Mike Dirksen's photostream  

My daughter was given a copy of Cliff Wall's Remembering Our Heritage as a wedding present. Later she showed it to me and said, "Dad, you're in here!" But I didn't care anything about family history. Such conversations with my father had always been brief. His parents secretly spoke German, his mother was from "Pole Russia" and his grandfather was killed by lightning. That was all.

After my father died, I used Cliff's book to guide an internet search that eventually expanded my ancestry to early 18th century Prussia, and revealed many previously unknown relatives. Outstanding among them is Kathy Sperling who sent a picture of her great-grandmother Minnie with my great-grandmother Sarah. None in my known family had seen her picture! That photo elevated my interest.

Visiting the Mennonite Brethren archives in Fresno I learned of their genealogy database called GRANDMA. Just as Cliff had said, the history of my family is deeply interwoven with that of other Russian Mennonites who immigrated during the 1870s to Brotherfield in South Dakota. Relentless research eventually developed a remarkable discovery.

One of the contributors to Cliff Wall's research had preserved her great-grandmother's collection of immigrant photographs. Among them were images of Cliff's grandparents Peter and Maria Buller Wall, my great-grandmother Sarah Funk Dirksen and my great-grandfather Abraham Dirksen who was killed by lightning at the age of 43, on the same date I would be born 57 years later. I thought at first the discovery of these photos would complete my research, but the opposite is true. The ongoing discovery of family history keeps me coming back for more.