(includes Ubben/Dolen ancestry and 2 generations of descendants)
As the author of this website I thought it appropriate to offer a brief biographical sketch of my life and the quest for my ancestors. I am seventy-two years old and live in northeast Kansas. I was born on a farm a few miles east and south of Oketo, Kansas. My early education was at country schools and a local high school.
Following graduation from high school I found employment with the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway as a helper apprentice electrician in the communication department. After completing the apprenticeship I was called into service, and enlisted in the Navy in 1952. In the service I followed the same line of trade, as an interior communication technician, and during the Korean War served aboard the USS Graffias (AF-29) and USS Charr (SS-328).
Following my four year tour of service, I attended two years of college at Kansas State College and briefly returned to work for the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway as a two-way radio technician. In 1959 or thereabouts, I took employment with the Boeing Co. in Seattle, Washington. While employed with them I worked under the various job titles of experimental electronics technician, ground telemetry technician at Cape Canaveral, and micro-electronics developer technician in Kent, Washington.
It was in Seattle that I met my present wife, Barbara A. Dixon. In 1966, due to the declining health of my mother and uncle, Barbara and I elected to move to the northeast Kansas area to help them with the farm in their declining years. Following the death of my uncle in 1972, Barbara and I continued to live and farm on my grand-parents farm, where we raised our family. In December of 2002 we moved to a nearby town where we are now retired.
My sister, Arlene (Ubben) Schmidt, spent about fifteen years of her life researching the Dolen and Ubben ancestors before passing away from leukemia in 1989. She was quite successful on the Dolen side, but reached a stalemate after determining our g.g. grandparents on the Ubben side. The inability to correspond in German, as well as loss of the original church records from the Stapel-Meinersfehn, hampered her further research. Pursuant to her death, I took it upon myself to continue her work on my father’s ancestry.
My sister had established contact with one relative on the Eilers side of the family and I continued to correspond with him. Through a course in German I, the school of hard knocks, and frequent help from translation dictionaries, I learned to communicate auf deutsch via letters and e-mails with various distant relatives and friends in the Ostfriesland area of Germany. I continued my sister’s research on the Ubben side of the family, but it was not until the recent publication of Pastor Christian Meyers’ Ortsippenbuch Volume IX that I was finally able to further determine my father’s ancestors. Everyone who researches their German ancestry in the Ostfriesland area owes Pastor Meyers untold gratitude for his dedication in this field.