The First Photo
08.03.2010 22:02
Cord and Katharina (Stemmer) Quast with two of their children, John and Metta. John is my 2nd-great-grandfather; his parents are my 3rd-great-grandparents.
So this is the photo that started my interest in family history. Pictured here are Cord and Katharina (Stemmer) Quast with two of their children, John and Metta. I don’t remember when I saw it first; I think it was in high school at some point. These are my great-great-great-grandparents who immigrated from Germany in 1869. I thought it was amazing that we had a photo that old, a photo of our ancestors who had come all the way to Minnesota from Germany. My great-great grandfather John Quast is the baby on the left.
My parents had other old photos too, but this is the one that really captured my imagination. What were these people like, how did they live, where did they come from?
Genealogy research didn’t become a major priority for me until maybe 2003, when I was 32 or so. I’d been mostly collecting data and photos from my family since then and filing them away, but these days I’m way more into it, making regular trips to the LDS Family History Center and poring through microfilm, looking for census records, collaborating with a contact in Germany who lives in the area where my ancestors in this picture came from, etc. I haven’t found anything really wild — mainly Germans who came over to the US in the 1800s to find a better life. Most of them were farmers, living in rough times and doing the best they could to get by — a lot like my present-day family.
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