Always look before you toss

I never really spoke to Dad about his father or grandparents, or maybe I just don’t remember him talking about them. His father left when he was a very small boy so we never saw or knew any of the Ryan side of the family. However we always talked about the fact that we kids were 1/8 Irish and 1/8 Luxembourgian and ¼ Norwegian (and 1/2 Spanish, from Mom). It never occurred to me that Dad might actually have any family history written down. Today I was sorting through old boxes of Dad’s stuff to organize and toss some “unimportant” papers, like envelopes and old tax returns etc. My Dad liked to write cryptic, esoteric notes on pieces of paper and in notebooks. Some notes I think were solutions to word puzzles, on others I think maybe he was in a drunken stupor. Hard to say. Mostly I just set them aside because I keep thinking I am going to discover he really was a spy and had to communicate in secret code.

The point of this post is an old envelope I found in a box of papers from Bangkok. Inside the envelope are negatives from Korea and Thailand. To be clear I could have stuck the negatives in the envelope on one of my previous sorting binges. What is in the envelope has nothing to do with notes written on the back of the envelope. On the top portion of the envelope he wrote all the dates of different places he lived. Some are abbreviations for States, some are street names in St. Louis.

47 - IL (Illinois)
49 - Keesler (no idea where this is?)
53 - S.Dak  (South Dakota I guess?)
54 - Cleve  (this is his first house after he married Mom, Cleveland Place in St. Louis, Mo.)
57 - Maple (Maplewood Avenue in St. Louis)
63 - Dover Place (street in St. Louis)
64 - Switzerland – Bel. (Belgium)
68 - US  (United States)
76 - K  (Korea)

The bottom of the envelope is more interesting. These numbers, or rather dates, are what really caught my eye. If I had not been doing genealogy research for the last few years and just happened to have certain dates stuck in my head I may never have figured out what this series numbers meant.

1868 – Lux
1873(5) US
1885 to MHd (17)
1887(19) married
1905(37) widow
1944

1944
1868
____
76

My great grandmother (Dad’s grandmother) Lena Steichen was born in Luxembourg in 1868. She immigrated with her family in 1873 (when she was five years old). The Steichen family moved to Moorhead, Minnesota in 1885. Lena married James Ryan in 1887. My great grandfather James Ryan died in 1905. Lena died in 1943. Ok this last date does not quite match but it’s close enough. Where did he get these dates? When and why did he write them down on the back of an envelope? I found all the dates through census, death records, obits etc! If I had only known that he had all this information all the time!! What else did he know?