Jim’s great aunt died suddenly early yesterday morning. After the morning phone calls and family arrangements for flowers etc. I started thinking of what a wonderful and vivacious woman this was. Aunt Velma Jean and her husband took a trip up to see Nanny last Christmas to take Nanny to lunch. They really lured her next door for the surprise Juni Fisher concert! That was the last time we saw her.
Yesterday I was thinking of our family so did a trial with an ancestry site for two weeks. I did some of the basics and found out something my father never had in his years of research: his mother’s passage from Hamburg, Germany to NYC in 1923. I was able to send him a copy of the passage documentation of her adopting a new country. I spent a couple of hours on it yesterday, no time today. I didn’t know the program at all so made many mistakes and it took me ten times the amount of time for an entry to say “whoops” and try to fix it.
Food and family go together naturally. Otherwise why would Thanksgiving dinner be important? It’s only a turkey. I hope results of my search lead to more family recipes and regional foods from the far-flung areas that marked even my parents and grandparents.
The next step is to interview our remaining relatives to glean more information from their searches. So I’m on a hunt for the best rouladen, Rosti potatoes, plus English, Irish, French-Canadian recipes out there. Here’s to a great weekend! Dee
Cooking with Dee 