Between the Windows: AHSGR

Monday, October 20, 2025

AHSGR

Those letters stand for the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia.

I am leaving in the morning for a trip to their museum and research library in Lincoln, Nebraska.

It's a straight shot due North, but while looking at the maps, I keep finding all sorts of other places to stop and other things to see. It's hard to make my mind remember that this trip has a purpose and it isn't sight-seeing.

I think I've mentioned a time or two or twelve that I don't know much about where my grandmother and her parents came from - said to be Saratov, Russia. The end. Saratov is a province and a huge city, even in the early 1900s when they left there.

https://betweenthewindows.blogspot.com/2013/07/halfway-round-world.html

2010: The sun began to warm my face even before I woke up to see it. It reached across the room to my bed. My bed is a green flex-steel couch that I have been sleeping on since my husband died three years ago. I often lay there thinking before getting up to start my day.

Thinking about the depth of the sun’s reach made me think about the photos I wanted to hang on the walls and where they should go. It was obvious that they should go between the windows, where that reach wouldn’t harm them. The windows would give me a direct view to the current world; the photos between them would give me a direct view to the past.

That’s what I do for enlightenment and enjoyment – sometimes I live in the past.

Genealogy, or family history, began as a study when my son was in the 8^th grade. We were homeschoolers that year and it seemed a good way to study history. It became a passion for me but now has settled down to a frequent activity.

Through my research I have come in touch with people from the past. Often they are people of whom the memory has nearly faded away. That’s the reason I put them between the windows – to keep them from fading away entirely.

This is their story and mine.