You are what you eat

I'm going to start tying my love of genealogy and food together.

Researching dates and places that an ancestor had is important, but a bit on the dry side. I don't get a feeling for who, what and how that person lived and what they were really like. I want to know them. It's the good and bad, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary that make someone's life. And this is what I want to understand better.

One way that I can personalized that connection to my ancestors is by recipes. I'm lucky in that my family has passed recipes and the stories that go with them.

Above is a photo from the early 1910s featuring my great grandmother Helen and her sister, Dorothy (also known as Aunty Nick) on the front porch of their house in Mauston, WI. It is their mother that made the peanut butter cookie that I'll share in the next blog entry.