usswurm Family Lore

Greta made a trip back to Germany in the 1950's to visit the family she'd not seen in thirty years. She brought back a little grey Bavarian jacket for my brother Lance.

In the early 90's the grey jacket my grandmother brought back from Germany was just about the right size for my son who is wearing it in the collage.

My favorite story about that famous trip: while Greta was in Germany she went into the forest and dug up four birch saplings — one for each of her children. She carefully packed those baby trees in the bottom of her suitcase and krpt them alive on the ocean crossing and smuggled them into Canada. Amazingly they survived, and Greta planted the baby trees around her home.

The remaining birch trees at Andrew & Greta's former farmhouse in the 1990's, and Lynn's tree in Waterloo circa 1961.

Lynn was the first to marry and he planted his birch tree in the back yard of his Waterloo home. (That's me holding them up in our Columbia Street back yard.) Sadly, the remaining trees were too big to be moved by the time the other children had places to put them. But we saw how the the survivors towered over the farmhouse when we visited Greta and Andrew's original farmhouse in the early 1990's.

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