Julie Brown (née Huebner) first became interested in genealogy in a history class at Proviso East High School in the late 1970s. Little did she know that decades later, this class project would lead her to create a family tree that spanned 13 generations.
For the class project, she and her dad collected some family pictures, she wrote the assignment up, handed it in and that she thought was that.
And indeed, it was until with plenty of spare time due to COVID, she recommitted herself to the project in 2020. As a result, she today has an eight-foot by eight-foot family tree mural on a wall in her home with more than 400 names on the branches.
At first Brown’s goal was simply to decorate a wall in their home with the pictures she had collected from her father and older cousins, but “my husband encouraged me to go as far back as I could,” and the goal became “presenting a visually pleasing account of where my family came from.”
“My husband, Ed, thinks the mural is the ‘cat’s meow,’ and one of my sons said that if we ever move, we have to take the wall with us,” she added.
Ancestry.com was her go-to resource to find primary sources such as U.S. Census data and passenger lists.
“The information I had gotten from my father and older cousins fit like a puzzle with what I learned from Ancestry.com,” she said.
For example, according to oral family lore, her grandmother’s father did not want her to marry her grandfather and offered her a piano if she did not go through with the wedding. She married him anyway. She learned from Ancestry.com that her great-grandfather was a cabinet maker.
Brown, a preschool and Kindergarten aide for the past 12 years is also an artist, which helped with the mural. She has sold some of her work and will be participating in Garage Galleries in Forest Park in 2024.
All of Brown’s forbears came from Germany, mainly from Bavaria, arriving in this country in the last half of the 19th Century; her husband’s family came from Scotland. This inspired her to paint a rural scene from southern Germany in the lower right-hand corner of the mural and Edinburgh Castle in the lower-left corner.
Perhaps channeling Henry Louis Gates Jr., Brown made some discoveries. For example, many of her female forbears changed their surnames during their lives, because they would remarry after first husbands died of diseases like cholera. Women would frequently die in childbirth with the children raised by their fathers or other relatives.
Some Americanized their names. Brown’s own maiden name, Huebner, was originally Hubner with an umlaut over the u. Because of resentment toward German immigrants in this country following World War I, a relative changed their family name from Eberspacher to Ebers.
Her husband’s ancestors in the country arrived before the Revolutionary War and four ancestors served in that war.
Brown has a Facebook page and has connected because of her project with some newly found cousins. She invested herself in the work for her own satisfaction and “to capture our family history before it gets lost in time.”
“What I love most about this,” she added, “is sharing what I learn with my cousins and immediate family, connecting oral history to the discovery of documents on Ancestry.com.
Brown’s roots in Forest Park go deep. She lived on the town’s south side from her birth at West Suburban Hospital in 1961 and lived in Forest Park until she was married at the age of 31. Her dad grew up at 1123 Circle and his father worked as a stone cutter at Troost Memorial across from Waldheim Cemetery. Her parents lived in Forest Park for 50 years.