Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Ambrose Bierce

The parents of my grandfather, Milton Frederick Wendt, died when he was young, and as a result he was shuttled back and forth between various relatives until he reached the age where he could be out on his own. His lonely time growing up was filled with the kind of farm work and hard labor typical of kids of his age and class, and it moulded his character with an easy-going, generous exterior which stoically hid what must have been a painful and difficult youth. By the time I came along and was growing up, I always knew my grandfather as a hard worker who would come home from work for lunch, quickly eat, and then take a short nap before he went back. I had to be very quiet when he was around during his lunch hour. On his rare days off when he did not have to work on the car or do some other home repair chore, he would love to go down usually by himself, to the river or out to a lake and go fishing. There was also the occasional vacation where he and my grandmother would travel around pulling a little trailer behind their car, and often staying several days on the coast above Bodega Bay or down south in Yosemite. After he retired, I always remember him always working hard on some project out in his garage. Aside from my memory of him being a hard worker, I also remember him as a kindly old guy who was always attempting to elicit a laugh from those around him.

When I eventually got interested in finding something out about my grandfather's family, he had already been gone for nearly twenty years. My grandmother, his widow, had been the family historian for us all and had told me stories about various members all through my youth. However, it was not until she was nearly 90, that I began to seriously document and record the history which she told. By then I could only remember a rare story or two, about my grandfather's own childhood. It was with much regret when I finally realized that if I had only asked a few, clearly defined questions of him when he was alive, that many of the brick walls which I had soon hit in attempting to elucidate his family's history would have been much easier to traverse.

Initially, my only source on these matters was my grandmother, and she often admitted that her husband had talked very little about his parents or his childhood to her. Also, there was the additional issue that my grandfather's family were not well regarded by my grandmother's family. Her mother had attempted to dissuade her from even marrying into that "awful bunch" and that she would have her hand's full if she ever married a Wendt. From my viewpoint, one got the impression that over much of their sixty years together, my grandmother actively attempted to break my grandfather from his corrupting and feral past.

Though she had this deep distaste for most of his family, she became instrumental in preserving what was remembered of it for future generations. In this she followed her Uncle John Wakeland, who had been the Wakeland family story-teller and historian on her side of the family when she was growing up. From his example, and the occasional fact or bit of information which she would learn from other members of her family, she began to make a little collection of family memorabilia. This was mostly composed of old newspaper clippings, wedding announcements and ancient unmarked photos. She would often save such things from being thrown away by others of the family, who saw such things as valueless keepsakes the significance of which was better off forgotten and of no business to others. In keeping with a deep appreciation of the importance of family preservation, she also actively made an attempt to obtain more material by questioning and keeping in touch with the more distant family member both on her side and her husband's. This was an activity she continued to take an active interest in throughout her 99 years, and was something which we could always find a common ground to talk about up until the last year of her life.

As a child, I would often spend days with my grandparents, and invariably my grandmother would take out her boxes of photos, scrapbooks of clippings, and albums and we would spend an afternoon where she would pull out photos to show me and talk at great length about what it was she was showing me as well as what her life was like growing up first on the plains of Nebraska and then later in Santa Rosa. As a child, I would always wonder what ever happened to a lot of those people she would talk about and why they never came around for a visit. After my grandfather passed away, she eventually sold the old family home, and moved into an apartment complex for seniors. I would visit her whenever I came to town and we would usually talk for a few hours about how our lives were going. In about 1990, we started to talk about her two grandfathers which had been in the Civil War, and she pulled out her old scrap books and photos which I had remembered as a child to show me. Her pages of clippings and handwritten family lists of births, deaths, and marriages were starting to deteriorate with age. Much of what she had written down as lists of family members and details had become scattered in notes here and there as she had obtained them. Items were duplicated throughout the scrapbooks and occasionally contradicted one another. Of all the old photos which she had, many were unmarked and only she knew the significance of each of them. I started making copies of the pictures and recorded her talking about them. I also photocopied her scrapbooks. In my arrogant naivete I believed that I could reorganize everything, wrap up all this family history business in a couple of months or so in a single volume, and present her a book about it as a Christmas present.

Though indeed I was able to present to her that Christmas, with a neatly typed thin booklet, I was far from ever being done with the work I had promised to finish so quickly. Since that time there has been many revisions and I am no where near being any more done then I was with that first little booklet. Later when I was printing out copies of corrections and additions to my previous printings, I would often discover something new during the time I was trying to print it all out, and I would have to start all over again. In this regard, using a website became the only practical method of keeping up with all the changes, even though it had limited access to only those relatives who had computers at that time. By that time however, the volume of material which I had accumulated had become too unwieldy for anyone, except the rare crazed-like-me enthusiast. Most of the members of my family were thankful and happy with me just talking for a few minutes about some new find and then going on to some other more pertainant subject.

I also soon found out that the websites were also a great tools at reaching other more distant family researchers. I would never have had the opportunity to meet so many of them, especially in such a short period of time, if I had stuck to older methods. Launching a genealogy website was like laying out a batch of fishing lines in the ocean and then waiting for a bite. Aside from my own research and trips to out of the way ancestral places, this sporadic and often overwhelming material which would show up miraculously in my inbox greatly expanded my own studies and helped me traverse great difficulties that I would have been forever stuck behind. For this, I am always grateful and appreciative of anyone who reads these pages and offers a correction or addition, no matter how minor they may think that it is.

Curiously, when I first started to research the history of my grandfather's family, I found it much easier to work on than his mother's family. After some hard work as well as a few very lucky breaks, I had a large quantity of material for both his Fulkerson and Cockrill lines. My grandfather's father's line continued to prove to be much more difficult. It has only been through the rare contact with some distant Wendt cousins who saw the earlier version of the Fulkerson and Cockrill websites, that I finally felt I had enough here to finally launch this Wendt site.

As such, I have also included the history of my grandmother's family here as well, even though they had a shorter history in Sonoma County. That they had been in Sonoma County since the late 1890's was sufficient enough excuse for me to include them even though most of my focus had been on the earlier history of the county. My grandmother's material had its own difficult brick walls and cans of worms, as well as suffering from large gaps and a lack of unique family information. Though I felt that the material would not warrant a focused website of its own, this was a convenient place to put it. There were a lot of of old photographs taken in Sonoma county from her albums and a wonderful diary that her grandmother had kept (if only more of my ancestors had done such a thing) in 1905 while living in Santa Rosa. Having such items presented to a wider group of readers would undoubtedly benefit my research.

Naming this website also proved to be difficult. At first wanting to call it "The Wendt Family of Sonoma County" website, I realized that would not work here since there appears to have been another Wendt family in the county which has a history almost as long as mine. I had always thought the Wendt name was somewhat rare and unique but nothing could be further from the truth. Calling the website "The Frederick Wendt Family of Sonoma County" after the first Wendt in my family which had come to Sonoma, would not have worked either, since it appears that their first Wendt was also a Frederick. Though completely unrelated at least while in this country, many of the names of the members of that group are duplicated in my group (including a contemporary member who has my first name). Since my grandfather spent all of his adult life in Napa rather than Sonoma County, I could not name it after him either. So I settled with his father's name, William M. Wendt, which I believe is not found in the other Wendt group. That this so titled website provides a keystone to connect my two other websites for my grandfather's mother's families made good logical sense to me. That I probably know the least about my grandfather's parents as compared to some of their ancestors is one of those persistent kinds of questions which will probably always incite me to continue this search. This work then is dedicated to my grandfather's stories which were never told.