A Family's Journey Through Time
This site has as it's starting point a focus on documenting the ancestry of the Kerzman, Mahowald, Kvaale, and Schlichting family lines. This reflects the confluence of my (Steve Kerzman, creator and administrator of this site) own particular set of ancestors: Richard J. Kerzman, my father: the Kerzman-Kvalle side, and LeeAnn E. (Mahowald) Kerzman, my mother: the Mahowald-Schlichting side. The picture to the left is an image of a
McLean County, ND USA township map.
It's significance is that the majority of my immediate Kerzman-Mahowald-Kvaale-Schlichting ancestors, including my parents and grandparents, settled here in the early part of the 20th century to pursue opportunities, including homesteading, and raise their families. Both myself and my siblings were born and raised on the John P. Kerzman homestead location near Roseglen, McLean, ND USA - a farmstead which is still in the family to this day. These ancestors had most commonly spent a period of time living and working in Minnesota before coming to North Dakota to pursue new homesteading and other opportunities in their newly adopted country. Minnesota was a sort of bridge between they and their families emigrating from the 'old county' - Kerzman's & Mahowalds from Luxembourg, Kvaale's from Norway, and Schlichting's from Germany - and their new lives in McLean County.
In addition to the obvious goals of documenting ancestry, this site was created as a stand-alone website to give me more control of what can be done on it, but even more importantly to better protect the biographical data of those documented on it - both living and dead. Plus there is no monthly subscription to pay! Access to this site, beyond the home page, is password protected and anyone wanting access to it will have to apply for log-in credentials.....which will only be given to family and friends. If you happen across this home page, and have a family connection and want to know more, use the 'Contact Us' form on the site to get in touch. Now, I may have created this site, but I want to give credit to all those who have contributed family information, either directly to me, or indirectly via their work on well known genealogy sites like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, MyHeritage.com, FindaGrave.com and others. I have liberally 'borrowed' from these sources to construct this site. My thanks to all involved for their past and (hopefully) future contributions. I would also like to particularly point out the utility of luxroots.org, an inexpensive, yet very exhaustive genealogy site based in Luxembourg....it has been extremely useful to me given their access to original source documents in Luxembourg. Lastly, it obviously goes without saying, that a site like this can never be 'finished'.....it can only ever be expanded and improved, and I look forward to continuing to work with those with an interest in doing so. Thanks for taking the time to look at the site!
This section highlights people from the Kerzman-Kvalle side of the family, specifically those connected with my paternal grandfather John P. Kerzman and grandmother Hildur M. Kvalle. It may also contain some information on the Hill family, as Marie C. Hill was my grandfather's first wife before passing away at a young age and his subsequent re-marriage to Hildur.
This section highlights people from the Mahowald-Schlichting side of the family, specifically those connected with my maternal grandfather Lawrence M. Mahowald and grandmother Elizabeth O. Schlichting.
This area is for extra history or person pages, and for some useful web links.
Click on a surname of interest to be taken through to more detailed information on this site about ancestors (and their spouses) with that surname. The larger the name appears below the more frequently it occurs in our data set.
