I'm a retired professor of German with career experience in researching, writing, and lecturing on cultural history and biography. I started researching branches of my family as a pandemic project, when the public library made Ancestry available online (not anymore, sadly). My father was Richard W. Dietrick b. 1929; his mother's family were called Heckman. My mother was Jane Vanderbilt b. 1929; her father was Russell Eliot Vanderbilt (no relation to the rich Vanderbilts!). Her mother's family were called Briegel, and her grandmother's family were the Wescoats of Hammonton NJ. Results of my research into these family lines can be found in FamilySearch.

I'm a retired professor of German with career experience in researching, writing, and lecturing on cultural history and biography. I started researching branches of my family as a pandemic project, when the public library made Ancestry available online (not anymore, sadly). My father was Richard W. Dietrick b. 1929; his mother's family were called Heckman. My mother was Jane Vanderbilt b. 1929; her father was Russell Eliot Vanderbilt (no relation to the rich Vanderbilts!). Her mother's family were called Briegel, and her grandmother's family were the Wescoats of Hammonton NJ. Results of my research into these family lines can be found in FamilySearch.