James Landes

Ancestors

Descendants

Problems/Questions Profile manager: James Landes [send private message]

Biography

My pix was taken more than 30 years ago. Wrinkled and gray with cataracts now.

Born in Dayton and grew up in Lima, Bowling Green, and Bellevue, Ohio. B. Sc 1960 and MD 1964 from The Ohio State University. Served with the US Navy from 1965-1987 as a medical officer. Private practice orthopedic surgery Fallbrook, CA 1987-2003. Married in 1966 and we have three sons and seven grandchildren.

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by James Landes at registration.

Sources

The original source for the Landes, Byerly, Rusmisel, Andrew, Miller, Brower, Sanger, Garber, Leedy, Cupp, Reeves, and Eichenberg families was a collection of handwritten notes and handmade family trees which had been gathered or drawn by my paternal Grandmother, [Willa Augusta [Rusmisel-2] Landes]. She was an avid collector of family lore long before computers. From 1945 to 1948, my sister, Jane, and I spent almost every Saturday during the school year and several weeks during the summer with our paternal grandparents on their farm north of Lima, OH. During that time, Grandma [Rusmisel-2] enjoyed telling about her youth growing up on a farm at the Natural Chimneys, near Mount Solon, Virginia. Jane and I loved to hear her stories. During the summer of 1955, when I was a teenager and lived about 80 miles away from our grandparent's farm, my sister and I spent about a week with them again. While there, I asked Grandma to tell us again about her family. She still had a good memory, but this time, she brought out her scrapbook of notes and family trees she had collected or made years before. Grandma passed away in 1970 in Napoleon, OH. Grandpa began to prepare to move to a retirement home and found and saved Grandma’s family history notes during moving. My Uncle George, my father's youngest brother, acquired the family history scrapbook binder. In 1980, I bought an Apple II computer and shortly after purchased a very early version of "Family Tree Maker." We stored files then on floppy discs. Uncle George and I shared an interest in family history. I told him about my new hobby. He thought that the notes saved by his mother, my grandma [Willa Augusta [Rusmisel-2]], would be a good start for the FTM project. He mailed them from Napoleon, OH, to me in Fallbrook, CA. Grandma's old family notes about the inter-relation of our families of the Rockingham and Augusta Counties of Virginia, especially those who had migrated to Bath Township, Allen County, Ohio, were a treasure. Over the next year or more, I transposed the lists of children, and their children and their children et c. of our ancestors who had migrated to the Valley of Virginia in the late 1700s into FTM. These notes obviously were not sourced by marriage licenses or certificates or census records, or public documents but were literally handed down to or collected by or remembered by Grandma [Rusmisel-2]. They ultimately came to me and then to FTM. When I discovered WikiTree.com about 2013, it was gratifying to find others who shared the same or connecting info.

However, I don't have it anymore as for providing this family ‘heirloom” source. On 22 October 2007, our home in Fallbrook, CA, burned to ashes literally to the ground in a wildfire with the loss of everything and specifically Grandma's collection of what was an irreplaceable and tangible family tree source.

by Edgar A. Guest "Ancestry" "My great-grandsire to me was just a name. Of him, his son was all I ever knew. Then to his care in times my father came. And Mother was the one he chose to woo. Her father's father long before had gone, to join with all I was not born to know. Death comes, but still, the family lives on. And will until the last of us to go. What hopes had they who lie so far behind? What dream had they for us they'd never see? Mothers and Fathers, gentle, gracious, kind. Who lived and loved that we might someday be."

My hope is that my grandchildren will want to maintain, add and update our family tree; their grandchildren will want to do so too. [Landes-150]