The 2004 Guelff Genealogical Expedition: Family Bible

Family Bible records are cool in many ways. First, they often record an event at the time it happened by a person who was there, frequently the person involved in the event (except for death, I suppose). Second, people generally do not type on the pages of a Family Bible, so you get to see handwriting exemplars for one or more people over time. Usually, the writer is the husband or wife, and you can figure out which is which by careful study of the handwriting for the first entry of death. [Hint: The death entry is (probably) in the hand of the surviving spouse. I say probably because of the nagging possibility that some prescient ancestor may have decided to pre-record his/her demise.] Third, they generally have pretty colorful pages, sort of illuminated manuscripts that shed light on family history.

For all of these reasons, I was very happy when Pamala Clark, a distant cousin and descendant of the Marquette Michigan Guelffs, happened upon this website or a post on a genealogy message board, and generously made available photos of pages from her Family Bible. Some of those pages might tell us a little about what the Guelff brothers were doing when they posed together, and a few other things of interest.

Mike and Mary Guelff, according to the "Marriages" page above, were married on the 22th [sic] of June 1879. We also get the bonus that "Louis and Anne Bertrand Guelff were married the 20th day of January 1918 at 8:00 a.m." Interesting time of the day to get married. Wonder if a justice of the peace was involved?  This is a teaser question. Cousin Pamela has assured me that "there were no shenanigans."  You can also see that the hand that begins the 1918 entry does not finish it. We see a generational transition here of the person who makes the entry, maybe a torch pass from a parent to a child.

Let's look at another record and see how we can make it talk to us, as though we were sitting in the same living room and having a chat. The "Deaths" page tells us, very succinctly, that "Mary Anna Guelff died the 24th of January 1884." Compare the script to the marriage entry and you will see it is by the same hand. Now look at the entry "Mike Guelff died March 5, 1918." What do you think? Did Mike Guelff begin the entry for the marriage of Louis and Anne in January of the same year? Did his impending death have anything to do with the time of day? Does the Marriage Certification below (probably not a page from the bible) help answer any of these questions? Maybe not, but it does give us the name of a church, St. John's in Marquette, where we will probably find quite a few more records if we contact the diocese or take a genealogical excursion to Marquette.


The Family Bible contains another page that gives us more information contemporaneously recorded. That page lists the births in the family, at least in the first generation of record keepers, and also gives greater detail on the Bertrand line of the marriage. The page is not titled "Births", as one would expect, but rather "Memoranda". The page has seen better days, as it has a yellowing tape repair. In a round about way this brings us back to the first page and the first entry above. "Peter and _____ Gray were joined in the holy bonds of Matrimony on the 6th day of July in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty nine." No mention of any other Gray appears on any other page. Who were they? What relationship do they have to the Guelff-Bertrand family?

As it turns out, probably no relationship at all. Peter Gray was probably the first owner of the bible, but did not live long enough to put it to good use, or if he did use it, then only the page for "Births" which may not have survived. Hence, the resort to the "Memoranda" section for the Guelff births and the Bertrand ancestor entries.

You may have a better explanation. If you do, please let me know. The sleuthing always improves when there is a posse in pursuit of the prize.

So we note from the "Memoranda" with the superimposed cursive "Children" that the marriage was blessed with 11 of the little rascals, one about every two years. The first, Eva, making her debut on 11 October 1880 and the last Leo Theodore on 18 May 1905. That's 25 years of hard labor, but fairly typical for the time. Remember, his brother -- the Michael Guelff married to Anna Grein who lived in Eden Valley, Minnesota -- sired 14 children for which we have records. Sibling rivalry?

I find the second birth entry interesting: "Louis Guelff born the 26th of Marz 1882." Doubtful that the entries in this hand were made by a native French speaker, so probably not by a Bertrand ancestor. So my preliminary conclusion from all of this: Michael or Michel Guelff of the Marquette Michigan branch acted as the primary record keeper. But it could be that Mary Bessing, the wife of Michel, also spoke and wrote German. So the attribution of authorship remains a working hypothesis.

I also thought it likely that all of the Bertrand entries were made by the same person, the same day, some time after 1957, the death date for Joseph Bertrand. Evidence: consistency of style, format, ink and type of pen. Cousin Pamela has confirmed that her mother, Mary Anne Guelff Peterson, faithfully recorded dates and events in their bible. She also brought to my attention that "both great grandparents [Michael and Mary Bessing] hailed from Guelph Belgium/Germany (depending on where the line was drawn that year)." Her grandmother Mary Bertrand was French by way of Canada. When she married Louis Guelff, three languages were spoken -- French and German at home and English outside the house. As Cousin Pamela tells it, "'We are American,' Grandpa would say." That three word sentence tells a powerful story of assimilation, but also a powerful story of severance from the old world and the loss of old world languages.

THE 2004 GUELFF GENEALOGICAL EXPEDITION: BORN IN EDEN VALLEY

I first came across a copy of this photo in one of many envelops of loose photos kept in a shoebox in my mother's closet. That version of the photo had nothing written on it. I first saw this version of the photo in July 2004 when visiting my Uncle Richard Christle in Rapid City, South Dakota at the end of the 2004 Genealogical Expedition. Uncle Richard was 95 at the time and had just returned home from having an operation. We saw him again last year on the occasion of his 100th birthday. He is still mentally sharp but has lost a little mobility.

The photo was displayed in an oval cardboard cut out in a frame that was hung from the wall in the living room. Nothing in the house had changed location since the death of Aunt Lucille Bell Christle in late 1983. I noticed the photo and asked Uncle Richard about it. He said it was something Aunt Lucille had bought at a store.  She had never gotten around to replacing the picture that came with the frame. He thought maybe she liked the look of the children and just decided to keep it the way she bought it.

I told him that the group looked familiar. If he wouldn't mind, I would like to take it out of the frame to see if there was anything that might identify them. Lo and behold! Scriveners at work again!

On the face of it, the block capitals could be in the hand of either my mother or Aunt Lucille.  Many of Aunt Lucille's photos, along with most of their belongings, perished in the deadly Black Hills flash flood. A dam burst and washed away their home on the banks of Rapid Creek on June 9, 1972.   More fortunate than the 200 who died, they got out and away just a few minutes ahead of the wall of water.

After the flood, my mother and others sent copies of photos to replace those that were lost. This may have been one of them. On the front of this photo, six of the Guelff children are identified, the younger ones perhaps not yet borne.  Turn it over, sure enough, it looks like Grandma Bell provided some dates and names, but this maybe not as though pasted on the backs of the subjects.   If that were the case, then the front and back names do not match.  The name assignments on the front clearly correspond to the relative ages of the children.  Elizabeth, sitting on the left, is three years older than Regina, sitting on the right.  Elizabeth's feet reach the floor, Regina's do not.  Nick, on standing on the right, is one year older than John Albert, standing on the left.

THE 2004 GUELFF GENEALOGICAL EXPEDITION: FAMILY ALBUMS

Grandma Bell (Elizabeth Guelff Bell) had a fine sense of order in everything about her house and everything in it. Things had a place, and they always returned to it. To my delight, as an amateur genealogist, this sense of order applied to family records, in particular to photographs. Her distinctive style, which I noticed and learned to appreciate early on, consisted of writing names on the photo. Usually the names were written on the back as though they were pasted to the back of the head of the person appearing on the front.

My mother and my Aunt Lucille had a shared habit, which I liked and appreciated less, when archiving photos -- they glued the photos to the black paper used in photo albums until more sophisticated systems came into vogue in the second half of the 20th Century. Granted, the LaPage system (my coining after a type of paper glue used in my kindergarten days) kept the photos in the album. In that aspect, the LaPage system had it all over the little paper corner clip devices that were frequently all the remained in an album to define, like a faded footprint, a photo treasure that had slipped its tethers and gone galloping into the sunset.

In any event, being sensitive to the predilections of my predecessors (or antics of my ancestors, if you prefer), I never left a LaPage unturned for fear of missing an important clue. By way of example, you see below one of the iconic Guelff group shots of the first generation. This photo has turned up in several locations, but not always annotated. On the front, you see handwritten in block capitals "GRANDFATHER" and in script "Mike Guelff." I think the block capitals were added at a later time by mother, Doris Bell Holzworth.  Sister PJ agrees, and I generally defer to her superior detective skills.  I think the script is probably also in Mom's hand, because writing on the front of a photo seems a little untidy for Grandma Bell and the "Mike" seems a little informal or more likely to be used for her brother than her father. 

Now, in order to turn the LePage, I had to carefully lift up the photo so that the felt-like album paper would come apart without the photo tearing. You see the black debris that remains stuck to the photo. Sure enough, names are written in the back in Grandma's unmistakably clear cursive hand. Keeping in mind her sense of order, she names on their backs Brother Mishel or Michel (a Dutch or French variation of Michael) who sits in front, with my Great Grandfather Michael standing to his left and Great Grand Uncle John (also "Jean") standing to his right.

Oh, so you want to know about that messy note in the middle and the three arrows?  I confess, I did it. Future sleuths may come across the photo, so I put in the arrows and initialed the note so they can tell who presumed to identify the "E. Bell notes." Also, I think it is kind of cool to have three generations of scribbling on the same page, but most serious genealogists would probably be appalled. Anyway, if you don't like it, just photo shop it out and put in your own imprimatur.

Now my sister would say, you do not really need the last name tag to know that these three are closely related Guelff brothers. Just look at the ears, her preferred method of proof positive identification. I wonder if she perfected this technique by close study of wanted posters in the Post Office?

One other valuable piece of information was kindly added by the photographer -- Werner of Marquette, Michigan. They appear to be dressed in their Sunday best, and are posing with standard indicia of prosperity -- watch chains (presumably with watches attached), cigars and waist coats.

The question, not yet answered: what brought the three brother together in Marquette on the occasion of this photo? Could it have been the wedding of Michael and Anna?

The 2004 Guelff Genealogical Expedition: Dear Mrs. Neidermeier

I found in my Mom's shoebox, an original handwritten letter in blue ballpoint from Pierre Guelff addressed to Dear Mrs. Neidermeir.  Who is she?  Are we related?  Why is she writing to Pierre Guelff, whoever he is?  Why does my mother have the original letter, which includes an almost indecipherable family tree?  The contents of this letter, set out below, lead to the formulation of my unified Guelff theory, i.e. if your last name is Guelff and you live in the United States, then your ancestors came from Guelff near Habergy Belgium and we are related. The following transcription of the letter is exact with no effort to correct grammar, spelling or omited words.

"Dear Mrs. Neidermeier,

First, please excuse myself, for perhaps not getting the spelling on your name correct. I took it off the letter as best I could. Too please excuse my delay in answering your letter. I have wanted to write you because I know how you must feel concerning getting my info regardign the Guelff family. Lord knows I written, travelled, scoured many documents in order to likewise find out a bit more. I can truthfully say I am probably as much as anyone on the Guelff clan. [s

Now to sorta set the pictures for you a bit more.

My name is Pierre Guelff, born in Paris France July 9. -- 1918. My Mother & Father, both living in Redondo Beach, Cal. -- where they moved in 1920 from over here. I'm presently stationed in France. My folks are in their 70's. My only brother, Roger Maurice Guelff, born in 1907, lives in Pales Verdes Estates, Cal.

My father Ferdinand Jean Joseph Guelff was born in Belgium the youngest of 6 brothers -- one Elysee Guelff lives in Redondo Beach, Cal. The other Leon Guelff is in Charleroi, Bel. Other brothers included Henri, Ernest and Alfred. I will also include their background info on another page.

My father knew that he came from a town near Ailon (Bel.) a small town in the corner of Luxembourg, France & Bel. So in Nov. 1954 we my wife (Naomi Kennedy Guelff and 3 children Barbara Diane, Richard Kennedy & Nancy Jean drove from the village of Viville near Paris to Belg. & went to the town of Bonnert. We spent awhile looking into records & followed the family back to 1812, when all records not available, having been destroyed by some character named Napoleon.

The city hall official asked if we would like to see the old villa which the family owned. We drove to the house, a huge one by the standards of the local village.

We enjoyed looking thru the place which housed many, years ago, quite possible your relatives.

Back to the record we found that they agreed with hazy information which my dad & his brothers remember, that at one time the grandfather died young, & shortly thereafter the grandmother, leaving the children in care of a guardian, who walked away with the family fortune, which wasn't fabulous, but they were well off, having three servants.

As you note from the family tree we probably aren't close relatives, but it may well be: Guelff not being an ordinary name, that somewhere at the turn of the century 1800, that your stem of the family may have joined mine. I was interested in the family crest, but to no avail.

Pierre H."

The letter must have been written sometime after the 1954 date for the trip to Bonnert, Belgium described in the letter.  Names appear on the back of page 1 of the family tree sketch, probably in the writing of Elizabeth Guelff Bell (1892-1962).  These are various "branches" of Guelff families known to be related.  There is also some helpful information that will lead to identifying Mrs. Neidermeir, who is probably "Mary Neidermeir, 5546 West Philip Place, Milwaukee 16, Wis." The "Austin Branch", referring to Austin in Mower County, Minn. lists "John Guelff/Mary Laerfly" and children "John, Helen, Betty Lou" with "Mason City, Iowa" following the note.   Listed immediately below: "Kate McMichael" followed by "Albert Lee, Minn."

Also an address for "Cdr. P.H. Guelff, Hg. U.S. Eurcom/MAD, H.P.O 128 N.Y."

THE 2004 GUELFF GENEALOGICAL EXPEDITION: GREAT UNCLE MIKE'S ACCOUNT

Not too long after sifting through Mom's shoebox, I realized that her notes and her sketch were based, at least in part, on recollections of Great Uncle Mike Guelff.  These were published in the Dawson County Ranger-Review under the heading of "As I Remember ...".  Later, they were reprinted in a book entitled "As I Remember ... Stories of Eastern Montana's Pioneers" as told to Mrs. Morris (Gladys Mullet) Kauffman, Sweetgrass Books (2006).  A shorter version appeared in a 1989 Montana Centennial yearbook "Our Times Our Lives" published by the Dawson County Tree Branches in Glendive Montana.    Great Uncle Mike's daughter, Marguerite (Guelff) Reed wrote the Dawson County piece.

The entry, appearing at pages 555 and 556 is entitled "Anna and Michael Guelff and Peter and Marie Russ."  The account follows, with my notes inserted in brackets.  In future postings, most of the questions raised in the notes will be resolved.

"Sometime in the 1870s, my grandparents, Anna Grein and Michael Guelff left Luxembourg, Belgium. [Luxembourg and Belgium are two different countries and had different boundaries in the 19th Century than they do today.] Their parents, along with relatives and friends came to this country in a sailboat. They were on the ocean three months. [Three months to cross the Atlantic in 1870 is a long time, even if they came in a sailboat.]  The Guelffs were from the village of Guelff, and the Greins were from Habergy. [Both Habergy and Guelff are within the present boundaries of Belgium, but are near Luxembourg.] They settled in Minnesota where they had relatives. [Indicates that some relatives had preceded the Greins to Minnesota. Who were they and where did they settle?]

"In 1889, my grandmother, Marie Hafele, and her brother Alois left Stuttgart, Germany, to join relatives in Brewster, Minnesota. [Stuttgart is in the Wuertemburg region of present day Germany. Very good emigration records and church records were kept from the 17th Century.  Point of departure, point of destination and Catholic ancestors should make research on the Hafele line relatively easy.] Their parents and sister stayed behind in Germany.

My grandfather Peter Russ was from Woodhall, Wisconsin. [NOTE: Russ is not said to be on the same ship with Anna and Mike.] He met and married Marie Hafele in Minnesota. [NOTE: Where in Minnesota? How did they meet?] They had one daughter, Florence. [One census record indicates that Florence was adopted.]

Michael Guelff and Anna Grein were married in Minnesota. [Where? When?] They had 14 children, of whom my father, Michael, was eighth in order of birth. Both families settled near Eden Valley, Minnesota, and became good friends.

In 1905, after the death of her husband, Anna Guelff and Pete Russ came to Montana and filed on adjoining homesteads near Yates, Montana. [NOTE: Mom's sketch placed Yates in North Dakota. Montana is the correct state.] Pete stayed out west and built homestead shacks for the two families. [Implies that Anna returned immediately to Eden Valley.] He also built a store in Beach, North Dakota. [Who owned and operated the store? Russ? Anna? Both?]

April 6, 1906, Mrs. Russ, Florence, and the Guelff children arrived in Beach, North Dakota. Young Michael rode alone in the immigrant car. He was only 12 years old. Mrs. Guelff stayed in Eden Valley until she had all her affairs settled. Pete Russ farmed on the homestead, and Mrs. Russ and Florence took care of the store in Beach. [Appears that the families decided to leave Eden Valley almost immediately after Michael Guelff's death.]

Because they were leaving for the West, Michael and Florence had been allowed to make their first Holy Communion ahead of their class. Mrs. Guelff said she had seen this happen only once before in Luxembourg. [Check Catholic Church records in Eden Valley for communions.]

Michael and Florence Guelff were married in 1912 in Wibaux, Montana. Wibaux was in Dawson County at that time. [Check Dawson County marriage register for date.]

In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Russ moved to a farm near Glendive. It was across the road from Alois Hafele and his family, who had moved to Montana in 1909. Their farms were on the north Pleasant View Road.

Anna Guelff eventually married Fred Grote, who came west for his health. [NOTE: No family?] He homesteaded near Brockway, Montana. The thing I remember about that place was the sod house. It had wooden floors, and I think it had two rooms. My aunts said it was always cool in summer and warm in winter. They lived at Brockway until they decided to go back to Underwood, Iowa, where Mr. Grote was from. [Was he also a Luxembourger, the term used for immigrants from both Belgium and Luxembourg in the area near France? Many settled in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.]"

The longer account in "As I Remember...", as told to Mrs. Morris (Gladys Mullet) Kauffman first appeared in the September 1966 Ranger-Review when Uncle Mike was still alive. Some parts of the Ranger-Review account shed additional light on the shorter Centennial account. Those excepts from Vol. I, 328-334 follow.

"In the fall of 1905 Mrs. Guelff and a neighbor, Mr. Russ, had made the trip West to file on homesteads, then the next spring they loaded immigrant cars and made the move. Mr. Russ loaded two immigrant cars and made the move. Mr. Russ loaded two imigrant cars, Guelffs one, and the 'men' started for the new land." From this it appears that Great Uncle Mike did not make the trip alone at the age of twelve.

"The homestead was located in Montana, but they unloaded their cars at Beach, the nearest railroad station. They arrived there at night May 20, 1906, and when daylight came so they couldlook out, they saw about twenty immigrant cars unloading along the tracks.

There were no buildings where goods could be stored so each immigrant was allotted a 'spot' then length of the car to pile his goods. Mike's mother's sister [his aunt] was living near Beach. She had come to the Treasure Srare in 1904, and it was her influence that was responsible for Guelffs moving. After they unloaded the car they hauled their possessions out to her place until they could build a shack on their own homestead."

The Dawson Ranger-Review provides a vivid account of the first year in Montana which included unusually heavy rains in a region seldom getting more than 10 inches a year, most of it in the form of snowfall. Peter Russ owned the store in Beach, and the Russ family lived above the store. The nine Guelff children and Anna lived with her sister's family on their homestead until a shack could be built, a well dug and crops planted. "Getting the shack built turned out to be no overnight job. They were hardly in this dry country before they found that it can rain in Montana. It rained and kept on raining for almost six weeks. Mike's eighteen-year-old brother came to helpthem get a house buit, but progress was slow with the weather so uncooperative." [The older brother would have been Nicolas Lorenz Guelf (1886-1921).]

Both accounts reflect, matter of factly, an enormous amount of grit and tenacity in the face of troubles that might even have shaken the faith of Job. They also reflect the "social safety net" of the extended family first leaping the pond from Belgium to Eden Valley and then to frontier on Eastern, Montana. What made them take the first step? Would they have done it if there was not family already established in Minnesota? And would they have done it again without family already established in Eastern Montana?

Next: Letters from Belgium cousins.

THE 2004 GUELFF GENEALOGICAL EXPEDITION: CLUES AND QUESTIONS

THE 2004 GUELFF GENEALOGICAL EXPEDITION: CLUES AND QUESTIONS

You never really know what you will find out about your family when you start asking questions, or better yet, fact checking the answers that you get or the stories that you hear. You also just might find out something about yourself in the process. Such was the case in the 2004 Guelff Genealogical Expedition.

My grandmother’s notes, some family stories and a letter written by a distant relative pinpointed the village of Guelff near Habergy in Belgium as the European birthplace of Michael Guelff, my great grandfather. I also learned from my mother and some preliminary research she had done that Michael Guelff settled with his wife, Anne Grein, in Eden Valley, Minnesota before the family moved to eastern Montana in the first decade of the 20th century.

In 2003 – nearly a hundred years later -- I took up genealogy as a way of having a real conversation with my mother whose short term memory was rapidly fading after several strokes. She could, however, remember an amazing amount of detail from her childhood and early adulthood. She also did very well when prompted with familiar photographs from the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Before her first stroke in early 2000, she had written a brief family history. The part about the Guelffs provided a few clues: “Anna Grein came to Eden Valley, Minnesota in 1876 at the age of 16 [remember the age, it comes back to haunt]. She was born in Haberge, Belgium, 3 miles from France. Met Michael Guelff on the ship. Married _______. They had 14 children, 9 grew to adulthood – Nicholas, Marie, Elizabeth, Michael, Regina, twins Catherine & Anna, Alphonse & Antony. Michael was drowned in a lake near Eden Valley. Anna then married Pete? Grote and moved to Yates, Mont. in 1906, then homesteaded near Brockway a few years later.” [Probably written by Doris Bell Holzworth before 1990]

She wrote another version, probably after doing some research and talking to other relatives: “Anna Grein was born in Haberge, Belgium – 1860. In 1876 her family sailed to the U.S. with Peter & ____ Russ. They settled in Eden Valley, Minn. She met her husband Michael Guelff on the boat. They had a saloon & lived above it. There were 14 children born to them. Michael, Elizabeth & Gertrude dies in infancy. John died at age 10 or appendix rupture. Nicholas, Marie, Elizabeth, Regina, Michael, twins, Anna & Catherine, Alphonse & Anthony. After husband Michael died --- the family moved to Yates, N.D. Anna married Fred Grote. About 1910 they settled on a homestead near Brockway. Marie married Hal Corkery & lived on a ranch near Medora, N.D. They had two sons Fred & Jack. Nick married Eva – 4 children Irene, Eugenia, Evelyn & Larry. Regina (Gene) married George Hutchinson – one sone Richard – Cheyenne, Wyo. Anna married James Campbell – 2 children Lavonne & Max – Omaha, Neb. Catherine married James Cashman – 2 children Joyce & Russell who was kille din the Phillipines in W.W. 2. Michael married Florence Russ – 3 children, Marguerite, Robert & Keith – Glendice. Alphonse married Marvel Joubert – 5 children Donald, Shirley, Dianne & David & _______, Missoula. Anthony dies age 30 of typhoid fever.”

I knew that Mom had santized her account of the death of Great Grandfather Michael Guelff. A hundred years ago -- and probably even today – much goes unspoken and even more unasked. My mother once mentioned that Great Grandfather Michael Guelff had probably committed suicide, but never elaborated other than to say that, according to Grandmother Bell, “She drove him to it.” Mom also told me, without going into detail, that Grandma Bell and her mother did not get along very well. My guess: this had something to do with Grandma Bell marrying outside the Catholic Church and, accordingly, being ex-communicated. Perhaps it was also because Grandma Bell was the oldest surviving child at the time Great Grandpa Michael Guelff died in 1905. Nevertheless, Grandma Bell and her four young children lived in one of Grandma Grote’s houses after Grandpa Dudley Bell died in the 1918 Spanish Influenza epidemic. My mother had fond memories of Grandma Grote.

More from Mom’s family sketch: “Elizabeth Guelff was born May 6, 1892 in Eden Valley, Minn. Moved to Yates N.D. in 1906. She helped her sister Marie at the Don Short ranch and Tom Mix of movie fame worked there. She married Dudly H. Bell on Dec. __, 1913 and they homesteaded near Brockway, Mt. Four children were born. Kenneth, Nov. 21, 1914 – Lucille, Jan. 18, 1916 – Gerald, Sept, 19, 1917 & Doris Jan. 30, 1919. Dudley died Nov. 11, 1918 while taking a load of wheat to Terry, MT This was when the influenza was so rampant. Her sister in law _______, Charles Bells wife, also died that same winter of flue. Doris [Mom] was born at Michael’s homestead at Pleasant View near Glendive. Elizabeth mover to her mother’s [Grandma Grote’s] house at 217 E. Hughes in Glendive that spring. She spent 8 months at Galen T.B. [Tuberculosis] Hospital near Butte that year [1920] while Grandmother Grote took care of the children. She lived there 16 years with a widows pension & taking in washing & cleaning for others. All the children graduated from High School & Gerald from U. of Montana. Kenneth & Gerald both were in the army during W.W.2. In 1948 she started working at Yellowstone Cleaners and doing alterations of clothing for several years.”

This paragraph also omits the real reason that Grandma Bell spent 8 months at Galen. Following Dudley’s death and Mom’s birth, she had a nervous breakdown.

The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds by Jonathan Rosen

Taking my lead from the title, I downloaded this book from the Internet and read it on my Kindle. Spark-like thoughts shot out from the "e-ink screen which reads like real paper and boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images." So says Amazon.com.

The author deftly weaves the very old and the very new with reflections on his relation to religion and his Jewish identity. He views the Talmud (2000 years of rabbinic commentary on the Torah) as a sort of Internet chat room of indefinite duration and scope. As Rosen points out, rabbinic scholars speak of "the sea of the Talmud" to convey the organic size and neural connectivity of the work, which can be entered at almost any point in time and on any topic along the vast shoreline of its ocean.

Most unusual to the uninitiated (and perhaps most intriguing), the Talmud like the Internet reflects and refracts an overwhelming array of views, often directly contradictory, even on matters that are settled confessions of faith in most other variations of occidental monotheism. Possibly (plausibly) this seeming chaos of uncertainty emerged from the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in the second century of the Common Era and ensuing Diaspora. Judaism, to survive and even sometimes thrive, evolved into a "grass roots" organization in which each Jewish household, wherever it existed geographically, became a functional equivalent of that temple, at least in some important respects. Thus, Judaism in exile became a portable religion of the book and never-ending commentary on the book, a sort of evolving collective covenant of memory that bound a people. The Talmud bundled culture, customs and practices into a portable abstract world of the word that was realized in the here and now wherever it was studied, revered and shared.

Rosen raises the provocative possibility that the Internet may (has) become the collective enduring consciousness of this century and, like the Talmud and the Torah before it, both memorializes and retroactively reshapes the past. Being of a literary bent, Rosen feels no discomfort by the evident and heavy pen applied with equally heavy moral judgments and consequences (real or imagined) by those priestly and later rabbinic scribes and commentators to those familiar and oft re-interpreted stories from the Tanahk (roughly what is also known as the Old Testament). Unlike the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, Russians, Nazis and other lesser known enemies and oppressors, Jews have survived and controlled the telling and re-telling of the past.

Rosen does not reflect on the Orwellian aspects of the enterprise. In the slogan words of Big Brother: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Rather, Rosen explores more deeply the importance of remembering in order to establish identity and in order to defeat attempts to erase memory (in fact, to erase any remembrance that Jews or Judaism existed). He does this by reflecting on the two lines of his ancestors, one escaping from the Shoah to spend the duration of WWII in a camp for Jewish children on the estate of Lord Balfour and the other having arrived and becoming established in the United States before the great calamities of the 20th Century claimed the lives of a third of the world's Jewish population.

One cannot read The Talmud and the Internet without being inspired to follow the path of Rosen's reflections. In 2000, when the book was first published, Wikipedia had not yet taken off. Wikipedia's own history of Wikipedia states that the Wikipedia was not formally launched until January 15, 2001, quickly became a large global project that today includes over 14 million freely usable articles in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. Some of them even rabbis.

In a partial recounting of what Jews faced from several centuries in Europe, Rosen mentioned a particularly loathsome tract penned by Martin Luther later in his life, "The Jews and Their Lies." Luther had, at the beginning of the Protestant break from the Catholic Church, been sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. The sympathy evaporated when it became apparent that Jews could not be converted to Luther's vision of Christianity. This should not have surprised Luther since his theological concept of redemption by faith alone is the perfect antithesis of the Judaic emphasis on the hard work of achieving by practice and conduct what is promised in the covenant. Judaic deed versus Lutheran creed or otherwise put in the disputation between Erasmus and Luther, works versus faith.

A significantly large number of Lutherans in the late 18th Century, the Pietists, also essentially rejected the central Lutheran doctrine, some of my forefathers among them. Because the establishment Lutheran church began to assume the outward trappings of Catholicism, the Pietists started to meet in household conclaves, dress simply and work hard on conforming personal practice to ethical ideals. The established church viewed them as trouble makers, even though generally they were widely regarded as conforming their behavior to a higher standard of moral conduct. 

In the 18th Century, first Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great sent an invitation to prosperous farmers to resettle in the Ukraine near Odessa in land seized from the Ottoman Turks. My ancestors accepted and went in family groups known as "harmonies". They settled in self-governing colonies, guaranteed by the Czarist edicts (ukases) to be exempt from military service, taxation for a period of years, military service and complete freedom of religion. An added incentive to those, like my chiliastic forefathers, who fervently believed the world would end in the 1830's, was the proximity of Odessa to Israel. They were ex-communicated from the Lutheran church when they left as reflected in the large "X" through the church records of their family births, baptisms, marriages and deaths.

Many Jews from the same regions of German speaking Europe also accepted the invitation. For a time, the deal worked for both groups. The Jews generally worked in trades within the larger
population centers and the German farmers remained within the small walled villages. In the end, with the rise of Slavic nationalism, the promises of the ukase were rescinded. It turned out to be a deal with the devil.

Rosen's mention of the Luther tract startled me. The Lutheran environment in which I grew up was nearly devoid of Jews and completely devoid of anti-Semitism. My Lutheran heritage had been shaped more by the tripartite, internecine and fratricidal wars of Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics causing both maternal and paternal ancestors to flee Alsace and Weurtemberg. The maternal side came to colonial western Maryland where they found ways to cooperate even to the extent of sharing church structures and pastors with other Protestant denominations, an arrangement that never would have happened in Europe.

I was also struck by Rosen's reference to his father's involvement, like my own father's, in Masonic orders, which are open to all monotheistic faiths. My father repudiated the Lutheran church, which his step-father built and served as a deacon. See Pastor Poisons Girl Gets Life. The Masonic orders became an outlet for a deeply held, but rarely expressed spirituality.

It did not seem at all unusual to me that my father had as a close friend one of the handful of Jews who lived in Helena, Montana. Jerry Karasik owned and operated a cafe on Rodney Street called the Dutch Maid from 1955 until sometime in the 70's or 80's. Jerry's parents were "Bohemian Jews," according to census records recently located. Jerry was born in Canada. He came to the United States and eventually to Fort Harrison just outside Helena to train as a paratrooper in a Canadian-American commando unit that came to be known as the Devil's Brigade, 1st Special Service Force, organized in 1942. Helena's Memorial Park is dedicated to the unit, along with I-15 and its extension into Alberta, Canada all the way to Lethbridge. A couple of Hollywood action movies, notably "The Devil's Brigade", have been made about it, but certainly bear almost no relation to the reality of the training or what these men actually faced in combat.

Jerry liked Helena, and came back after the war. It must have seemed like a return to paradise. Jerry and my father got to know each other in the late fifties when my father was frequently in Helena to bid on state and federal highway contracts. My father consumed large amounts of beer and coffee, so I suspect the location the Dutch Maid near two of his favorite bars, Jesters and the Red Meadow, had a lot to do with the initial acquaintance. Also Dad's low/middle German shared vocabulary and idiomatic expressions with Yiddish, so they probably had that in common as well. For some reason, Jerry either never learned to drive a car or at least never owned one, so Dad got in the habit of driving him back and forth to grocery stores and other places. Later on, when Dad's company failed, Jerry reciprocated by providing a relatively unlimited supply of "Jewish road oil" (Dad's term for Jerry's coffee and his notion of friendly harassment) and odd jobs around the malt shop.

The friendship may also have had something to do with the Masons. At least one group of German Mason's openly repudiated the rampant anti-Semitism in Germany prior to and during the rise of Hitler, though others were not so righteous. See www.bessel.org/masjud.htm David Kaufmann, the author of the piece and a free mason, summarizes the intersection of the fraternal order and Judaism. Both subscribe and aspire to respect and support individual freedom, moral responsibility, the symbolic finding of "light" through moral practice, ridding oneself of all prejudices and a deep respect for learning. Of course, Masonry also borrows freely symbols that are central to Jewish liturgy, literature and practice, most especially the Temple of Solomon and light as the symbol of divinity. The place where I scattered my parents ashes on the crest of the continental divide hosts an open air Masonic structure commemorating the first Masonic meeting in Montana. The structure faces and points to Jerusalem, more specifically and symbolically the location of the Temple.

No doubt, because of the this notable influence, Free Masonry has often figured prominently in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Once again, from a Wikipedia article entitled "The Judaeo-Masonic Conspiracy:"

The International-Communist-Judaeo-Masonic Conspiracy, sometimes called
the international-marxist-masonic conspiracy, or simply the judaeo-masonic
conspiracy, is a conspiracy theory involving a secret coalition of Jews, Freemasons,
and communists. The coalition's dark aim, especially in the view of franquist pain,
would be world domination. The absence of evidence for such a world-spanning
is taken as further demonstration of the influence of the conspirators, who are
understood to be working to suppress evidence of their activity.

What else is there to say in the face of such logic?