I have received the Restle Family Tree data disk from my Uncle Robert Protsik in California. Uncle Bob started family tree research over 40 years ago and has published the Pothast, Protsik, Restle, Badik/Gjasik trees and more. He has entrusted the Restle Tree to me and I shall care for it for a while until it becomes my time to pass it on (hopefully) to a younger generation of geneologist in the family.
There are two ties between the Restle and Lucas trees:
A third link is William and Josephine's son John marrying C Isabell Deimling in 1920. This is another link to the Deimling family.
I have finally found (again) the Lucas Reunion books! Sharon (Burkhardt) Williams had passed these on to me many years ago, along with the bingo game, and I had carefully stored them away - so well that I had to seriously dig to find them. Anyway, the box contains spiral bound notebooks, copied pages, mailing lists, and the yearly 'Minutes' of each reunion. It was interesting to see what people did before the days of computers. The extremely sad part is the books only go back to the 52nd. reunion in 1969. The normal course of affairs was the family that was going to host the reunion the next year would take all the books home. Well, whomever was hosting the following year had a house fire and all the books were destroyed.
The 68th reunion, the last reunion, was held in 1985. Interest in keeping the reunion going was waning and finding someone to take on hosting the next year was becoming fairly difficult. Sharon remembers sending out a questionnaire to family members after the 68th reunion. The response in general what that the tree had branched and grown so much that families were having their own reunions. Somehow, the Luckey Legion Hall never got rented for the following year and that spelled the demise of an annual event that had started in 1918.
In March 2021 I had the time to update the LucasReunion.com web site. The site is now mobile friendly and hopefully easier for you to bring up photos on your phone and possibly show to older generations to help identify folks in the pictures. Each photo is assigned a number 'tree0000' so please reference this number when you contact me. I can also rescan a photo at a higher resolution and 'touch it up' in Photoshop if you wish to get a print.
A worldwide pandemic afforded me the time to be able to return to working on the tree. I was able to locate a program, WebTrees, that would work the way I wanted AND be able to convert the data into standard GEDCOM format. The online family tree can be accessed by clicking the 'Family Tree' link in the menu. For privacy and security reasons, the WebTrees program does not show any person that is living. If you are a relative and wish to have access to the full tree where you can update you and your family's info, please let me know and I will set you up a login account.
John R Lucas, son of Lawrence A Lucas and great-grandson of Sebastian Lucas, and his wife Grace held a family reunion at their home outside of Helena, Ohio. The goal was to restart the Sebastian & Margaret (Deimling) Lucas Reunion. A good turnout was present and everyone enjoyed playing cornhole and horseshoes and much general visiting and catching up by family members. Grace's famous chili, a corn roast and potluck assured there was much food to be had.
Ethel Marie (Burkhardt) Pilzecker & grandson Robert Pearson publish 'Grandma's Story - The History of a Sesquicentennial Farm.' The book tells of Ethel's life growing up south of Perrysburg, Ohio near Five Points Road. There are many stories about the Burkhardt and, her mother's side, the Lucas families.
Ethel was the 7th of 8 children born to Frank Joseph and Mary Gertrude (Lucas) Burkhardt.
The book can be viewed online here.
Photo taken about 1920
The first (and only) John J and Emma M (Burkhardt) Family Reunion was held at a shelter house in Basic Park in Luckey, Ohio. We had a nice attendence by decendants of John and Emma. Much data was gathered by John J's grandson, John R Lucas, for the family tree. Unfortunately, he was so busy gathering data that he barely took any photos! So if you happen to have photos from the day, please forward them on to him.
