Publisher's Synopsis
For a long time now I have wanted to know something about my family history. Part of the reason is because I'd like to know where I came from, and part is because I am a history enthusiast and want to learn something about the lives of my ancestors. My biggest interest in history is people; I love reading histories of real people and the events of their times. I know that the ancestors on my mother's side of the family are fairly recent arrivals in America. My maternal grandfather's family, the Johnson's, emigrated from Denmark in the 1880s. The Hanson's, my maternal grandmother's family, emigrated from Norway at about the same time. My father, Robert Nathaniel Lower, died at the age of 37 years old at our home in Fullerton, California in May 1954. I was nine years old at the time. While our family (my sister Susan and I and mom and dad) was very close to my mother's family, for some reason we were never very close to my father's family. Maybe it was because our family and my maternal grandparents lived nearby in southern California while my paternal grandparents lived in Illinois. Regardless of the reason, after my father's death my mother and her family had little or no further contact with his family. My sister Susan Lower Barnhart and I are the only remaining members of our mother and father's family; there is no one left to ask about our father's family ancestry. This is the story of my search for my father's family history. I found a lot of surprises in my ancestry.
