52 Ancestors #1: Edna Marjorie Van Horn (1899-2004), She Knew

Having finally decided to take up of Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, this is my first post. The prompt for this week was "Start" and this is how my obsession got started. 

Edna Marjorie Van Horn (1899-2004), She Knew, 52 Ancestors #1

Edna Van Horn wasn’t one of my ancestors.  She was my great aunt and the keeper of a quarter of my ancestors for decades.

In 1961, she inherited a bundle of letters written in German when her mother passed away. They were letters our German ancestors had written to her grandparents. It was then that she began tracing her family history. She had studied German in college, bought a very old German dictionary and proceeded to translate the letters on her own. All of her work was hand written or typed, multiple copies made using carbon paper. She sent copies of her family group sheets and other writings to her brothers and sisters while they were living and to her nieces and nephews later on. Eventually, she would buy a self-correcting typewriter. Still, that was a lot of hard work.

While in junior high and high school, I looked forward to the yearly updates on her travels, the friends she had made and the new information she could add to her family tree. The slide show was held most often at Christmas time with lots of good things to munch on and rum balls for the adults. It was interesting and colorful, but that was the extent of my interest.

In 1997 it occurred to me that I could give her a hand with her manuscripts. She was still typing them and retyping them and when she finished, she would have to pay to have them copied or printed. On the other hand, if I scanned them into my computer, she could rewrite and correct much more easily and we could print at home.

She thought that was a great idea so we spent a day going through her files and she sent me home with a pile of her writing to start with and a folder full of family group sheets so that I would know who I was working with. As I left that day, she told me she had just given me my life’s work. I laughed. Scanning, typing and printing things for her was all I had in mind.

Needless to say, she had the last laugh. In a couple  weeks, I’d done what I set out to do, she had clean copies of what she’d written, double spaced for easy reading and room for corrections. But, I had looked at those family group sheets. The bug had bitten. Hard!  She knew.

We worked together every weekend for couple years after that. When she moved to a smaller apartment, she sent most of the genealogy files home with me “for safe keeping.” She kept those for her toughest brick wall where she could continue working on him. On the day she changed her will for the last time, she told me that she had willed me everything in her room, “including the dirty socks.” She knew!