Vacation Pictures 2000
Vacation Pictures - 2000


As spring came to our area we drove past many stone fences between home and work. This year our work consisted of visiting many parts of the county working with the Census2000 project, and one of the joys of early May was watching the daffodils blooming beside one such beautiful old "fence" - sometimes called a stone "hedge."

On May 21, 2000 we took a one day leave from Census2000 to travel to Louisville and see our daughter, Heather, receive her Masters of Divinity (and three awards!) from Louisville Presbyterian Seminary.

By mid-June, with the second phase of our census work finished, we flew "home" to California. First, a reunion with the Harbiners at Three Rivers where we met other children of immigrants, including Pete Penner, the reunion's organizer, and George and Nelda Thiessen, Jake's brother and sister-in-law. We had several hardy/hearty discussions with Mel and Mathilda Buhrkuhl of Stockton.

On Sunday we met Lena Janzen Burgeson, the mother of one of my new e-mail contact, Carol Vaughan. Because of Carol, who clarified some of the relationships on the Harbiner page, we were able to tape an interview with her Aunt Tena on Saturday. In this interview we heard about the exodus of the Janzen family from Blagoveshensky (near the Amur River) to Harbin, the struggles in that Chinese city, and the family's subsequent voyage to San Francisco on the Korea Maru.

It was great to see our friend Katharine Rogalski Sylvester again. After the 1995 reunion she reproduced a picture of Jake's dad dairy at work in Harbin. As this is the one of the few pictures we have of the family during that period, we are extremely grateful to Katharine. One of Katharine's most recent projects, her book "From Despair to Deliverance," may be purchased on-line from our book mall.

As more pictures come in we'll try to mount them here - as we have time. We are now working our third phase of Census2000, but still remembering the beautuful California scenery, from the redwoods in Sequoia to the palm trees and San Gabriel mountains in the "backyard" of Doris's house in Altadena.


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Jo Thiessen
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