Wilkommen Familie!

Welcome to the inaugural post for our family blog.
Ever since the discussion after Christmas dinner 2005 at Kevin and Linda's I decided to look into our maternal grandparents' history. I had a great three page newsletter written back in March. But some weird technical clitch that no one could explain refused to save the file before I sent it to the printer and only one page printed before the data was lost. I know... only me, right? Well, this is one of the reasons that I took so long to get into the whole technilogical landscape. How am I really certain I can't blow up the world or at least launch a wargame? Yeah, too much sci-fi as a kid.
Anyway, I finally got to the point where I can understand this crazy thing. So, to prevent losing ALL my data, I am putting this stuff into a blog. I can recreate a post better than I can recreate a whole newsletter.
I will try to keep a running bibliography in the sidebar, probably do the occassional extraneous blog about the process of research and the hazards of crazy wars on documents, and when possible I will make the attempt to bore you with how I have translated something. This is important, not only because you can see where my thinking is, but if someone outside that knows more than I do looks at my work, they can see where and how I went wrong and help correct the error. Or they can just laught themselves into a coma.
I hope you find this as interesting as I do. Its alot of work but it is fun.... for a total geek with two years of highschool Geerman. Yes, most of my sources will be German.