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Fred and Lil Gartz 11-8-42 |
After my uncle died in 1990, our job had been to
clear out his house as well. He had lived with my grandparents his entire life,
so when we found my grandmother’s cedar chest in their basement, full of old
letters and photographs, we had simply moved it to my parents’ attic. We were
all young adults at that time, devoted to our emerging careers, and had no time
to mess around pondering the relics they’d left behind. Still, we had been
raised to value our family’s history, so we never considered throwing it out.
Now the day of reckoning had come. All the older
generations were gone, and we had both my grandparents’ and my parents’ stuff
to contend with. We simply hadn’t known how much they had saved.
My parents had saved all the letters they had
received from friends, dating back to the 1920s, as well as the letters they
wrote to each other from 1949-1962, when my Dad traveled extensively. These
letters recreated our lives and the history of our emerging rooming house from
a time when we were too young to form memories or know the hidden world of man
and wife.
In my grandmother’s cedar chest we discovered a
trove of nearly 300 World War II letters between my Uncle Frank, Dad’s younger
brother, and his friends and family. Taken together they comprised a history of
the War Years. The letters revealed the lives of my parents, grandparents, and
their neighbors from 1943-1945, as well as the evolution of a young eighteen
year old from a neighborhood kid into a seasoned navigator, charged, along with
his peers, of saving the world.
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Woschkeruscha Family 1901 |
I felt like Howard Carter, peering through a
chink in King Tut’s tomb. When asked if he could see anything, he responded,
“Yes! Wonderful things!”
I knew then that I had to pursue learning about
the lives of my family, to discover what lay hidden in their words, but I
couldn’t do it just then. I had little children to raise--helping with
homework, volunteering to make our schools a better place, taking on the
occasional freelance job. But someday.I swore I would.
That someday came in 2002, when both my boys
were older and more independent. I wanted to get to know the uncle whom I’d
never met, so I first hauled out the box of World War II letters. Uncle Frank’s
letters revealed a sweet, rascally, funny, and generous fellow. The biggest
surprise was my grandmother’s letters to him. Instead of the distant and aloof
grandmother I had known, her letters revealed a devoted, prayerful mother,
desperate for her son’s safety.
Since that day, I’ve pored over thousands of
pages of letters and diaries, learning first- hand about my parents’ and
grandparents’ struggles and triumphs, my parents’ courtship through Mom’s ebullient,
emotional journal entries of falling in love with my Dad.
In 2009 I found my Rosetta Stone, ninety-year
old Meta, through an ad my cousin placed for me in a newspaper for ethnic
Germans from Romania. I sent Meta copies of the old, unreadable letters and
documents my grandmother had saved since 1910, and she deciphered them into
readable German, which I could then translate to English. Maybe this was the
fateful reason I had chosen German as a major in college, although I had no
clue at the time.
Meta’s decoding opened a shuttered window, and
the past came blowing in: love letters between my grandparents; my grandfather
and grandmother’s diaries of their journeys to America, after two devastating
wars, the fate of their homeland and relatives they had left behind.
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Josef and Lisi Gartz Oct 13,1911 |
I heard their call when I first laid eyes on
those old letters and diaries back in 1994. It’s been ten years now since I was
able to answer that call. With a century’s worth of treasures, I feel I’ll
never run out of discoveries. The payoff is getting to know my parents and
grandparents in their youth, as if restored from dusty death.
Meet The Storyteller Linda Gartz
Linda cut her journalistic teeth in the television business—researching, producing, and writing documentaries that have aired nationally on CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS and have been syndicated on cable nation-wide.
Linda has published article in magazines, literary journals, and newspapers nationwide.
Linda is the Family Archaeologist, digging deep into twentieth century history as unearthed through her family’s letters, diaries, photos, and artifacts spanning more than a hundred years. Join her on a quest to uncover the joy, struggle, loss, and resilience her ancestors experienced—and the secrets revealed along the way. You may recognize some of your own family’s past in hers and learn techniques for investigating, organizing, preserving, and enjoying a genealogical treasure trove.
Linda's experience clearly displays she understands the power of storytelling. You can find her at her webpage Linda Gartz and her blog, Family Archaeologist.
Linda has published article in magazines, literary journals, and newspapers nationwide.
Linda is the Family Archaeologist, digging deep into twentieth century history as unearthed through her family’s letters, diaries, photos, and artifacts spanning more than a hundred years. Join her on a quest to uncover the joy, struggle, loss, and resilience her ancestors experienced—and the secrets revealed along the way. You may recognize some of your own family’s past in hers and learn techniques for investigating, organizing, preserving, and enjoying a genealogical treasure trove.
Linda's experience clearly displays she understands the power of storytelling. You can find her at her webpage Linda Gartz and her blog, Family Archaeologist.