Jan Ehlers ⁹⁹¹

  General Notes:

August 1, 2001
Dear All,

I thought I would send you a note telling you a bit about myself and who I am. I'll get the worse part out of the way I'm 43 oh god Im' glad that parts done. I'm married to the most understanding man alive, he has to be right to live with someone who lives and breathes geanal. We have been married for 22 years. Yet we've known each other all of our lives and even had gone to the same church. But always going in oppsite directions. We were set up on a blind date by my girl friend and haven't been apart since. We have one child a boy William Andrew who turns 20 this year. BTW he's the 7th William Reineking in a row, I discovered that in my research, but thats another story. he moved out this year on his own, which was very hard for me, but I've adjusted. I'm still considered the food mart for him yet. He does all his food shopping from my freezer.
I've worked in food service most of my life. I now am the food service director for a drug rehab center for teens. We are very small we average about 12 to 18 kids. Very low stress. I like it there an have been there now for the past 3 years. William my husband attended Jr. college for two years and is a Certified Automechanic. He works for a company called Graham Tire in Fairmont, Mn. and has worked there for 20 years. He loves to ride motorcycle and we own at last count 19. Some run some dont, and some are just for parts.
On the weekends we don't work, we take off and go touring on or goldwing 1100. We have been doing this for the past two years now. We just get up on Saturday and ride and where ever we end up at the end of the day thats where we stay. Then in the morning we turn around and ride back home. Our favorite place to ride tho is on the Root River by Amhearst, Preston, and Harmony we follow the river over to the Mississippi, and then follow the mighty Miss. Now doing geanal. I find it interesting that not only do I love this area my ancestors also loved the same area. Now our rides consists of me saying " hey how about we ride over to Martin county I need to walk a cemetery over there." of curse he's all for the ride, but his response is "can't I just sit under a tree and wait until your done?"....hehehhe which of course is ok with me, because I have so many names going through my mind that I hope to find that I'm afraid he'll miss someone and then I'll have to go back over it....lol
How I got hooked on geanal. is all my mother's fault. She was doing research as fas back as I can remember while she was alive but only when time afforded it. I can remember on Memorial day she would take us kids with her to the cemetery where her sister was buried and put flowers on her grave. Then walk us over to where other Winch's were buried and tell us who they were, and how we were related. But then when your ten you don't really care who those dead people were, you just wished she hurry up. Oh how I wished I had listened now! When my mother died and we were going through her things we found the old note book she kept with geanal. notes in there. We (my sister and I) stored it away and now 9 years later have dug it out and decided to pick up where she left off. Believe me she would be so shocked with all the information we have now. Now this may sound odd weird or crazybut at times I feel like shes guiding me. The reason I say this is because of the day I was out at the nashville cemetery where she's buried and a large majority of the other Winch's are also, I was there taking pics of the stones to use as reference material later on. Well on the way home there is another cemetery just 3 miles or so from Nashville, now I've never stopped there before as I didn't believe we had family there. But that day it was like some force made me go there. Well I noticed they had a huge map enclosed in glass of the cemetery so I thought well I'll just go look and see. And there in bold letters was the name WINCH, i thought mmmmmmm so I went to go look and there she was Alison Winch first wife of James. Now I've drove by that cemetery for years and never gave it a sceond thought. I do recall mom saying someday she should check out that cemetery, but in her notes she didn't have any info on Alison. Odd? or just coincidence?
Well I hope I haven't bored ya too much I just felt I would share myself with you.

Jan Reineking

Jan married William Reineking.