A New Year a New Start

Here is hoping I do better than I did last year. 

Life is busy with two girls in the house, one a teen and the other a pre-teen and it is never boring.

One day on social media I saw a link to an interesting list of question about your life and memories so I decided to use that as a jumping off place to start doing my genealogy blog again. What caught my eye was the first question was so easy.  

Here is the link to the questions: 

First Question: What is your full name? 

Explain why your parents gave you that name.

My full name is Mary Elizabeth Hartmann-Bowden

I was named after both my grandmothers, Mary Jirak Hartmann and Minnie Elizabeth Spahn Chaplin.

This is my Dad's Mom Mary Jirak I have heard from a great uncle in a letter she was very jovial and a great cook of Bohemian and German dishes. My Dad did not speak about her a lot, he was not jovial. A good guy but had a lot of hard times in his life.

This is my Mother's Mom, Minnie Elizabeth Spahn, she didn't like her name Minnie, so I always think of her as Minnie Elizabeth. My aunt, her sister told me this was her graduation from nursing school photo. She was a suffragette and was very upset when she went to vote and wasn't able to because she was married to and alien, an English man. I have an image of when she applied for citizenship after her husband died. 

Hartmann is my family name and when I married Richard I didn't want to change my last name, so we compromised and I hyphenated my last name.

I never meet my grandmothers as they had all died before I was born. I wish I new more about them.

I hope they are proud of how I have lived my life and honored their names. One of my most sacred memories I have is when I did the temple work for Minnie Elizabeth. We are an eternal family.