For a long time now I have wanted to know something about my family history. Part of the reason is because I'd like to know where I came from, and part is because I am a history enthusiast and want to learn something about the lives of my ancestors. My biggest interest in history is people; I love reading histories of real people and the events of their times. I know that the ancestors on my mother's side of the family are fairly recent arrivals in America. My maternal grandfather's family, the Johnson's, emigrated from Denmark in the 1880s. The Hanson's, my maternal grandmother's family, emigrated from Norway at about the same time. My father, Robert Nathaniel Lower, died at the age of 37 years old at our home in Fullerton, California in May 1954. I was nine years old at the time. While our family (my sister Susan and I and mom and dad) was very close to my mother's family, for some reason we were never very close to my father's family. Maybe it was because our family and my maternal grandparents lived nearby in southern California while my paternal grandparents lived in Illinois. Regardless of the reason, after my father's death my mother and her family had little or no further contact with his family. My sister Susan Lower Barnhart and I are the only remaining members of our mother and father's family; there is no one left to ask about our father's family ancestry. This is the story of my search for my father's family history. I found a lot of surprises in my ancestry.
About the Author: I was born to Robert and Norma (Johnson) Lower in Pasadena, California in March of 1945. After being raised and educated in Fullerton, California, I started college at Fullerton Junior College majoring in geology. Vietnam intervened, and I served in the U.S. Army Infantry in the late 1960's, including a tour of duty in Southeast Asia, attaining the rank of Sergeant E-5. I later earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Hydrogeology from San Diego State University. I started my career as a hydrogeologist working on the implementation of the California Environmental Quality Act in San Diego County, California, in 1974. During the late 1970's I also taught geology courses in the evening program at San Diego Mesa College. I met the love of my life, Kathy, in San Diego in 1975; we were married in February 1977. In 1979 Kathy and I moved to Oklahoma where I took a job as a hydrogeologist in private industry. There I concentrated on ensuring corporate compliance with Federal and State environmental regulations. Work I did investigating and removing environmental contamination caused by oil companies and other industries from soil and groundwater and constructing groundwater monitoring and water supply wells took me to many parts of the United State. I spent a lot of time in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming ensuring the compliance of surface coalmines with Federal and State environmental regulations and the minimization of impacts to Wyoming groundwater resources. I am now retired. I lost my wife Kathy to cancer in 2001. In 2013 I published a book titled "A Journal of Unresolved Grief - One Man's Journey through the Abyss of Grieving Hell" as a way of honoring the memory of my late wife and to tell the story of my struggle with grief. My latest book, "A Journey Through Time - Discovering my Family History," tells the story of trying to find the ancestry of my father, Robert Lower, who died at the age of 37 years in 1954, when I was nine years old.