von Fircks

Blogs which describe people or events related to my paternal line.

Connections to Place

Does your family have a connection with a geographical place? I had to think about this for a recent writing activity which I had to produce for my study. Both my maternal and paternal sides of the family have connections with geographical places. But one example immediately sprang to mind.

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Garlic wards off more than Vampires

According to Bram Stoker, garlic works a charm when warding off vampires. I am not sure what my grandfather thought about vampires, but he certainly believed in the power of garlic. My grandfather, pictured, learnt homeopathy and iridology in his middle age. He and his family had sought refuge in

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Multiple Marriages – a family trait?

Being married more than once seems to be a familiar pattern for the males on both sides of my family. On my father’s side, my great grandfather, Otto v. Fircks, was married twice. On 10 January 1854 he married Catharina Hilda v. Oelsen, who died in 1868. On 29 April

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Adapting to Modernity

There was good news and bad news when I discovered “Adapting to Modernity” by Heide W Whelan in the library. The good news, apart from the fact it is in English, was that it is the best resource I’ve found so far in my research about my father’s family. The

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Found Objects – Cufflinks

Amongst the myriad of objects I found when cleaning out my father’s possessions after his death, there were several pairs of cufflinks. Some of them, including an odd one out, are in the picture above. All of the cufflinks I have are known as toggle style, or swivel-back. This means

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Filling in the gaps

I have several genealogical charts of my father’s family. A couple of them comprise the entire family, one of them is only of my father’s direct family, and one of them includes the children of the females in the family. All of them contain valuable information; names, birth dates, dates

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