About

Jonathan W. Wanzer, M.A.

I have always been interested in history, not just what happened, but the circumstances around events, the myriad of details that lead up to an event, how everything interrelates and reacts. So, it is little surprise that I would find myself under the tutelage of my maternal grandmother, Wanieta “Nita” Ruth SULLIVAN Wanzer (1916-2004), a lifelong teacher and librarian by trade, and a renegade genealogist by avocation.

In 1978 there was a Sullivan family reunion back in the Midwest. My mother was relocating us and jumped on the opportunity to send me on a 2-month genealogical road trip and adventure with my grandmother while she packed and moved us. It was on this trip that I first experienced history as we traveled from the San Francisco Bay Area through the Southwest, up into the middle states, crossing the Mississippi River in Hannibal Missouri and coming back through Colorado and Utah on the way home to San Jose, California.

Many of our stops were tourist traps built around historic locations or well-known people, Laura Ingles Wilder’s house, Roy Rogers Ranch, Samuel Clements’s house, and the Alamo to name a few, all of course having a museum of some sort and gift shops. We steered away from the souvenirs for the most part, though I did buy several of the Little House books while we were at the Wilder house for the long periods of driving between stops. These were physical connections to the history they represented, something tangible, being in the place, among the objects. What came later in Kansas, where my grandmother grew up, was deeper still, a visceral link, not just to the historical past, to my historical past, places my family lived, and in a few cases still did.

There is a reason we have physical senses, they all make strong mental connections between the facts and emotions of our experiences. They are key factors in establishing memories, memory retention, and in recovering memories of things we thought we had forgotten. Certain smells cause a strong memory and emotional response. The smells common to old books and documents affect me strongly. You can tell a lot about the environment a book has come from just by smell, and yes, I do like the smells that accompany old books. Every old book I buy gets a sniff test as well as a thorough structural examination. Old books are just one thing I have strong sense memory attachments with.

Though the farmhouse my grandmother was born in had been torn down decades before, the one-room schoolhouse she attended for elementary school through eighth grade, was still there. The school is no longer in use, but it was left standing as one of the few early-19th century prairie schools still standing in Kansas. As a fan of the Little House on the Prairie TV show and books I had a foreknowledge of the one-room schoolhouse idea, and she often told me that it reminded her of her school when we watched the TV series, but it never made a real impression until we were standing on the steps of her one-room schoolhouse, the full sensory experience made it that that much more real to me.

Life took over as it tends to do, and my draw to history was relegated to a back burner until my grandmother dove even deeper into genealogical research, predominantly for the Sullivan side of the family. I occasionally went with her to a local genealogical research library and helped when I could. She eventually put together a book of her research and sent out 200 copies to family who requested it. When Nieta passed in 2004 my mother, Gini, took the mantle of family historian and genealogist. When mom passed unexpectedly on December 23, 2007, the mantle was passed on to me.

Over the years I have had a few opportunities to dig in for several weeks at a time and make some progress, particularly on the Wanzer side. My grandfathers, fathers, mother, Malvina “Vina” Abigail CHASE Wanzer had passed down a family bible through to my paternal great grandmother. In this Chase family Bible, there were some undiscovered documents, at least undiscovered by my mother, that would spark my interest again.

In 2012 I was going through filing cabinets full of Nieta’s notes and came across the Bible. Inside was an envelope addressed to Gigi, the forementioned great grandmother, who I had met two or three times as a small child, in the envelop were 5 letters from here father-in-law, Andrew “Jack” Jackson Wanzer, to her mother-in-law Vina, while he was serving in the Union Army’s, Wisconsin 5th Infantry Regiment, during the Civil War.

Many people have family letters from the Civil War, some have correspondence from the Revolutionary War period, and a few even earlier, but this was one of those inspiring moments in my history journey. There were some additional documents, a pastoral reference for Vina and her mother, and several sheets removed from another family bible with births, deaths, and marriages recorded, Vina’s being the latest entry.

This discovery reinvigorated my interest in history, archival preservation, and restoration, the bible is in very poor condition with a significant amount of leather dry rot. It is a common style late 18th to early 19th century family bible that is frequently found here in the U.S. I ordered some preservation materials to try and stabilize the cover before it just crumbles away to nothing. Unfortunately, the cover is badly damaged from a century of abuse. Replacement covers are available in the same style indicating the common nature of this volume. The text block and spine are in fair condition. This brings me to my areas of interest, while I am certainly interested in research, and archives as well as in field work, I also have a good deal of interest in preservation and restoration of books and documents, and in collection curation and presentation, i.e. public history. As a maker and costumer, fun hobbies in their own right, I am also interested in producing museum quality replicas and supporting living history.

In 2004, when my grandmother passed, I was finishing flight school working on my commercial pilot and instructor certificates. I had become interested in warbirds and vintage aircraft in flight school and decided to enroll in an Airframe & Powerplant program in hopes of working on these old aircraft, preserving them for future generations, graduating with an AS in Aviation Maintenance Technologies, three academic certificates, and A&P Mechanic certificates from the FAA. I was on track for work in aviation education, teaching one semester of Airframe at my alma mater. Opportunities in the aviation industry for someone just starting out are inevitably tied to a few things, long hours, travel, and relocation. None of which were in the cards for me at that time. I do have plans to get back to flying and building an experimental aircraft at some point, but for now aviation is an interest on the back burner.

A few odd twists of timing and opportunity, a move to Oregon, and I was back in school working on a Bachelor of Science in Religion. Philosophy, theology, and early church history have been topics of interest for many years. I started the degree in 2018 and completed it in December 2020. At the time I had notions of working on an M.Div. with concentrations in church history and chaplaincy. I enjoyed working on that degree, but it became clear that that academic path was not the one I needed to be on. It was also clear that I was going to continue on to a master’s program.

There are threads flowing through my journey since the day gram and I headed out on our adventure to the family reunion in Kansas, teaching, history, research, and hands-on skills, in the field, in the lab, and in the workshop. Threads is indeed the right term for my many interests, weaving in and out, changing colors and direction frequently, weft of experiences waving through the warp of time, seemingly unconnected shiny objects, distractions from a straight path. This is not, however, the case. Most of my unrelated interests cross paths and enhance each other frequently.

I started my first graduate program in Spring 2022 completing it in the fall of 2023 with an M.A. in History, primarily American and military history. I began a second graduate program in public history in the spring of 2024, and I am on schedule to complete it in December of 2024 with an M.A. in Public History. My application to a doctoral program in history has been accepted and I will begin doctoral studies in the spring of 2025. The plan at present is to find a position as a part-time adjunct Instructor or Assistant Professor at a four-year institution teaching history while I finish my second M.A. and start work on the Ph.D.

For me, history is all about connections, to people, their lives, how they lived, what they did, how they faced hardships and overcame obstacles, what their beliefs were, what we generically call context.