The Hager Family Album...

     ...is an effort of love.  My brothers and sister have many vivid memories of their father, but I have few.  I am the youngest of five children.  Together, my sister, Nancy and I bracket the Baby Boom.  Nancy, the oldest, was born right after the war, and I was born in 1961.  My father, who had served nearly four years in the U.S. Army when Pearl Harbor was attacked, was 53 when I was born.  He was only 60 when he died.  I was six.  So, this album means different things to me than it does to my sister.  To me, putting together this album is somewhat a quest of to discover my father.  For my sister, it is more of drive down memory lane.  For both of us, this project is at times painful, delightful, frustrating, and fun.  Is is an effort of love.

     This is an element of  a "quest" in this for Nancy and I, for not only did our father die prematurely, but we never had the privilege of knowing his parents, either.  Our father was but an infant when his father died.  His mother soon remarried.  While our father had some contact with the Hager family, it seems hat there were no enduring ties.  A few years after the war ended, William Hager left Chicago behind, along with his mother, his aunts, uncles and cousins.  He didn't speak in great detail any of us about his family in Chicago, and neither did our mother.  Once, I met our cousin Leola and her husband.  And, only once - at my father's funeral - I met my grandmother.  When my sister and I began the search for our family tree, it was truly a search for our family.

     All that my mother could tell us about the Hager family can be written in one paragraph.  Our father was named after his father, William John Hager, who had died while digging a well in Walla Walla, Washington.  Our grandfather and his brothers Emil and Wolfgang had immigrated from Germany when they were young men.  Wolfgang was a career sailor.  While most of this information was incorrect, at least the names were right.  It was enough to begin searching.  This was in the days before the Internet, so I began at the National Archives.  It was there, in the dimly lit  microfilm room, that I came upon the names of Emil and Wolfgang and Johann Wilhelm Hager in the 1900 census.  I was thrilled.  I wanted to tell everyone in the room.  What little information Mom had given us was enough to find their records.  I was hooked on family history.

     I believe the "thrill of it" is a large part of why Carol Brown has contributed to this project.  Carol is a cousin of sorts.   She is one of those that I refer to above; my brothers and sister 

 

 

and I never had the privilege of knowing her growing up.  Carol is an amateur genealogist, but professional in every sense of the word.  She has done an appreciable amount of research on the Meseth and Hager families.  For Carol, there is that sense of nostalgia, and perhaps somewhat of a quest for family, but I believe it is the "thrill" that drives her.

The Contributors

Part of the reason behind publishing this site is in hope of  receiving photos from distant relatives whom we do not know - finding photos that we do not have.  The photos in this album were provided by many people.  My sister, Nancy Hager-Okabe, contributed photos of the Hager family from 1930 onward, the Stephens family and the Farrell family.  Carol Brown has provided many of the Meseth and Hager family, as well as many of the original documents.  Back in the early 1980s, Clarence and Doris Meseth gave me an album full of photos and documents that date back a century or more.  Without these contributors, there would be no Family Album site.

About the speed of downloads...

In order to increase loading speeds, I have preloaded the background photos and created thumbnails of the family photos.  This means that the first time you click on the site, it may be slow to load, but after that, it should be much quicker.  If you clean out your cache when you close, then the site will be slow to load upon your next visit, also.  Many of the photos have considerably faded, and could not be corrected.  I have tried to improve upon them when possible.   When you click on a photo, the original scan will pop up, no matter how large or of what quality.  When you click on "Enhanced," the resulting photo will be the full photo, but of a more manageable size.

About the Quality

Not only are the Enhanced Photos more manageable in size for downloading, but they are more detailed, also.  This does not always a mean better looking photo.  Some photos are enhanced to bring out detail at the expense of beauty.  Others may not have needed any enhancement, while still others are beyond enhancing.  I hope you enjoy the site.

Steve Hager  18 July 2006