• Our early family history is rather obscure, but I’ll start with Adam, naturally assume that some of us carried on up to the time of Noah, and that a couple of our more optimistic forebears joined up with him on that cruise and thereby perpetuated the family name. Of course all of the family records up to that time were lost in the flood and since then no one seemed to care until history caught up with me.
I am today starting my 78th year, and for no other reason than my own amusement, I am jotting down all that I know or have heard about our family from the ox-cart days to this atomic era. More particularly, it is reminiscent of my own days spent on this marvelous little bit of the world, and of people and events in the communities in which I lived.
Life has never been dull nor uninteresting, and after three-quarters of a century I have concluded that, not the spectacular, but the commonplace events in one’s life, are the determining factors in the sum total of peace and contentment.1600, p 1

• The lumbering industry in the Saginaw Valley just about reached its peak when life started for me on the 18th of September, 1885. It was in a little white house on Hess Street, Salina (South Saginaw). I was sandwiched in between two older sisters, Kate and Laura, and two younger brothers, Edward and William.1600, p 10

• In December, 1956 we moved to Fenton, and during the past five years Laura has had six more heart attacks and is still able to see a little humor in it all. Life, in the main, has been a very wonderful and a very beautiful adventure. God has been good to us, to our children and to our children’s children and may they live long and moderately prosper.1600, p 56

• 1900 Census: Bridgeport, Saginaw, Michigan. Age ??, b MI.2735