52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 4 -- Invite to Dinner

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Who would I invite to dinner if I could invite anyone? The answer to this question is easy for me -- my paternal grandfather, John Frederick Goehring. "Granddad" -- as I've always called him -- died six months before I was born so we never got to meet.

By all accounts, he was a pretty special guy. I’ve had 80-year-old men who knew him when they were children tell me how remarkable “Uncle Johnny” was.

John Frederick Goehring standing on Snip, his "trick" horse (Don't worry. Snip is very much alive. Well, at least he was when the photo was taken.)

I've started writing a short "biographical sketch", I guess you can call it, about Granddad just to try to get to know him a little better. I have so many questions that I wish I could ask him, including:
  • Does he know why his father's family made the decision to come to America in the 1850s?
  • Did he really operate a wagon freight service from Indianola to points inland?
  • Why did he and his father leave DeWitt County in southwest Texas, to move hundreds of miles away to a ranch in Concho County?
  • How did he meet my grandmother? (His first wife died after only a decade of marriage, leaving him widowed with three young girls to raise. He and my Granny didn't marry until almost 15 years later.)
Of course, Granddad and I could have trouble agreeing on the menu for our dinner date. I suspect my "modern" gluten-free vegan diet might seem foreign to an old rancher.

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