on and on.

That last entry led me to wonder how Juergen heard so quickly about such news events. The result, for the book, was a separate justification on the role of the telegraph in the urbane War. (Fact: Some 15,000 miles of telegraph lines were built those years just for military purposes.)

Flow of information

As time went on, illumination started coming to me. One old relative (Elvira Kruse, the widow of a grandson) sent photocopies of Juergen's military payment records, as well as a chronology of his war service compiled by another offspring. Yet another relative prepared Juergen's writing in a script font on stationery with a scene landscape; we used it in color in the book.

Someone suggested we repeat the postwar history and lineage tree charts from an eight-page booklet written in 1953 by the widower of Juergen's youngest daughter. That account chronicled Juergen's marriage to Anna Juergens in 1866, the births of all 11 children (including two who died in infancy) and the people's moves from Illinois to Nebraska and finally to Kansas.

I asked about pictures. A great-granddaughter-in-law, Pat Kruse, removed the original 140-year-old agenda from the innocent deposit box where it was body kept, took photographs, scanned them into her computer and onto a CD and mailed it to me. She did the same with the vibrant marriage certificate and varied photos of the progeny homes in Illinois and Kansas. A snapshot of the Illinois homestead, I conspicuous, was taken by my great-grandmother Mary (Kruse) Lohse in 1920, when she and my great-grandfather traveled there to see the place where she had been born.

Later CDs included pictures of gravestones from Illinois of the infant daughters who had died, photos of Juergen and Anna and their family, and an notion of the deed to the Nebraska land, complete with prices paid and collected.

Ken, the Civil War buff, e-mailed me Library of conference photos of battle sites mentioned by Juergen, a sketch of the consign that carried Juergen and Peter to America, and maps he had prepared of Juergen's war routes, year by year.

I seemed to be living the historian's translation of the family recital "Stone Soup." You appreciate: Put some water on to boil and soon everyone is bringing ingredients to throw in the pot.

High-tech story

A account major (as well as journalism) in college, I had eternally been interested in ancestry. E-mail, the Internet and the computer made this project possible and relatively painless.

I was amazed to perceive all I could do using just Microsoft Word and Excel. Photos could be opened in Paint for cropping, again copied and pasted into the Word deed. There, I could reduce or increase the contrast, lighten or darken, re-size, and position the images on the page. outdo spreadsheets, meanwhile, made readable kin tree charts credible, using the landscape format.

The hardest part was not preparing the 110 pages of words and images. It was verdict a presentable printer.

I pedantic one salient reading early on: Microsoft Word is not a printing program.

The first printer we contacted said no acknowledge you, he wouldn't touch it. The next said a PDF file would enable him to print the credentials as it was. A free 30-day trial download of Adobe allowed me to convert my Word deed into a PDF file. But again a miscommunication with the second printer and a series of changing cost estimates (not in our favor) had us looking repeatedly.

We wanted hard cover, we wanted some color. We didn't want to compromise. But we also couldn't exhaust so much that no one in the family could furnish to order the books.

We ended up with a separate printer and book binder that I found by word of mouth, both in Waukesha constituency.

Alas, my PDF file was flawed. Unfortunately, my 30-day free Adobe trial had expired. favorably, this new printer was able to realize the obligatory adjustments with one 20-minute phone call and a direct connection to my desktop.

Less than a month later, the books were done.

Seeing them, enclosed in their navy blue leather-look cover with gold lettering, with their 38 photos and graphics and 10 pages of full color, was substantial reward for nine months of work and a cost of just under $15 per book. (Another relative generously fronted the creation money.)

"Juergen Kruse: Immigrant, Soldier, Farmer, progeny Man" won't be a bestseller, and it's in no way intentional for a plurality market. Only his descendants will care enough to find it deeply serious. But care we do. I bought multiple copies for myself and my three college daughters (including extras for a next reproduction), as well as copies for my nephews and a cousin. We expect others will do the consistent.

In actuality, we hope 350 copies will be enough. (At last wild count, there were more than 500 living descendants.)

I tried to imagine what Juergen himself would say about this whisper of immortality. clever so many kindred Kansas farm folk as I do, I'm guessing it would be something like "Ach, I was just doing my duty" or "I was just performance my best to making a living off the land and raise my children."

He might admit that as a fighter he was lucky, having missed two or three bloody battles due to minor ailment including one battle in which his companion Peter rapt the use of an eye, leading to an early discharge.

Juergen apparently would be most proud that the mammoth blood he had spawned had worked so cooperatively to retain his bequest. The book was truly a collaborative exertion, with not a solitary divisive or ego-centered jiffy.

For myself, peering through the microscope at this one man's activity reinforced the heritage of a stout work ethic, sense of duty and everyday communion embedded in my genes. It likewise made me wish I knew as much about my other family lines. After all, Juergen and Anna are, for me, just one set of eight pairs of great-great-grandparents.

Preparing the kin tree charts, I was struck by how many ancestors' lives had been reduced to a single name, and perhaps a date, on a lineage lineage spreadsheet. A couple of words to represent a life.

At least that won't be the luck for Juergen.

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ONLINE CHAT

mix Nancy Stohs for an interactive chat about the making of the Juergen Kruse profile and related kin history topics at noon Wednesday. Visit .com/chat.

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Nancy Stohs is the Journal Sentinel's food editor.