Stair

 a Family History

Stair Family History © 2013 | All Rights Reserved

If you scroll to the bottom of every page you will find an index that will help you navigate around the site. If you hover your cursor over several of the page names in the index, additional smaller indexes will drop down with additional pages. This site is not anywhere near complete, so check back often to see what is added. AND-make sure to forward YOUR family's info , stories and pictures so they can be considered to be added to the site. 

I mentioned that it was very rare to find anything written on the back of any photos from the 1800s. However the 'BACK' of two of the photos in the album are shown below, were further proof, that the pictures were indeed of our family. With that being said, there are still many people in the album who we don't know who they are, but luckily, several that we do...

Above: My great-great grandmother, Auguste ne'e Bucholz Stier.

Of course the large framed photo of the two is a composite of the two pictures I have already had in the photo album, not a separate picture that was taken. However these two photos Mark and Tim had were hung in Lester Stair's house for generations, and with Minnie's name on the back must have been commissioned by or for her. 

Same exact frame as the one at Tim's house, and now compare Auguste on the left with a picture from the family album, that I had seen many, many times without knowing who it was:

Lucky for me it was a Sunday. I jumped in my car and drove (quickly) to Tim's house, hoping all the way there that he would consider letting us open the frame to see if anything was written on it . I have not had much luck with writing on pictures, but if there was even the slightest chance, this could be one of our biggest family history discoveries.  When I arrived at Tim's house I could not believe what I was seeing. A large, fancy version of a picture from the album! I asked Tim if we could pull of the back to see if there was ANY writing. Tim never hesitated, he allowed us to carefully pull the back off. At first, nothing, but then we realized there was a piece of paper covering the actual back of the photograph. We removed the sheet of paper. At first it looked like nothing was there, however, written in pencil, VERY faint, in quite large letters were the words, "Charley Stars Minnie Mather her father" .To see this writing, click here but it is light, and be prepared to magnify the picture to barely see it. This was the biggest breakthrough in family history research I had in over 25 years of research. This meant that this photograph was now proven to be Carl Christian ("Charles") Stier- my great-great grandfather who came over on the ship from Germany as a boy in 1856!   I took many pictures of this picture and as soon as I was home I emailed the find to my dad and Uncle Mark.   

Lightning Strikes TWICE in One Day

After seeing the picture (of the picture) my Uncle Mark called me and said, when Tim saved that picture from the dumpster (during cleaning out of his grandfather's house) he saved TWO. Mark continued that Tim had given him one, since neither of them knew who they were. Mark said the one he had has "that same guy and a woman"!  OK, I was in shock earlier, now I'm full bore speeding out to Mark's in Cudahy to see who "Auguste" (Charle's) wife was...

​The picture from Mark's basement:

I immediately recognized this as a picture I had looked at a thousand times in the photo album- see below:

For brevity, I am going to skip WAY ahead to 2015. On a Friday night in March, Tim Dietrich, grandson of Lester Stair, tells me he has an old portrait of a man that had hung in his grandfather Lester's house. He was not even sure if it was a relation, because many of the things in his grandparents house came with the house. I told him to take a picture of it and send it to me.  Two days later, I received an email with a small picture that said, "here's the picture I promised" -and I went into shock:

Again, another definite match of a known relative to a person in the photo album!

A match! A definitive match of KNOWN family members to those in the family album! Here is another great example, look at the girl in the middle of the back row- George's sister Louiza. Now look at the following photo from the album:​

Donna said that the upper right is Wilhelmina, also, when married known as Minnie Mather. She also said that the girl in the lower right was for certain Christina. She said these were the sisters of George Stair my great grandfather. He had five sisters, and the sixth (lower middle) was the daughter of Carl ("Charles") second wife.

Now look at the girl in the upper left (Mary). Compare the picture above of Mary, with the following two photos from the photo album I had had for a long time:

I was given a photo album of large portraits that were clearly from the 1800's and it was implied to me that it was our family. I had no way for a long time of confirming nor denying that the excellent portraits within this book were of our family or not.  I could not identify one person in the book.

In the 1990s I was reaching out for help. I needed to find people also working on family history. At this time I separately met two people related to our family and working on family history from other angles. These two people were Donna Mather and Dianne Smith.

I met Donna Mather, who was married to a descendant of my great grandfather (George's) sister Wilhelmina. Wilhelmina married a Mather and her married name was "Minnie Mather". When I met Donna , she came with many missing puzzle pieces I was looking for. We met at the Mukwonago park on a summer day. I had begun to take a special (film) camera with me, that would take pictures of other pictures, a hint I learned at a genealogy seminar. This way when you took pictures of pictures and had them developed, you also now had negatives. When I met Donna the information (photographically) I was about to receive, would prove once and for all whether the book I had was pictures of our family or not...

The first, and probably most amazing picture she had, was of six girls in the 1800s. She said they were George's (my great-grandfather's) sisters! The daughters of Carl Christian and Auguste Stier- WOW!!!!  Below is a copy of the picture she had, and immediately below the picture of the six sisters she had, will be a few pictures from the photo album...

Finding Our Family Page 2