WHAT IS THIS?
I work as a professional church musician by day. Training, temperament, and sheer dumb luck have happily provided me gainful and fulfilling employment in diverse environments over the course of several years.
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The same training and temperament--musicianship's demands for persistence and patience, attention to detail, long periods of studious isolation--have yielded unintended consequences. Virtues by day became vices by night. There is a hungry demon always nipping at my heels: genealogy.
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My two decade avocational obsession with family history indeed has lapped my 10 years of professional graduate education. As engrossing as the research methods are in and of themselves, justice perhaps demands that these labors bear some fruit--hence, this chronicle.
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In 2013 a colleague alerted me to the objective reality that my biological family consisted primarily of "farmers who were dour and then died out on the prairie." Willa Cather covered these things poignantly and better than anyone since. What more can I say?
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My wife's family, on the other hand, lacks little for interest. Whether storied and distinguished, forgotten or ignominious, the characters rival any dreamed up by García Márquez. However, unlike famous literature, the texts and sundry sources of these stories remain obscure, scattered, and primarily in Spanish.
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This site constitutes my attempt to highlight, consolidate, and present in English these webs of narratives. The scope is inherently broad, if also diffuse and rambling now and then. Accounts of people naturally become stories of families, and stories of families, in turn, stories of communities. Communities entail places and things, politics and beliefs--in a word, they embody and make culture, as much as they reflect it.
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Biography reaches beyond names and dates. It strives to be (and can only be) a saga of centuries.
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E-Mail: mjpemmerich@gmail.com