How Can I Help?

We Need TeSelle Memorabilia — Photos, Stories, Documents, etc.

The ongoing success of this Family History project depends not only on interested visitors, but especially on the willingness of many visitors to share their TeSelle Family memorabilia — photos, stories, documents, newspaper clippings, and other interesting pieces of TeSelle history. A few bits and pieces of memorabilia from lots of different people will provide us with a fascinating patchwork of information about the evolution of the TeSelle Family over the years. Please use our Special Contact Form to submit your information and attachment files, if any.

Writing about one’s family history is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that has hundreds of pieces missing.

Written stories about the past can help us better understand the present. Our family history is more than just nostalgia for a time gone by. Writing about one’s family history is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that has hundreds of pieces missing. If you take the trouble to lay out the pieces that you do have, you begin to see a vague picture of what the complete puzzle would look like. You start to see the contours of a landscape, dotted with a few houses and farms. With luck you can distinguish some of the people who populated that landscape and lived in those houses. Sometimes you will find exactly the puzzle piece you need to fill an important gap and shed new light on some adjacent pieces.

We created this TeSelle Family website to begin assembling our own puzzle pieces, and to help those who may be searching for missing pieces of their own puzzles. In the process we hope that you will share some of your puzzle pieces that may also fit with ours.

Our journey began with the wonderful discovery of the “Letters from America”, which shed a new light on the life and times of our ancestors and relatives who emigrated from the Netherlands to America so many years ago. As you read those letters, you briefly find yourself in the shoes of those early settlers, struggling to build a life in a strange, new world. Those letters represented the strong family connection between our American and Dutch families, each wanting to share their experiences and find out how their relatives are doing. With this website we want to renew that sense of connection between our family members by sharing the stories and memorabilia that may have helped each of us become who we are today.

Thanks in advance for sharing your comments, stories, photos, and memorabilia.

The family — We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

~Erma Bombeck

Please Spread the Word!

Tell your family members about the TeSelle Family website, and encourage them to visit us online. If you see a particular website page that you think might interest them, click the email link near the top or bottom of the page to send them the page. The email will give them a link to the website, so that they can explore all the material on their own. We thank you, and so will they!