People Pages
Personal Family Member Stories
One of the most interesting aspects of doing genealogy research is learning more about the people in the family tree. Throughout my research, I have come across some ancestors who might be called "characters" Some, I have known personally; some I have heard about through stories related by other family members.
As each generation passes, the stories have a tendency to get forgotten. Research can provide dates and places, sometimes a record of military service or information from court records. But, these statistical types of information have to be reassembled to get a sense of a person's life and character. It is a bonus to find an ancestor who may be a "pioneer" in some area such as medicine, exploration, commerce or art. Often their lives or character are described in some journal or newspaper article. It is the ancestor who has affected the lives of others, but who has not received printed acclamation, who needs to be recognized.
It is with that thought in mind that Family Harvest Genealogy presents stories about some of the more interesting members of our family tree. The stories are many. In addition to the personal stories on this website, others can be read on the Family Harvest Blog.
Hopefully, younger generations of the family will find in these stories an insight into both their ancestors' lives and the traditions passed down from generation to generation.
Ancestor on this page:
Katherine Gilfedder
(15 January 1881 - 20 May 1932)
Born in Ireland, Great Aunt Katherine emigrated to the United States, as did several of her brothers and sisters, around the year 1900. It was not long before she married and moved to Deerfield, MA, where she ran The Gray Parrot Inn and Tea House which she named after her treasured African Gray Parrot, "Babe". Living far from family in the western part of the state, Katherine would often invite her nieces and nephews to spend time at the inn. On one of those visits, she gave her niece, Ruth, a German-made doll with real, long, blonde hair, big blue eyes and movable joints. It was Ruth's 16th birthday which gave the doll special status in her eyes. On my 16th birthday, my mother passed "Kathleen" along to me.
