About

The purpose of this page is to talk about myself and my love of history and all things Schmidt.  I also wanted to introduce the inspiration for this website as she spent countless hours researching our family and collecting/organizing our family records. 

I am very excited to be a part of this project having loved my Grandpa Ted and Grandma Marion.  My father Don was one of Grandpa Ted's and Grandma Marion's three children.  As the only male in their modest family, he was the only one to carry forward the Schmidt name to my three brothers and one sister.  His sisters changed away from their Schmidt name when they married.  Nonetheless,  they carried forward the Schmidt values and passed these family values to their children.

My dad lived in Griffith, Indiana with my mother Judie less than a mile away from Grandpa and Grandma Schmidt (which yes required required us to walk uphill both ways).  We spent every holiday, birthday, and other special occasion together at my dad's house at 741 Glenwood.  For Christmas Eve each year until Grandma and Grandpa could no longer manage preperations for the Christmas feast together, we enjoyed Grandma Marion's terrific ham, wonderful baked beans, and very special shrimp salad in her basement at 242 Harvey Street. 

Grandma would regale us with stories about the Bolduan and Schmidt families at almost every family gathering.  My dad heard the stories again and again throughout his life, including countless retellings to us grandchildren.  At one Christmas Eve gathering with Grandma and Grandpa, my dad concluded that Grandma's stories had become increasingly embellished over the many years sharing the with the family.  I never before and have since never saw him laugh as hard when he decided to start numbering the stories.  

Grandpa unfortunately became increasingly hard of hearing as he grew older so he would largely leave the story telling to Grandma.  I remember him very distinctly sitting there and smiling at Grandma's stories.  He never said that the stories got increasingly embellished, but I think that we probably agreed with my father.  I tried to get him to share some of his family stories in Russia but he would invariably state that life was very tough in Russia, and that he would take lick of hard candy at Christmas and wrap the candy up again for another lick on another day.

My first passion is learning about history and I often said when I was younger that "I would have a career in history if I could make make a living from it."   One of my big projects right now is digitizing, organizing, and capturing the what, where, and why elements of all the family pictures that I could get my hands on.  The scanning part of the project included my scanning and touching up old pictures that came about before the modern phenomenon of digital cameras.  However, the majority of the pictures were sent to Scan Cafe for scanning and touch ups.  The digitizing part was the easy part of the project.  Despite having facial recognition capabilities, the organizing part and the capturing the details about each picture part (in the metadata fields) in my photo organizing software is painstaking (and therefore time consuming) work.    

My second passion is traveling to interesting places around the world especially since my travel also feeds my passion for history.  Dad and Mom loved going to Bass Lake and Lake of the Ozarks each summer during my Dad's 3 or 4 weeks of vacation that he always took in August.  The focus was on water skiing, fishing, swimming and relaxing.  My late wife, Kathy, shared her love of travel with me. We took many vacations together with her parents to see and experience some very cool things.   I love vacations that are very fast paced and action packed since I want to see and experience as many new things as possible and of course "to get my money's worth." Recent trips include going to Belgium/Norway/Iceland, Australia/New Zealand, and Italy/Greece (over the past several years of course).  Some of my recent, more modest trips include going to Seattle, Detroit, and Boston (this last one during a business trip) with my daughter.  

You can find out more about me by going to my William Schmidt Facebook Page.  I am not particularly active on Facebook (except when I am vacationing), but I do include a good amount of information about my career and my educational experiences on the "About" tab.  You do not want to miss my favorite quotes by my two favorite people and my "Likes" for movies, TV shows, sports teams, etc.. The former can be found by clicking on the "Details about you" on the "About" screen.  The latter can be found by clicking on the "More" tab and selecting "Likes." 

My mother-in-law Sue worked magic in getting Grandpa to share his many very interesting stories about moving from Russia to the United States as a young boy.  Sue spent countless hours meeting with Grandpa, researching family history across the County (including in Salt Lake City and Ellis Island in New York), and collecting family documents along the way.  Grandpa's ship landed at Ellis Island with his brother (Alex), and his mother (Marie) to reconnect the family with his father (Fred) (my Great Grandpa) who lived and worked for many years paving the way for the migration of the rest of the family from Russia to the United States.  

Sue was such an inspirational part of this project that it is especially important to highlight her contributions on this web page.  I hope that she continues her efforts to organize our family documents that she collected over the years (especially around my dad).  I truly believe that she saved the best stuff for last in fine Schmidt tradition!  It is very important to carry on her efforts by building on her work and adding additional family materials to this website. I hope this site becomes a cherished home that helps to preserve our family’s stories and history.