There is an advertisement currently showing on television. It’s for Ancestry and shows a lady all excited because she found her grandfather’s World War I draft card on her computer. I am pleased to say that I actually have my father’s World War I draft card in my possession.
He was born in 1899 and was too young to serve in that conflict. He is also the one who gave me my interest in history and genealogy.
Our last name for the past several hundred years has been Cline. However the ancestor who came to this part of the world in the mid-1700s. Pieter, was from Alsace Lorraine and it was spelled Klein. Alsace Lorraine was a narrow country between France and Germany and I believe went in with Germany in the mid-1860s.
I have American Revolutionary War ancestors and Civil War ancestors and am proud of both. There was even a lawyer named Cline in the Hatfield-McCoy feud, but, alas, he came from an entirely different branch.
We are who we are, folks.
My Dad and his younger sister had to ride horses to school and one rainy day, my Dad got off his horse so he could let his sister ride on her as they went down a hill. My Dad slipped and fell, and his horse tried its best not to step on my Dad’s face. One hoof came down over an eye but did not put it out. It did, however, leave a horseshoe scar around it. We went to a Cline reunion in 1939 and a man, who had probably not seen my Dad for 25 years, came up to him and called him by name, based on that horseshoe scar. And no, it never completely went away.
Because of his interest in family we often visited relatives, even though we lived in northern Ohio and they were all in southern Ohio. I treasure the memories. I also realize how lucky I am to be able to trace them back nearly 300 years.
My Dad always said he thought there was some Native American blood in us. If you saw a photo of him in his late teens and photos of various relatives about then, you would agree. However, a genealogist told me it would only show up in me in a DNA test if my Dad had a sister, whom I’ve already mentioned, and if she had a daughter, which she did. A DNA test however, revealed no Native American but mostly German and a little Irish thrown in.
While I admit I was a little disappointed, at least it confirmed what I already knew.
