Category Archives: Genealogy

Voice Communications

20140518_105456You may have noticed this placard over my shack bench desk. I didn’t have this made for me, I inherited it. It was my mom’s placard, traveling with her throughout her various offices at Amdahl/Fujitsu.

Mom had a long relationship with telecommunications throughout her life. My earliest memories of my mom working were of her plugging the switchboards at an answering service. She made a second career for herself as a bookkeeper for many years but returned to switchboard communications where she stayed the rest of her life. She was a very talented communications operator and supervisor.

I didn’t spend huge amounts of time at the answering service growing up, but I was there enough to learn about tip & ring, how switchboards worked, the old cord-boards, and what the miles of wire behind them were for. I was lucky I suppose, there was a phone company technician swinging lines fairly often while I was there. In some small way I think that experience influenced my desire to go work for the phone company, which I did for a short time.

20140512_170250Looking at mom’s placard this morning I got a little nostalgic and started thinking about how I have been involved in communications, at least peripherally, as long as I can remember. In some way it seems as though I inherited more than just the placard. Communications seems to run through our veins.

As it turns out mom wasn’t the only family member in communications. My grandfather Robert was in communications while in the Navy during WWII. My great-uncle Allan was a signalman in the Navy as well during the war (WWII.) Allan also worked for a military aviation contractor working with navigation and avionics equipment after his hitch ended. These two related fields seem to be hereditary in my family. Robert had some connection to aviation as well, but the details are sketchy.

I never met my grandfather or spent any time with my great-uncle when he was alive. I found out about their experiences with communications and aviation while doing genealogy work after my mom passed in 2006. Like so many other vets, they didn’t talk about these experiences with their families.

Radio and aviation have always been comfortable places for me. I feel good doing these things. Even when I am frustrated or stumped, I can always figure things out and learn new skills. There are vast communities to get involved with for both, but they also provide space for solitary practitioners looking for some alone time. Both fields also seem to interact easily and many skill sets translate from one to the other well. Both also are very broad in scope, they have many sub-sets of interest to keep an interested party busy with a seemingly infinite variety of new things to learn and do. I am very grateful to be a part of both fields and I look forward to years of continued participation and sharing in both of these communities.

☮ ♥ ✈ & 73,
~FlyBoyJon / KK6GXG

Descendants of John Thayer

WGRCAlogosm

I wrote this piece for the Genealogical Archive.

~FBJ

505 years has transpired through this 16 generation descendancy, five centuries, half a millennium. When I inherited the genealogy project from my mother, generations 16 back through 10 where in the research files my grandmother had compiled. When I discovered the Chase family bible among the files and memorabilia, I found a few clues that helped me track down nine more generations to John Thayer.

John Thayer was born in 1503 in Thornbury, Gloucester, England. The Thayers, from John to Cicely where all from Thornbury. Cicely came across the Atlantic to set up hearth in Haverhill Massachusetts. The family stayed in Massachusetts (Haverhill, Rehoboth, and Swansea) until Benjamin Chase and Abigail Mason moved the line to Wisconsin where the family lived until Mortimer Wanzer and Virginia Rogers moved to Kansas. Robert Wanzer and Wanieta Sullivan moved from Kansas to California where the rest of the line resides to this day.

Efforts to keep moving back in time are presently at an impasse. I am stuck at the very beginning of the 16th century. This will give me time to fill in some of the blanks and check citations and get copies of documents.

The family names that span the 5 centuries are Thayer, Davis, Barney, Davis, Saunders, Chase, and Wanzer.

1. John Thayer (b. 1503 d. 1562)
sp: Constance (b. 1507 d. 1576)

2. John Thayer (b.1531 d. 1584)
sp: Mary Roberts (b. 1537 d.1611)

3. Edward Thayer
sp: Katherine Eddys (b. 1578 d.1658)

4. Cicely Thayer (b. 1600 d. 1673)
sp: James Davis (d. 1676)

5. James Davis (b. 1620 d. 1694)
sp: Elizabeth Eaton (b. 1625 d. 1683)

6. Constance Davis (b. 1674 d. 1721)
sp: Joseph Barney (b. 1673 d. 1731)

7. Esther Barney (b. 1706 d. 1778)
sp: Daniel Davis (b. 1697 d. 1741)

8. Mary Davis (b.1739;d.1799)
sp: Benjamin Saunders (b. 1736 d. 1808)

9. Constance Saunders (b. 1758)
sp: Jacob Chase (b. 1758 d.1818)

10. Benjamin Chase (b. 1782 d. 1847)
sp: Abigail Mason (b. 1793 d. 1853)

11. Melvina N Chase (b. 1836 d. 1919)
sp: Andrew Jackson Wanzer (b. 1837 d. 1889)

12. Mortimer Leroy Wanzer (b. 1878 d. 1947)
sp: Virginia Mary Rogers (b. 1892 d. 1974)

13. Robert Wheeler Wanzer (b. 1920 d. 1962)
sp: Wanieta Ruth Sullivan (b. 1916 d. 2004)

14. Virginia Louise Wanzer (b. 1942 d. 2006)
sp: Lester leland Raines (b.1924)

15. Jonathan Wheeler Wanzer (b. 1967)
sp: Tammy Irene Veloza (b. 1972)

16. Zachery Patrick Wanzer (b. 1995)

Wanzer Genealogical

sullivan-morOne project that has been neglected for far too long is my genealogy website. It has been a long time since any work has been done on the site. So throughout the night I have been converting the site from an shtml based site to a php blog site. Several hours and it is up and running.

I have lots of pictures and scans to start posting there.

I need to work up some kind of blogging schedule. I have 6 blogs of my own (5 in-house and one LJ) and I follow 77 other blogs with Google Reader. It is beginning to take a lot of time to keep up. I have some blogs I can cull out of the aggregator but I still need to be sure to post in my own blogs.

I also need to start producing more media.

Definitely a schedule, definitely.

~FBJ