Tennie History from my mom's cousin David Tennie

The following was emailed from my mom's cousin David Tennie on August 26, 2009. More on the Tennie side! Joseph Tennie is my great-great grandfather.

This is Joseph Tennie's obituary taken from the Appleton Post Crescent on August 11, 1926.

JOSEPH TENNIE Joseph Tennie, Sr. 82, 212 N. Story Street died at 6 o’clock Tuesday evening. He was born February 6, 1844 at Ludge, Westphalia, Germany. In 1871 he came to America, spending the first two or three years in Appleton, after which he moved to a farm in the town of Greenville. Seven years ago he retired and again moved to this city. Mr. Tennie is survived by his wife, Mrs. Emma Tennie; eight children, Sister M. Ermelinda, Milwaukee; Mrs. Frank Nussbaum and Mrs. Martin Hein of Center; Oscar and George Tennie of Greenville; John Tennie, Ellington; and Mrs. Henry Viotto and Joseph Tennie of Appleton. A brother Henry Tennie of Appleton, and a sister, Mrs. Frances Kappe in Germany, and 27 grandchildren also survive. Funeral services will be held at 9 o’clock Friday morning at St. Joseph Catholic church in Appleton and burial will be in St. Joseph cemetery.

Two things to note: 1) the Town of Lügde was spelt wrong in our Great Grandfather's obituary which made searching for our ancestors difficult. 2) Joseph was survived by a sister living in Germany in 1926, which would be the key to finding our Great Grandfather's birthplace.

With the aid of the Internet, and the fact that most young people in Germany all speak English today, I was able to find Frances Kappe's death record.

Franziska (Tennie) Kappe died at the age of 88 years old on the 10th of May, 1935 at 1 p.m. in the afternoon. Franziska is buried at St. Mary's Catholic Church (Kath. Kirchenegemeinde) Lügde. The following is a letter I received August 21, 2009:

Dear Mr. Tennie, 8-21-2009
I am Jürgen van Elten. I am the son of Agnes Kappe, sister of Fritz Kappe, whom you wrote a letter. My mother often told me that two brothers of her grandmother Franziska left Germany, Heinrich (Henry) and Josef Tennie. Franziska(engl. Frances) was married with Franz. Franz and Franziska had a son and a daughter, Dorothee and Friedrich. Friedrich was married with Anna, the mother of five children, my mother, my aunts and uncles. Friedrich and Anna were the parents of my mother, Agnes, her brother Fritz, whom you wrote the letter, Rita, Maria and Hubert. The full prename of my mother is Agnes Franziska Kappe. My mother is 86 years old.We are glad to be able to show you some more documents about a lot of common relatives. We would be also glad to meet you in September in Lügde. In particular my mother would be happy to meet you and your wife Sue for speaking about her ancestors. She doesn’t speak English, but when I or one of my brothers translate, it will be possible to have a conversation with you and your wife.If you want to get more information before your journey to Germany you can write me or my uncle Fritz.
best greetings
Jürgen van Elten Lügde, Germany

I must have sent 30 letters out to random Tennie's and Kappe's that I found in the German phone book using the Internet and I was very excited when I got this letter sent back to me. At my niece's wedding this past Saturday (my sister Mary's daughter) I shared this letter from Jürgen van Elten with my Dad, Leonard, and Harold Urban. I have some other information on Tennie's living in Lügde, but nothing yet to report. Wish me luck on our trip to Germany. I will send you an update when I get home and get organized. Thanks for initiating the contact. Everyone take care. Dave Tennie

25 things...

Twenty-Five Things About Me

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it is because I want to know more about you.

1.       I’m just paranoid enough about losing this list, that I’m writing it in a Word doc first and saving it. (Thanks for the warning, Jill!)

2.       I'm anal enough that I’m also going to edit it before I post it.  Yup, I’m a perfectionist, sometimes to a fault. I’ve been working on that problem for a long time.

3.       The most important thing in my life is that I am a Christian. I happen to be a WELS Lutheran.

4.       The most important person in my life is my wife Lisa. Without her I would be lost and I would not be the person I am today.  My relationship with Lisa has to take priority even over my kids, but for their benefit: If Lisa and I do not have a happy marriage then we will not serve well as parents. 

5.       We are committed to our marriage, and we will work hard to ensure that we are happy.  We will not consider the possibility of divorce, nor will we ever suffer through and unhappy marriage together. We are committed to WORK HARD toward our long term happiness.  We take vacations and go on marriage retreats for that very purpose. Just as I need to train for my job, Lisa and I work to improve our “skills” as husband and wife.  And yet, I still screw up constantly.

6.       My kids have created true purpose in my life, in a way that no other responsibility or passion can. Being a good father, and a role model as a Christian, a worker, a father, and a husband, is the most important responsibility I have.  Through this purpose, I fulfill my other goals.

7.       Lisa and I met and started dating in high school. We both worked at McDonald’s and while I knew who she was (the cute girl with an incredible smile, who was just a bit suspicious of me!). We only worked together one day, but the rest is history.

8.       I can officially say that I’ve known Lisa for over half my life already. We’ll be married 10 years this November, and we’ve been together for a total of 14 years or so, even after subtracting the 3 years we broke up while I was in college.  By the time we’re retired, we’ll have spent about three quarters of our life together!  And on from there.  We work to stay healthy so that we’ll have no problem going strong past 50 years!

9.       Lisa and I are unified in our priority of faith, marriage, and kids. And while I showed her some of this list, I didn’t need to ask her the question in order to know that she would agree. Well, she would especially agree with #1 and 2, but that is another story!

10.   My kids are Zachery, Dylan and Cora. Their personalities and learning, their similarities and differences, amaze me every day.  We adopted one of the kids, and the other two are born to us. If you don’t, know, I doubt you can guess! We are done with children for now… but we never say never to another adoption some day.

11.   I am passionate about teaching kids and teen agers.  Right now I teach 7-8 grade Sunday School, and before that High School Youth Group.  I want to impact their lives in a way that no one impacted me at that age. I usually had great teachers in school, but no one leading me as a Christian.

12.   While my parents are Christians, unfortunately I don’t count them as significant mentors to me. We were “every Sunday” Catholics, and I suppose that is their biggest contribution to my faith: I understand that it is a responsibility (and now I know that it is a joyous blessing!) to worship every Sunday.

13.   I consider myself lucky that another girl I met in high school – just before meeting Lisa – had parents who were not afraid to challenge me. They managed to point out my situation as a sinner, and tell me of the opportunity and need for me to have Jesus Christ as my savior.  They gently corrected me when I said absurd, 16-year-old things. Thanks, Kermit and Debbie. It was blessed to have met Julie.

14.   I realized at some point that there would be a chance of my mom reading this note on Facebook, and then I was worried about some of what I was going to write. Then, I realized that there could be a hundred close and not-so-close friends reading it, so why should it matter?  Sheesh, I’m 33 years old after all!

15.   I literally thank God that I got away with so many of the things I did when I was young without hurting myself or anyone else too badly. I hope the reason is so that I can teach my kids and others to do better than I did.

16.   I still don’t know whether my parents were naïve of my actions, but I suspect that they were either self-involved in their own problems or just unsure how to confront my behavior when I was a teen ager.

17.   Lisa and I plan to be the parents that will host our kids and their friends at our home…

18.   …and, since I know what I got away with… there isn’t a chance on earth that I’m NOT going to confront them when they try to get away with things.  Things will be stopped before they ever start!

19.   It was only once I admitted that I was a sinner, that I also started to get over my perfectionism. Once I realized my need for forgiveness, it made it possible for me to forgive others. And once I admitted that I was (and still am) a sinner, it also helped eliminate my self-righteous need for perfectionism.

20.   After being raised as a work-righteous Catholic, it was almost hard to understand the simple Biblical truth that God grants us forgiveness freely; that salvation is a Gift and that Jesus did the work for us!  Wow!  Once I grasped that, a true gratefulness came over me and defines the reason that I want to live life as a good person. But now that I’m forgiven, I want to live that way.

21.   My business passion is toward modern, energy efficient, Green design and construction. I love what I do. I love changing people’s lives by changing their homes. I love helping them, by helping to reconcile their needs to their desires. I love delivering something different… something better than they expected, but in a way that ultimately meets their needs.

22. If I have any ideas of becoming wealthy, it is only because in the course of things I’ll be able to give even more money away for charity and philanthropy.  That's the reason I enjoy doing so many things like Extreme Makeover Home Edition and the Green Built Home Makeover.

23.   I seem to teeter precariously between humility and self-promotion. I worry that I still often pass over humility in favor of the temptation of selfish-promotion.

24.   I’ve been secretly hoping for someone to tag me for this list for a while. I really enjoy reading the lists that other people post.

25.   I have the most fun with Facebook when there are reasons to comment on other people’s pictures and postings, and when there is reaction back and forth.

 

 

Like Grandpa Leo, I liked my cars! (Part 1 of 3?)

The most imortant part in my life: Learning to drive stick!
When I had my temp license in December 1991, my cousin Nick Thompson was brave (or foolish!) enough to teach me to drive stick shift in his Volkswagon GTI. It was a snowy night, and since there was enough snow on the ground to spin the wheels a little bit, I quickly learned to start without killing the engine, burning off too much of his tires or the clutch for that matter. It was a piece of cake and I was thrilled.

Car #1: Absolute P-O-S.
I turned 16 on February 8, 1992. Probably within a month or so, I bought my first piece of junk: a 1984 Chevy Cavalier. But the key to me was that it had a stick shift. I paid $400 for the car from someone at my high school named April Johnson, and I surely paid too much! I had to add a quart of oil every time I filled up with gas, which was about 200 miles or so. A friend of my dad's named Chuck Meudt helped me change out the faulty air pump and also taught me to replace the Throttle Body Injector because the car didn't idle right. I tried 3 different TBI's from a junk yard and the car never did run right. By July, I was done with that car. I'm not sure who I sold it to. Seems like I still sold it for $325. I was working at Piggly Wiggly grocery store and earning about $3.85 per hour.

Car #2: Luxury?
In July 1992, I bought a 1983 Pontiac 6000 LE from an older man in west Madison. He was the original owner and worked in sales, so it has 160,000 miles on it. I paid $1600 for this car. It was silver, and the interior was a bit worn but completely clean. The car was loaded with options including power seats, A/C, power windows and locks, and even had a CB radio for cruising East Wash. This was the car in which I started to build the boomin' system. I built a custom subwoofer box for the trunk. Chris Cormack, Peter Luttrell, Bill Franks and I made a few trips to the Sony Outlet Store in Kenosha to pick up great stereo parts. I installed new speakers and a 10-disc changer, amplifier, and head unit. Other than the rattles, it was a pretty great system. In Mr. Ableidinger's Physics class, we even used the decibel meter: I was able to crank out 126dB it seems. Yes, I have a little bit of ringing in my ears. Kids, don't try this yourselves.

The engine ran great for over a year; I eventually started to have problems with the radiator and the transmission. The torque converter clutch was failing, and I had to carry several gallons of water with me during the summer of 1993 because of the leaky radiator. I started searching for a new car, and I unloaded the silver Pontiac 6000 for about $1100, with 177,000 miles on it.

Car #3: My hot rod
My third car was the one that nearly did me in. It was my prized, shiny black 1986 Chevy Cavalier Z24 with a 4-speed and a sunroof. How could I have been so foolish to buy another Chevy Cavalier, you ask? Well, I reasoned that since this one had the same V6 as my excellent Pontiac did, then it must be an OK car! Man, was I wrong. It seems like I bought the car for $2100, but it must have cost me at least that much again in repairs... probably even $3K in repairs over the next year that I owned it. I was young and foolish, and boy, did I want a hot fast car. I paid for it dearly.

The boomin' system came over to this car; I was pretty much an expert at pulling door panels and dashboards apart between the ages of 16 and 25. The V6 and 4-speed were pretty fast. Granted, nothing like the 1980-ish Camaro that Tom Virnig had (105 MPH on Hwy I one time), nor like the 1984-ish Mustang 5.0 of Craig Koltes. But all the same, this was MY hot car.

Then winter came. The timing chain jumped a sprocket and cost me $$. The bearings in the camshaft started to fail and I had low oil pressure. Spring came, and some hag backed into me in a parking garage when I took my ACT test or something like that at UW-Madison. The Herbrand's german shepherd even dented the car with his teeth because that crazy dog used to chase cars that went past their farm on Easy Street. I couldn't win with this lemon. It must have spent more time in the shop than it did running, but I can't even remember what all the problems were.

Finally, the camshaft bearing just simply failed. It actually happened when some guy was test driving the car as I was trying to sell it. The engine had a knock. In the end, I sold the car for about $1500 to a guy named Dale Payne who used to be a manager when I worked at McDonalds. Funny thing is, he lives down the street from the house I built in Conservancy Place now. I worked for my dad and also at McDonalds at some point during this process. I know at McDonald's I made between $4.25 and $5.25 during this time period, because I started as a weekend opener.

More cars to come another day!

My reasons to start blogging

I've been learning about the family history on my Mom's side for the last few years. My grandpa Leo Tennie died in 2004, and my grandma Dorathy Tennie died the day after my birthday, February 9, 2008. I spent a fair amount of time with Grandma Tennie in the 18 months preceding her death and got to talk to her about a lot of things. But even more importantly, Grandpa Tennie was a prolific writer and even more a record keeper. Since I never know what this life may hold or when I could be called home to my Lord, I should start writing now.



Moreover, I recently joined Facebook and found out just how many Degnan's there are in the nation and world. I had never heard anything about my dad's side of the family, but I was pretty sure he has no Degnan first-cousins. We got together with my parents for dinner and I learned a lot more. My mom had something my dad's sister wrote a few years ago with Degnan family history going all the way back 5 generations to Ireland! So between the information from Grandpa Tennie and Aunt Judy, I now know a little more about both sides of my family.

I'll trace the Degnan family back to Longford County, Ireland.

But, as I was reading what Grandpa Tennie wrote tonight, I noticed how he really likes to talk about his cars. And that might just be my first set of personal history.

Off on a new adventure.