>Family Tree (ancestry.com login required)
Letters
Albert Jackson “Bert” Stage and Helen Augusta (Wood) Stage were my great-grandparents. They came from farmers and domestics but they were literate and I can say that we are lucky that someone decided to hold on to some of their letters.
The originals passed to their eldest daughter, Tessie Viola (Stage) Darcy, then to her eldest daughter, Dorothy (Darcy) Thurston.
At some point, my mom, Beatrice Helen (Ruppel) Shengulette – first cousin to Dorothy – took up the mantle of family genealogist, and acquired transcriptions of the letters. I have converted those copies to html and added some inline notes to clear up some of who’s who since I have the benefit of the internet and the inimitable sleuthing skills of my wife, Kathy.
My mom and my grandmother knew many of these people personally and provided a lot of the notes. Sadly, Nellie (Stage) Ruppel passed in the mid-70s and my mom passed in 2015. Mom would have loved some of the stuff I have found on the internet but she would have laughed, too. For instance, I saw her Aunt Tessie listed somewhere as Tessie “Violet” Stage. Stuff happens; during all this genealogy work I discovered that my own middle initial is listed as “C” in my father’s published obituary in 1997. Imagine some of the interesting things that were (poorly) written down before the electronic age.