immigrant song

Just so you know, I'm unsure how much of the following is true. Once I got back beyond the 1800s, I was cross-referencing other people's research instead of using our own recorded family history. But if what I found is true, then...

Well, let me tell you about it first.

This turned out to be a lot longer tale than I thought, so I've split it into two parts. This is the first, and will concern my mother's side of the family. I'll do Pop's side tomorrow.

It never seemed wise to shell out good money to Genealogy.com or Ancestry.com merely to determine the nature of my family tree. But I desperately wanted to know. Was it a poor, malnourished wisp? Or was it an oak, a mighty, spreading growth with roots which plunged deep into Old World soil and sprouts which soared across the waters? How illustrious were the branches? Were there any famous leaves, celebrated buds? To which twigs may I claim relation? Which blossoms have awed the world, if any? What blooms have made their mark on humanity, broken molds, shattered records, defeated obscurity, ground mediocrity into the dust of ages? Who, exactly, am I? And who am I related to?

I had almost no idea. Dad was under the impression that he was 100% German, and that his ancestors (formerly called the "Von Posts") came over on the boat in the 1840s. Whispered rumor suggests I'm distantly related to the folks at Post cereals, but not closely enough to warrant an inheritance. (Bummer.)

I knew even less about my mom's family. The word on the street was that one branch emigrated from Prussia, also in the 1800s. The rest of the family was already in the States by then. That's as far back as our written genealogy goes, so it was impossible for me to know exactly where the rest of my family came from. Or it was until Ancestry.com came along.

One rainy afternoon a few weeks ago, Mom and I finally broke down, bought an account, and started poking around. The rest of what follows was gleaned using Ancestry's records. Though I made use of official records as much as possible, I had to rely on other people's family trees for the most part. I have no idea how accurate this information is, if at all. But some of the things I found were rather amazing, regardless.

My mom's family hasn't been in the country too long. Her mother's maiden name was Leitzen, and by all accounts, the Leitzens were big-boned, no-nonsense Illinois farmer folk. I don't know much about the family line beyond that. Mom's mom's mother's maiden name was Rhodes; I'm actually named after my great-great-grandmother's father, Andrew Rhodes. After him and the Leitzens, Ancestry just petered out on me. No hints, no records, nothing. Same thing with my grandpa's father's line, the Fritzes. That's about as German a surname as you can get. I can only assume that they were all emigres, early 20th or late 19th centuries, as assumed.

On mom's dad's mother's side, however, I got a little farther. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand introducing, Anders Hansen! Born in Gjerpen, Norway, June 24, eighteen-hundred and thirty-three! (P.S. WOW.) I don't know what the situation was like in Norway in 1833, nor what warranted his emigration. Maybe Anders was sick of freezing his butt off every winter. Whatever the case, he took his wife Mariah and split for the States. Upon arrival, Anders and Mariah changed their names. I'm not sure why they did this. "Hansen" seems perfectly easy to pronounce. But they changed their names anyway. They became the Sandleys. Anders also changed his name to given name to Andrew. Maybe he did it to fit in; maybe it was "fixed" by whatever passed for Ellis Island back then.

Either way, Andrew and Mariah Sandley entered the country sometime in the 1850s or 60s. Anders Hansen became the other grandfather I'm named for, Andrew Sandley. He and Mariah settled in Wisconsin and gave birth to a son, Ole Sandley, in 1870. Ole and his wife Amy (originally Amy Van Voorhis) gave birth to my great-grandmother, Ruth Sandley, in 1908. NINETEEN-OH-EIGHT. (P.S. DOUBLE-WOW.)
I actually knew her, too. She lived to the ripe old age of 99. She got that gene from her father; Ole died in 1964, at the age of 94. I can remember going to visit Ruth in Freeport, Illinois, many a time. First at her home; then at a nursing home; then at one of those rather sad places where the extremely elderly wait around to die, peeing their pants and losing their memories. She barely recognized us by the end. The last time I saw her was when I and all of my Fritz-side cousins had a big reunion at Grandpa Fritz's place. She was frail, wispy, thin as a stick, her voice faint and scratchy as an old phonograph record. Her hands were gnarled and wrinkled. But that didn't matter. I was always struck by some ineffable awe in her presence. It was the same of awe I felt in museums when I looked at well-preserved artifacts. This woman had lived almost an entire century. She had been born in 1908, the same year as Rex Harrison, Louis L'Amour, David Lean, Edward R. Murrow, Tex Avery, Ian Fleming, Mel Blanc, Milton Berle, and William Saroyan. The same year a massive asteroid exploded over Siberia. The same year Robert Peary set sail for the North Pole. The same year Henry Ford manufactured his first Model T. The same year Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were supposedly killed in Bolivia. My great-grandma Ruth was four years old when the Titanic sank. Six when World War I broke out. Twenty-one when the stock market crashed. Thirty-three when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Thirty-nine when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Sixty-one when man walked on the moon. Sixty-two when the Beatles broke up. Eighty-one when the Berlin Wall fell. Ninety-three when the Twin Towers were destroyed. This woman witnessed history. What impressed me the most about her, though, was how lucid she remained, until the very end. Her body was withering, but her mind was hale and healthy. Her voice quavered, but she spoke with conviction, intelligence, and wisdom always. I miss her a lot for only having seen her three times. And oh, the stories she told... I'll bet old Ole could have told a story or two himself.

That's your cue, Robert.