Heather (Larlee) Feuerhelm

Ancestors

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Biography

I am the oldest of six and a missionary kid. I grew up listening to family lore about my ancestor, Dr. John Larlee, but didn't really get interested in genealogy until we were asked to contribute to the Baker Book in 1993. In 2001, the wife of my father's cousin sent me a copy of all the information she had discovered on my father's family tree and I was hooked.

I am fascinated by how our family histories are interwoven with historical events. My father's ancestors played an integral part in the beginnings of New Brunswick following the French Indian War. I was born in 1950 and not too long ago paused to think about the historical events of my own lifetime.

I grew up without technology. https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1950/ Televisions were big boxy things with tiny black and white screens. A lot of radios were big boxy things too. MY first "hand-held" was a transistor radio that ran on DC-9 batteries and the stations were all on AM -- there was NO FM then. Telephones were rotary. Our first telephone number when we moved into a house in Sacramento in late 1958 started with Ivanhoe (I don't remember the rest of the numbers). There were no zip codes.

The Korean War started the year I was born. I was five months old when my parents went to Japan as missionaries and we were living there when the war ended with a divided Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

The first television I remember watching was in 1958 when we were living in Ione, CA with my maternal grandparents. The shows I remember from that time were Romper Room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romper_Room, Captain Kangaroo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Kangaroo, and learning to like spinach by watching Popeye cartoons. "I'm strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach." I don't know that I ever saw Howdy Doody.

I was 12 years old when President Kennedy was shot. I was 13 when Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech. When I graduated high school in 1968, many of my classmates were drafted into the Vietnam War. A year later, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. In 1970, when Apollo 13 was traversing the dark side of the moon in radio silence, I was sitting in class at Bible College in Los Angeles, praying with my classmates for the astronauts' safety.

My first "real" computer (I don't count the Commodore that we got from my dad) was a Sanyo MBC-1000 https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1..., that had a 12" green screen, a 5.25" floppy drive and 64K ram! It ran CP/M 2.2 OS and came with Micropro software. That was in 1982 and we were hot stuff! It cost $2000!!!

My greatest regret is that I never took the time to sit down with my parents and grandparents and ask them to talk about their own lifetimes. That is the biggest reason for these reflections.

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Cathy Heather Larlee at registration.
• Fairley, Linda M. Baker, Pioneers of Northwestern New Brunswick, John Baker and wife Hannah. Printed in Canada by Quebecor Printing Atlantic, 1994.