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, and how everything interrelates and reacts. Early on I found myself under the tutelage of my maternal grandmother, Wanieta “Nita” Ruth SULLIVAN Wanzer (1916-2004), a lifelong teacher and librarian by trade, a renegade genealogist by avocation.

In 1978 a Sullivan family reunion was taking place in Kansas. My mother chose to relocate us to another part of town and jumped on the opportunity to send me on a 2-month genealogical adventure with my grandmother while she made the move. 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 returning 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 Ingalls 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 shop. 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 to read on the long stretches of road between stops. These sites were physical connections to the history they represented, something tangible, in the place, among the objects that belonged to these storied individuals and events. What came later in Moran, 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 some still did.

There is a reason we have physical senses, each can make a strong mental, and emotional connection to the facts of our experiences. They are key factors in establishing memories, memory retention, and in recovering memories of things we thought we had forgotten. The olfactory sense in particular can evoke strong emotional reactions and bring long-forgotten memories to the surface. The smells common to old books and documents affect me deeply. You can tell a lot about the environment a book has lived in by its smell, and yes, I do have an affinity for many smells that accompany old books. Every old or used book I add to my library gets a sniff test as well as a thorough structural examination. Old books are just one thing I have a strong sense-memory attachment to.

Wanieta Ruth SULLIVAN Wanzer
Moran, Kansas c. 1918

The farmhouse my grandmother was born in had long since been torn down, decades before I was there, the one-room schoolhouse she attended first through eighth grades, however, was still there. The school was no longer in use, but it was still standing, one of the few 19th century prairie schools still standing in Kansas at the time. As a fan of the Little House on the Prairie TV show and books I had foreknowledge of the one-room schoolhouse as a practice of the time, and Nita often told me that she was reminded of her school when we watched the TV series, but it never made a real impression on me 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. The smells of the surrounding farmland, the feel of the wood of the steps and doors, the slight dampness from rain the day before. From that day on I had a better understanding of her connection to the place and experience. The combination of these sents can take me back to that little one-room schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie. I understand my grandmother’s context that much better having been in those places.

Life took over as it tends to, and my draw to history was relegated to the recesses of a busy mind until my grandmother dove 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 her research together producing a photocopied manuscript, sending 200 copies to family members who requested one. 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 a couple of weeks and make some progress, particularly on the Wanzer side. My great-grandfather’s mother, Malvina “Vina” Abigail CHASE Wanzer had passed down a family bible through my paternal great-grandmother. In the Chase family Bible, there were some undiscovered documents, at least undiscovered by my mother, that would spark my interest in genealogy 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 aforementioned great-grandmother, who I had met two or three times as a small child, in the envelope were 5 letters from her 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, and a few have even earlier colonial dispatches and letters, but this was one of those inspiring moments in my personal history journey. There were additional documents in the bible, a pastoral reference for Vina and her mother, Abagail MASON Chase, 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, paper conservation, and restoration, the bible is in poor condition with a significant amount of red rot. It is a common style c. 1877 family bible frequently found here in the U.S. I ordered some preservation materials to consolidate and stabilize the cover before it 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 to good condition. This brings me to my areas of interest, while I am certainly interested in research, and archives as well as in fieldwork, I also have a good deal of interest in the preservation and restoration of books and documents, graphology, paleography, collection curation and presentation, and public history. As a maker and costumer, I am also interested in producing museum-quality replicas and supporting living history.

In 2004, when my grandmother passed, I was finishing flight school and working on my commercial pilot and instructor certificates. I had become interested in warbirds and vintage aircraft in flight school and later enrolled 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 an 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. However, for someone just starting in the aviation industry, opportunities are inevitably tied to a few required commitments, long hours, travel, and relocation, none of which were in the cards for me. I plan to get back to flying and building experimental aircraft at some point, for now, aviation is an interest on the back burner.

A few odd twists of timing and opportunity saw us moving to Oregon, and me enrolling in school and working on a Bachelor of Science in Religion. Philosophy, theology, and early church history have long been topics of interest to me. I started the degree in 2018 and completed it in December 2020. At the time I had notions of working on a Master’s in Divinity with a concentration in church history. I enjoyed working on that degree, but it became clear that this theological path was not the path I needed to be on, in the spring of 2021 I began a master’s program in a different field, history.

Some threads have flowed through my journey since the day Nita and I headed out on our adventure to the family reunion in Kansas, teaching, history, research, and hands-on bench skills in the field, in the lab, and in the workshop. Threads is an appropriate term for my many interests, weaving in and out, changing colors and direction, weft of experiences weaving through the warp of time, seemingly unconnected shiny objects, distractions from a linear 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 2021 completing it in December 2023 with an M.A. in History, primarily American and military history. I began a second graduate program in the spring of 2024 and completed it in December 2024 with an M.A. in Public History. The final decision to pursue a terminal degree was not fully made until late 2024. Anyone who knew me in primary or high school would fall down laughing had it been suggested that I would earn a master’s, let alone pursue a doctorate. Not that I lacked ability, what I lacked was focus and drive.

I had been kicking around the idea of a Ph.D. from the time I started the bachelor’s program, I even planned my classes in both master’s to maximize efficiency before I was sure I would pursue the second master’s. I just wasn’t sure I would go on to the doctorate. In the spring of 2024, I decided to apply to the doctoral program and was accepted. I registered for my first two classes as an official doctoral student for the spring 2025 term. In reality, two of the three classes in my final semester in the public history program were required classes for the doctorate and most of my classmates were working on their doctorates.

With the completion of my second master’s inevitable, I found myself in an uncomfortable internal ethical debate based on political differences between myself and the institution I attend. My continuation with the institution was on and off, back and forth for several months. In the end, it came down to a dispassionate practicality, no other institution in the U.S. could meet my programmatic needs, and I spent many hours searching for one that could. If I were to change institutions I would have to move, and that was not practical or feasible. Seeing myself in a doctoral program at all before now was odd, going through the ethical dilemma, it felt like it was always supposed to be.