The Family Kalamazoo

This post is meant to show my gratitude to two wonderful bloggers who have nominated this blog for awards and to pass on the shout outs to some bloggers who are so deserving of mention.  Actually, there are too many bloggers deserving of mention to mention, if that doesn’t sound too confusing!  I’ve got my “regulars” I read, but every day I find new blogs I want to add to my regulars list.

The Red Man and Sheila from Red’s Rants and Raves visited me bearing the WordPress Family Award.  They say that the award “was started by someone who wanted to say what being a part of cyberspace had meant to her and what a family atmosphere existed in her WordPress World.”  Yes! I can relate to that.

Thank you, Sheila, Red Man, and Team Red Man.  Check out their fun blog-with-personality right away!

I’m supposed to nominate 10 bloggers for this award.  I’ll raise it to 11 and include it below.

Later, Martha at Home Thoughts from Abroad came calling with the Liebster award. It means dearest and is meant to help promote new blogs.  I’m not sure which blogs are new and which are old standards, so I won’t be too fussy about that.  Thank you so much, Martha!

Martha keeps up so well with her blogging.  She alternates yummy food and fascinating history posts as fast as I can read them. If you haven’t checked out her blog, you will want to run there.

These are the rules from Martha. The award is a “pay-it-forward” thing as you must complete these requirements:

1.  Post the award on my blog.

2. Thank the blogger who gave me the award and link back to her site.

Thank you, Martha  at Home Thoughts from Abroad!

3.  Post 11 random facts about myself.  I’m going to post 11 family stories and whether or not I have discovered anything about their veracity.

a. That my grandparents were cousins.  Yes, they share a common ancestor way back.  I shared that in this blog post

b. That we have French Huguenots as ancestors.  The genealogist Yvette Hoitink believes the name DeKorn could have its origins in ancestors who moved from the village of  Corné in France to Holland.

c. That my grandmother was smart.  Yes, she was because as you know she did very well in school.

d. That Uncle Lou and Aunt Jen owned a general market in Kalamazoo in the early 1900s.  When I searched the name Leeuwenhoek in the newspaper archives at Genealogy Bank I discovered ads for their store.

e. That my great-grandfather Adrian Zuidweg owned a fish market in downtown Kalamazoo.  When I searched the name Zuidweg in the newspaper archives I discovered ads, but I also saw a notice that you could get fresh halibut at Zuidwegs.  I also found a photograph of the store, which can be found in this blog post.

f. That we had a wee smidgen of African ancestry.  I took the 23andme DNA test, and nope, that was not true.  I think it might have been a story that came about because of ancestry from countries where the people might have had darker hair, eyes, and skin tones, in the way that people talk about “black Irish.”

g. That Uncle Joe went to the University of Michigan to study engineering.  His son, Phil DeKorn, confirmed to me that he also went to Kalamazoo College, before he moved on to UM.  He took a majority of our old family photos, and Phil says that his father continued his love of photography into his later life.

h. That Richard DeKorn was a prominent mason and contractor in Kalamazoo, and through the research I have done, especially old newspapers it appears that that is the case.

i. That my relatives came from Goes in the Netherlands.  Yvette Hoitink discovered that many of them did come from Goes–both my grandfather’s and my grandmother’s families.  But they also came from other villages in the province of Zeeland.  Grandma told me it was pronounced Hoos, rhyming with goose, and Yvette confirmed that it is pronounced that way in the dialect.

j. That Uncle Lou was a descendent of the inventor of the microscope, Anton van Leeuwenhoek. I don’t have a confirmation on that because that would involve a lot of research far back, using sources written in Dutch. Grandpa told me that and he also told me that Uncle Lou and his brother Gerrit (the boy who died in the Spanish-American War) were orphans. I thought it was just them in the world, but apparently they had other siblings we didn’t know about who had stayed behind in Holland.

k. When my mother-in-law, who was an artist, met me she said she thought I must be part Chinese. I thought she was kidding, but then a rheumatologist told me he found a “Mongolian spot” on me.  This is a birth mark that looks like a bruise. He said I had to have Asian ancestry.  I thought it was an apocryphal story, but my DNA test confirmed that I do have .1% East Asian ancestry. I’d love to find out the story behind that!  This was mildly interesting to me since my kids, both adopted, are Korean ;).

4.  Answer 11 questions that the presenter of the award has asked.

1. What is your favorite book?  The Dollmaker by Harriet Arnow

2. What person influenced you most when you were growing up? My grandmother and Captain Kangaroo

3. If you could travel the world, where would you go first? Let me check my schedule

4. What is your dream car? Jaguar from days past

5. What are three things on your bucket list that you hope to do soon? I’ve been thinking about starting a bucket list . . .

6. Which was your most memorable birthday? My 40th at my parents’ lake house

7. What was your favorite year and why? 1984 and 1988 when my kids arrived from Korea

8. Who is your favorite singer or musician? My daughter

9. What did you do for the Millenium New Year’s Eve 1999/2000? I can’t remember

10. What is your greatest accomplishment? My kids

11. Of what are you the most proud? My kids

5.  Nominate 11 new bloggers with fewer than 200 followers who I want to pass the award on to.  These are the 11 blogs I nominate for the Liebster AND for the Family Award.  A few of these blogs I nominated last time as well, but they continue to be inspirations.

“Greatest Generation” Life Lessons

Pacific Paratrooper

Always Backroads

Enhanced News Archive

Explore Newness

Child Out of Time

Fashion A Hundred Years Ago

Jackie Dinnis

Living with My Ancestors

Relatively Frank

Genealogy Lady

6.   Ask my nominees 11 questions of my own.  Please share 11 facts about your ancestors (yes, parents count) and come tell me after you post so I am sure to read them!