About

Jonathan W. Wanzer, M.S. (1967 – )

I have always been interested in history, not just what happened, but the circumstances around the event, the myriad of details that lead up to an event, how everything inter relates 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, my grandmothers maiden name, family reunion back in the Midwest. My mother was relocating us and jumped on the opportunity to send me on a 2 month genealogical 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 to return 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, all of course having a museum of some sort and a gift shop. We steered away from the souvenirs for the most part, though I did get 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 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, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. 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. To this day, certain smells cause a strong memory and emotional response for me. 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.

Thought 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 mid-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 told me that it reminded her of her school but it never made a real impression until we were standing on the steps of her schoolhouse, the full sensory experience made it that that much more real to me.

Life took over as it has a tendency to do, and my draw to history was relegated to a back burner until my grandmother got 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 at least 200 copies to family who requested it. When gram passed in 2004 my mother, Gini, took over 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 along my grandfathers side, the Wanzer side. My grandfathers, fathers, mother, Malvina “Vina” Abigail CHASE Wanzer had passed down a family bible. In the Chase family Bible there were some undiscovered documents, at least undiscovered by my grandmother and mother, that sparked my interest again.

Around 2012 I was going through filing cabinets full of grams’s notes and came across the Bible. Inside was an envelope addressed to Gigi, my grandfathers mother, who I had actually met a few 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, at the end of 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. I recently ordered some preservation materials to try and stabilize the cover before it just crumbles away to nothing. This brings me to my areas of interest, while I am certainly interested in research, and archives as well as in field work, my primary interest is in preservation and restoration of books and documents, and in collection curation and presentation, i.e. museum work. As a maker and costumer, fun hobbies in their own right, I am also interested in producing museum quality replicas of books, documents, and properties.

In 2004, when my grandmother passed, I was finishing flight school. I enrolled in an Airframe & Powerplant school earning an AS in Aviation Maintenance Technologies. After graduation I held Commercial Pilot, Advanced Ground Instructor, and A&P Mechanic certificates from the FAA. I was sure I was on track for work in aviation education, and I did teach 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 beck to flying and building an experimental aircraft at some point. but for the moment, aviation is an interest on the back burner.

A few odd twists of timing and opportunity, and I was back in school working on a Bachelor of Science in Religion. Philosophy and theology have been topics of interest for many years, Church History has also been a topic of interest to me so I began working on the degree a year after we moved north to Klamath Falls, Oregon. I started the degree in 2018 and completed it in December 2020.

I enjoyed working on that degree but it became clear I would not go further down that academic path. It was also clear that I was going to continue on to a masters program. There are some threads flowing through my journey since the day gram and I headed out on our adventure to the family reunion in Kansas, I enjoy to teaching, history, and research. I also enjoy the hands-on work, in the field, in the lab, and in the workshop.

Moving forward, I started a masters program in Spring 2022 that concluded in the fall of 2023 with an M.A. in History. The classes were primarily American History and Military History and I began a second masters program in public history in the spring 2024. I am on schedule to completing the second master’s in December of 2024 and have applied to a doctoral program beginning in the spring of 2025. Which of the many paths open to historians I will follow is yet to be seen. I plan to teach while I hone my research skills and narrow my field. As I mentioned above, I have a few trade interests as a historian, and I do have subject matter interests, mostly in the broad time frame of the Industrial Revolution, particularly communications and technology as topics, I also have an interest in documents, ships logs, journals, civil records, correspondence, etc.

For me, history is all about connections. Connections to people, their lives, how they lived, what they did and how, how they faced hardships and overcame obstacles. History should not be done solely in the cloistered library or archive, these places are important to be sure, but history is also done in the fields, workshops, and shipyards, doing history. Questions are often answered in the process of replication. Do what they did, does it work? What technologies were available? Are we sure? The Antikythera Mechanism and its replication by maker-historians has changed the way we think about ancient engineering and what was possible by the ancients. We frequently find our assumptions were incorrect when it come to the abilities of the ancients.

Where I end up is not yet written, but it has been a fun ride so far.