HOW I WAS INSPIRED TO CLIMB MY TREE

  1.  INSPIRATION FOR CLIMBING MY TREE

When I was a first-grader in a little Sargent County, North Dakota, country school of all eight grades, Kingston #1, commonly called the Fust School, I was naturally listening in on all the other grades' recitations with the teacher.  My ears perked up when the name John Fust was discussed by the sixth graders during their history lesson from the green textbook, The Past Lives On, by Edna McGuire.  Being that my name was Karen Fust (pronounced "Foost"), I wondered if somehow we Fusts were descended from this famous man in the 1400's who had lent money to John Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press.  I also knew that my grandparents Fust had come to America from Germany.  Could we somehow be related?

In 1976, the Bicentennial Year of our country, the year of the great miniseries called "Roots", and the wonderful Gauche-Curtis Family History book by Larry's Aunt Letty Gauche, I, then the mother of 4 sons from 1 to 12 years of age and a full-time 4th-grade teacher, was inspired to start researching our tree and find out if John Fust was an ancestor.

First, I went to the Klamath County Library and checked out a couple books on beginning the climb.  With that background information and rough-drawn copies of blank pedigree charts and family group sheets, I was all prepared to quiz my parents, Raymond William Fust and Catherine Margaret Keiser Fust, when they visited us that fall in Klamath Falls.

Based on their recollections of their parents and grandparents, I prepared a set of questions that I sent to my Fust and Keiser aunts and uncles.  I am greatly indebted to Aunt Marie, Aunt Rosa, Aunt Huldah, Aunt Loretta, Aunt Frances, Uncle Alfred, and Cousin Sylvia for all their suggestions and help.

Are we Fusts from North Dakota descended from the historic John Fust (about 1400-1466)?  Well, no, not directly by the Fust name line, for sure.  You see, Johann Fust had no sons but only one daughter, Christina, who married her father's partner, Peter Schoeffer, who had won the printing press and business from Gutenberg in a legal suit when Gutenberg couldn't repay Fust the money he owed.  Or maybe Johann's father is our direct ancestor who may have had another son, and the famous Johann Fust is a first-cousin 25 or more times removed.  Maybe we're related anyway through Christina Fust Schoeffer's descendants six centuries later!  Who knows?

In this blog I will happily share our Fust ancestors, reaching so far only to the 1760's.