April 1999   Volume 3   Issue  1

Birthdays & Wedding Anniversaries Dies und Das New Kids Bring Total to 50 Biography Html or Plain Text? A Word From Uncle Don My Great Uncle - part two Questionnaire Results Links Animation & Audios of the Month

Birthdays and Wedding Anniversaries in April 1st   Sonja Schoenfeld and Alfred Ziemen south of Stuttgart celebrate 38 years of marriage. 2nd  Jay C. Schwenk of Skaneateles near Syracuse, NY turns 59.  4th   Jay C. Schwenk and wife Barbara celebrate their 35th year of marriage. 17th Andrea Schoenfeld of Brooklyn, NY celebrates her 30th year of life. 23rd Jim Schwenk and wife Mary of Wausau, WI celebrate their 37th year of marriage.  Want to see how these and other Kids are related to you? Click here for those who descended from John Schwenk and his immigrant siblings. Click here for all others.

Dies und Das

Dieter Rehse now Top Cop in Laichingen! On Feb. 26, Dieter, age 49, with more than 25 years experience in police work,  was sworn in as  police chief in this city of around 10,000. Several small surrounding communities are also in his jurisdiction. Click here for a photo taken at ceremony...Richard L. Schwenk and wife Caring will retire at the end of this year and return to the USA. Richard has served as an agricultural missionary and teacher in the Philippines and other parts of SE Asia since 1957. They have also been participants in former President Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity program. Here is an excerpt from an e-mail received from them on March 24th: On Tuesday afternoon we were all called to pose for a group picture with Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. Our particular group had about 200 workers and low and behold, Jimmy and Rosalyn came and stood beside Caring and me in the third row. He did not dare begin shaking hands then as he would be mobbed. But this morning after breakfast Rosalyn and Jimmy stopped by our table to shake hands at the Puerto Azul Hotel as we were about the only ones left in that part of the dining hall.  So we went the whole day without washing our hands...
Karlheinz Schoenfeld of Wappinger Falls, NY recently acquired a new IBM computer and is now enjoying the pleasures of surfing the Web and sending html e-mail with NS Communicator...Duff Schwenkbeck, of Dover, NH, builds DNA testing equipment (protein sep.) at Owl Seperation Systems in Portsmouth NH and attends McIntosh College for Business Science (computers) where he will graduate Oct. 99...Maurla Haehlen White (one of the new Kids) of  Herndon, VA near Washington D.C., is very interested in family history. Some of her other interests are Middle East Peace activities and peace and justice issues of various other types, and she also has a heavy volunteer schedule with the Methodist Church...Gordon Schwenk of Boise, Idaho recently was honored by his employer, US West Communications, for the Regional Best Ad, Companywide Best Ad and more recenlty an Idaho Advertising Federation "Rockie" Award. These are for a yellow page advertisement he designed for an attorney in Twin Falls, ID in 1998...In early March, Jürgen Mangold of Laichingen went skiing in  Austria with a local Hilsenbeck friend. Snow avalanches held them prisioners at that skiing area for two days, but they returned home from this high adventure unscathed...In his quest to dig up more Kids, Don Schwenk in early March, phoned a Robert Wilfred Schwenkbeck in Ransomville, NY north of Buffalo and born in 1953 in Niagara Falls.  He said his 18 yr. old son Derek is online. He agreed to ask him to send e-mail to Don. Incidentally,  Robert knows nothing of his Schwenkbeck ancestry in Germany. Don also phoned a Charles George Schroer in K.C., MO, b. 1926,  a g-grandson of Luise Schwenk, a younger sister of the Schwenk immigrants mentioned in the article below. He said three of his children are online and also agreed to ask them to send Don e-mail. That same day, a phone message was left on the answering machine of J.W. Schwenk III, also of Kansas City. He is a g-grandson of August Schwenk, another of the four immigrant siblings. As of press time, there have been no responses to these phone calls. It seems as if the four immigrants transmitted a gene for shyness...John Schwenk of Pasadena, CA recently resumed employment with the Pasadena Public Library system. John graduated from UCLA with a Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) in 1996. Here is what he wrote on March 24th: I'm a Librarian and I will be doing collection development in this library that serves northwest Pasadena.  Additionally, I will be teaching research and internet skills to elementary and high school students from local public and private schools...Recently seen dining at the Kneadery, one of Ketchum-Sun Valley's most popular eating places by Tyrone Schwenk, its top chef,  were Warren Miller the ski film producer, Demi Moore, and a frequent guest Arnold Schwarzeneger.

New Kids

Early in March it was learned that Doris Fletcher Blair and Dan Blair who live near Portland, Oregon are online. Doris was born in 1902, the daughter of Emma Schwenk, the daughter of John Schwenk the Immigrant, b. 1839. No, 1902 is not a typo.  She is still spry and alert. Dan, born in 1944, is her grandson, but was adopted from Virginia, a daughter of Doris.

Between 1854 and 1872, four Schwenk siblings left their homeland southeast of Stuttgart, Germany and settled in America. They were in order of their arrival: Maria Agnes Felicitas Schwenk Baumeister, Luise Schwenk, John and August. Maria married Pankratius Baumeister just before emigrating. They settled in Chicago. Several generations of their descendants were in our family tree, but none was known personally by the descendants of Maria's siblings until March 3rd of this year. On that day, Maurla Haehlen White of Herndon, VA near Washington DC, born in 1935, phoned Don Schwenk. She had just got off the phone after talking with Juanita Teter Schwenk in NE Missouri, the wife of Darrel Schwenk, grandson of John the Immigrant. Juanita has been the family historian for 40 + years, and were it not for her record keeping, we probably would not have found our Schwenk ancestry in S. Germany. However it was learned from Maurla that the  information of Maria Agnes parents and her place of birth in Dettingen/Erms was apparently provided by Maurla's Uncle Kynett Haehlen and Grandfather Rev. Jacob Haehlen to Juanita. Maurla is online as well as her sister, Olinda Lea Haehlen Corin of Olympia, Washington, born in 1933. Maria Agnes was their gg-grandmother.

Juergen Schwenkglenks of Passau, Bavaria, Germany visited our SchwenkNet Website in early February. His paternal ancestry was not known to him beyond that of his Grandfather Daniel Schwenkglenks, b. 1903 in Laichingen. Through a series of e-mails between Juergen and Don Schwenk and Don's phone calls to Heinrich and Ruth Schwenk in Laichingen and some cooperation by Juergen's Aunt Martha Schwenkglenks, a neighbor of Heinrich and Ruth, the name and dob of the father of Daniel was learned. That Daniel already was in Don's family tree and it was already known that Daniel was a descendant of our Konrad Schwenk, 1601. Thus Juergen, b. 1956,  is an 11th generation descendant of Konrad and our newest Kid.

As a reminder, you can see the faces of nearly all 50 Konrad's Kids by visiting the Konrad's Kids page in this Website or by clicking here (ca. 185 K).

Biography
(Ed. note: This is a new and hopefully regular monthly column)

Hello!  We're happy to provide a short bit of biographical information along with occupational background and favorite links, and sincerely hope this is of interest to you, SNNL reader.

First, my name is Kyle Schwenk, and I am a first cousin to our editors Don and Jim.  I am the son of Milt and Joann Schwenk, from Yakima, WA.  I am 39 y.o., born in Missoula, MT, moved to Yakima in '69, graduated University of Puget Sound '83 receiving degree in physical therapy.  Played football at U.P.S. injuring my knee and received a bit of physical therapy myself.  I have been working as a registered physical therapist since then.  I met my wife Beth through church and work (both initially employed at St. Elizabeth's Med. Ctr. in Yakima) and we married in '89.  We moved to Warrenton, Oregon in 1991.  We have two daughters, Laura, age 6, and Kelly 3.Interests other than family and work are church, reading, sports, and travel, (there may be more on this later in future issue as we are planning a trip to Germany in June.  We recently received information, through Don's assistance and translation of e-mail from Dieter Rehse, that we will have the opportunity to meet family in Germany, which we certainly are looking forward to.)  Additional interests include music, and last but at times not least, computers.

It seems most anyone spending a fair amount of time at a computer probably should have at least a  remote interest in ergonomics.  Here's the transition to my occupational background:  I do not specialize in any area of physical therapy, as working in a small hospital tends to require some knowledge in a lot of areas, (as opposed to a lot of knowledge in a few areas.)  However, ergonomics is a subject of particular interest to me.  I'm no expert, but to be brief in offering info to fellow computer-users, proper computer work-station design (terminal height, chair height, angles of vision, etc.) can decrease strain to our eyes, neck, shoulder and especially the wrist.  If a reader has questions or would like to discuss ergonomics further (or other areas of interest), I'd be happy to send info - (free and
non-promotional!).  As my understanding of graphics via computer are quite limited, I'd prefer to send ergonomics stuff via postal mail, but otherwise I'd be glad to correspond via e-mail.  A note from my wife follows, along with a couple of our favorite links to healthcare sites.  Thanks to Don and Jim for a great newsletter!

A note from Beth, who is a dietitian:  I work at Providence Seaside Hospital with Kyle, and a couple of websites you might find helpful in discerning fact from fiction related to nutrition subjects, and are therefore a couple of my favorites, are the American Dietetic Association site http://www.eatright.org and http://www.quackwatch.com -  A good ergonomics site is http://ergonomics.ucla.edu/default.htm and a good site on healthcare in general with a search option is http://www.mayohealth.org -  Our favorite comic strip, Close to Home, can be found at http://www.uexpress.com -  Hope this information is of interest.  Kyle and Beth Schwenk.

schwenk@pacifier.com
33687 Westshore Lane
Warrenton, OR 97146
 

Html or Plain Text?
by Don Schwenk

Html e-mail,  plain text email and a discussion of the various email programs is the subject of this article. Many of you are capable of sending and receiving html e-mail, but few - I have observed - do. For my part, I find the use of html fun and functional. So, what is html? This is an acronym for hyper text markup language. But that tells us practically nothing. Html in real terms means rich text = formatted text. I like this because if I want to emphasize something in an e-mail, I can underline, italicize, get bold or even put in a little color just to brighten things up a bit. I can also choose large fonts when desired.

Now the question is: Who can send and who can receive html? This is where things get a bit tricky. If you use Netscape Communicator (NS Comm) or Microsoft Outlook Express (MSOE), you can send and receive html.  These two e-mail programs are quite compatible with each other.  And this is where it really gets tricky. These programs are not compatible with AOL, Compuserve, Eudora and other email programs which you can get free on various Web portal sites such as hotmail, juno, t-online.de (in Germany), snap and yahoo to mention a few.  The point to remember here is: If you use NS Comm or MSOE, don't waste your time sending a nicely formatted e-mail to people who use email  programs other than these two. For your information, 27 of the current 50 Kids use either NS Comm or MSOE.

And now to AOL. Fifteen of you use this so called proprietary e-mail client (a synonym for program). If you have the newest verson of AOL (4.0), you too can send and receive html e-mail, but only to people who also have the AOL 4.0 version. For example, if you send me a lovely formatted e-mail with large red fonts, etc., all I will see on my screen is plain text!  And ditto if you send that to an AOL friend who uses the earlier 3. version.

So, how do you know who uses what kind of program? In NS Comm, you can select/highlite the received e-mail, click on View/Page Source. That trick  will usually reveal what kind of e-mail program and the version used by the sender.  In this way, you can know whether  to send html or plain text to that person.  MSOE users can select the e-mail in question, then click on File/Properties/Details which gives the same kind of information.

Imbedding of image files. I enjoy doing this in e-mail.  For example if I want to show an image to the recipient(s), I don't need to send this as an attachment. I can imbed (insert) that right in the body of the e-mail like this: . But remember: The rule for sending an imbedded image in an e-mail is the same as for sending html e-mail. Send this only to those you know have email programs compatible to yours.  AOL 4.0 people can send this among themselves; MSOE and NS Comm people can do the same.  But if I send this ladybug to my AOL friend, he/she will see no image at all!  For those of you who can send/receive html and imbed images and have simply not  become familiar with these procedures, I would encourage you to give this a try. I think you'll like it! 

A Word from Uncle Don

In April of 1997, there were only 13 of us online or known to be by those 13. One lived in Laichingen; the others in the USA, with one, Richard Schwenk,  in the Philippines. He decided that what we needed was a monthly electronic newsletter. That was the beginning of this SchwenkNet Newsletter. Here are the opening words in that April, 1997 newsletter: Dear Kith and Kin, Here is the first issue of *Significant Schwenk Kith & Kin News* for April 1997. Richard also issued the May Newsletter, and in June I took over this task.  In late 1997, Richard's brother Jim Schwenk joined me as co-editor.

Until April of last year, the NL was sent as plain text. After that, it was sent out as a graphic attachment. That was a nice improvement, in that color, pictures and formatting was then possible. Last month's issue was sent again as an attachment, but also placed in my Website.  And that test led your editors to decide to issue  future newsletters, beginning this month, in that format only, that is, as a Webpage.

It has been very gratifying to see this network of online kin grow from 13 to 50 during the past two years. Of those 37 new Kids, more than 50% of those were discovered through their visit to the SchwenkNet Website, at:
http://www.cyberhighway.net/~gordons -  This Website was created by Gordon Schwenk in January of 1997. Shortly after launching this showcase for graphic art, he decided to make it primarily a place for our family history.  Anyone typing in the name Schwenk in about any kind of search engine will find links to this site. And this results in "lost cousins" such as Jürgen Schwenkglenks being found, and I'm certain this will continue to happen (Ed. note July 2001: this site no longer in operation).

I have often wondered how many  descendants of our Konrad Schwenk are living today. I would venture a guess that this number would be in the thousands. And how many of these are connected to the Internet?  Two or three hundred? And how many of those know of their descent from Konrad?  Very few would be my guess.  And wouldn't it be fun to locate them and inform them of their Schwenk roots?  Let's all agree to refer back to this issue in April, 2001 to see what the Konrad's Kids' membership roll looks like then.

My Great Uncle - part two by Jim Schwenk, co-editor

Uncle John and Aunt Nell were probably among the more fortunate of folks during the tough times of the 1930's.  As a farm couple they enjoyed doing the hard work together as a team. It was this enduring quality, their strong faith, and their resilience that made it possible to begin anew. After being pioneers on the Minnesota prairie, there came an opportunity to seek out other endeavors in the city of St. Paul.

Although unemployment was at an all time high, John was able to find a job as an experienced woodworker with a manufacturer of wooden showcases. He spent the next 13 years on the road installing display cabinets thoughout Minnesota. When this company closed, he went to work supervising the wood mill department of the Seeger Refrigerator Company, ( yes, wooden ice boxes) which was then bought out by the Whirlpool Corp.  He retired from that company in 1954. This was, you might say, his work record up until that time. However, one of his ongoing hobbies propelled him into a new career.

John's great love for archery was not lost to his boyhood.  During the 1920's, he continued his interest in this sport that was fast becoming popular in America. Good archery equipment could not to be purchased from a store in those days, so John made his own target arrows and target tips during the late 20's and had other archers as his customers. During the 30s, he found that there was an increasing demand for archery equipment, so as a part-time venture he started the Ace Archery Co. in his basement and specialized in making both bows and arrows.  After joining the Twin Cities Archery Club, he found that, "they didn't have any good equipment, so I concentrated on making a balanced arrow that would fly true."  To attain this, he invented what he  referred to as the "mechanical archer" (an arrow firing machine). He took it to the Hippodrome at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds where there was no wind, and there tested the arrows time and time again. "There was a 9 inch bull's-eye on the target, and at 40 yards this one bunch of arrows I made grouped like they were shot with a rifle." Experimentation with this high tech precision produced the arrow that he had hoped for and the demand for that kind of arrow was growing. John went on to  pioneer more in the field of archery.

During the 1940's  many states throughout the nation were establishing special deer hunting seasons for bow hunters. The sport needed good quality big game arrowheads that would not collapse in use or lose their edge. John again set out in search for that better broadhead. He patented a new creation made of high carbon steel that held a sharp edge and could withstand John's test of firing it into 20 gauge steel targets. This type of broadhead was one of the first of it's kind in archery and today is dearly sought after by archery memorabilia collectors. John sold his patents and business in 1973 after producing and selling nearly a million broadheads. They are still being sold by an Idaho company.

As a lad growing up, I can remember looking up to my great uncle John with great awe. As most children growing up, I was almost an adult when I suddenly realized he was "great" for another reason.  He was my dad's uncle!  All the time I just thought great was just an adjective being applied to him.   Most of the bragging nature of this tale of his life could well be blamed on me, the writer. Please accept my apologies, readers, but I cannot be accused of stretchng the truth. . I can still remember the stories that he told with his Missouri twang, which he never totally lost.  He managed to hunt most everything with the bow . . . squirrels, deer, pheasants, carp, ( with a bow and a reel attached). The highlight of his hunting life was to bring down a 600 pound black bear, and I still retain the image of that huge bear rug in his living room.

Among my other memories of John was the twinkle in his eye as he caught my reaction to finding a pear growing on an apple tree in his backyard. He had skillfully grafted it there, just as his father, John the Immigrant, taught him.  I remember receiving some sage advice from him that was useful in my life as a teacher, "If God gave you a talent for doing something, it's downright sinful if you don't use it!" Visiting his basement shop, I saw a long, thin, squarish piece of compressed cedar move its way through a "pencil sharpener kind of instrument" that produced a beautifully round, straight arrow shaft after exiting the machine.  If a boy and his brother found a dilapidated canoe with both ends missing, but showed some promise, "Uncle John could help us fix it!"  And very well, he did!  He was truly the first man of the 1950's that I ever saw working in the kitchen, cooking or setting the table in a casual way as if he had been doing it all his life. He and Nell must have found a need to help each other many years ago that erased the lines between the sexes.  A man truly ahead of his times. At age 84, John retired for the second time in his life.  He remained active with archery, golf, bowling. Aunt Nell passed on before him and he later remarried.  At the age of 90 years he still worked as a volunteer, driving folks to church on Sunday. Much of the material for this part of my story was taken from a newspaper article "Pioneer on Target With Broadhead Arrow"  a featured article about Uncle John, in the January 1, 1984, edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The accompanying photo is taken from the article as well as the final note below:

"After competing in many area archery contests though the years, as a member of the Twin Cities Archery Club, he won many trophies.  He placed 3rd in the National Field Archery Tournament in the Summer of 1952, at age 63."

Questionnaire Results

A questionnaire was sent on Feb. 15 to the then-40 Konrad's Kids. As of March 20th, 25 responses were received - a 62.5% return. This cooperation is  greatly appreciated by your editors. Some of the suggestions and comments contained in these have already affected the look of this newsletter, the most significant being that it is now in an html format and appears in this Website rather than being sent to you as a graphic attachment.

Because of the way this questionnaire was formulated (obviously not by a professional pollster), it is next to impossible to tabulate, to quantify the results of most of the questions, however, we will do our best to give you a feeling, an overview of these 25 responses to the questionaire.
 
 

Links

http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/translate? - Type or paste in a short message which will be translated into the selected language. Not perfect. Avoid slang and uncommon expressions. If not, you'll get some hilarious translations.
http://www.anywho.com/  - Similar to switchboard.com.  Includes a reverse number feature; type in the phone number of someone whose address or name is unknown and this will quickly be revealed.
http://www.lds.org/ - The brand new official Website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This will be a goldmine for  genealogists when in full operation. The following news release appeared in early March:
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Mormon church says it will put at least some of its family-history archive - the world's largest - on the World Wide Web. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posted a statement Friday about the plan on its official Web site, www.lds.org. One leader said last year the church has archived the names of 13 billion people from 110 countries. "There are millions and millions of records just in their International Genealogy Index alone, and millions more in their ancestral files, and both of those are electronic databases," Karen Clifford, president and CEO of Genealogical Research Associates, said Saturday in The Salt Lake Tribune.

Click here for a witch's nightmare

This tune will make you want to dance.

---