Information on the Topic
Is there a trait or an occupation that seems to have been in your family tree for generations? Is there a line in your genealogy that's been in a particular place for a long, long time? Maybe you have Long as a surname.
Unlike the Bachelor Uncle topic, this one I could apply multiple of ways. Some of these are:
- temper and stubbornness - Yep, on all sides and one of the traits my husband has pointed out multiple of times.
- business owner and cooking/baking - Yep, on both sides of the family although some family members have more of a gift than others or so I'm told.
- being the country and away from crowds - Yep, once again on all sides.
I think I'm going to concentrate on the business owners. Sometimes they had combined the business owner with cooking and baking.
On my mother's Gauquie side, we have had people as far back as the My 3rd and 4th great grandfathers Jean Baptiste and Jean-Francois Gauquie in 1806 were farmers in Belgium. I consider farms a small business and they had to sell whatever they were farming somehow.
Document Credit: Herve Costille
Then you have the descendants who were a range of occupations:
Johannes Jacobus Gauquie (born 1792 died 1833) was an innkeeper in Boezinge, Belgium.
Desiderius/Desire Franciscus 'Didier' Gauquie (born 1820 died 1878) who owned (along with his wife) a small business of a baker.
Many of Desiderius' children had farms or owned their own or married into families where they owned their own businesses like Hotel Gauquie in Belgium.
Jules Gauquie (born 1871 died 1946) he had his own diary farm and sold milk which his cousin took to market for him. Then he turned to owning land which was later either sold or given away to his second wife, Belle.
Many Jules' children had their own businesses as well. You had sons who took up farming and one who started his own business of cleaning chimneys and furnaces. His daughter started up their own dance studio.
From there the family doesn't really do too well with the owning of businesses or farming. However, Jules' great grandson, Jason, does own his business of heating and air conditioning company from 2002.
To go further with the baking and cooking, my paternal great grandmother (Mary or Maryanna) all loved to bake and cook. She would spend hours baking and cooking away. Further, my paternal great grandfather (Adam), loved to make Polish sausage and eventually made his own smokehouse. People would drive from all over to buy his smoked food. My great grandfather was so busy making the smoked food, he had to limit how many times a week he made it because the other part of the business would suffer if he didn't.
Credit: J. Schmitz - Her parents outside their Polish food store in Linden, New Jersey in the 1930s.
They owned a small Polish deli in New Jersey. A few times they had to close or move it around due to the economy, but he always came back to running the business. He loved doing it and had taken serious hits when the Depression happened in 1929 and during the wars because he was trying to look out for his community so he would let people slide on food and payments. This ment at times, he would have to close their store and even once he had to work in a factory for a short time.
When Adam passed away, after a long battle of stomach cancer, and they had to run a small sentence in the business directory about his passing because people were still trying to contact him after he stopped working.
The love for baking and cooking has passed down. I like cooking and baking various dishes. However, the one who went even farther is my cousin, John S. Schmitz Jr who is an Executive Chef at Ocean Center in Florida. John's brother, Joseph, run his own accounting firm in Florida as well.
No matter how you look at it, we've have a long line of running businesses and the love of cooking and baking.
