Documenting family’s immigration story leads to discovery, awards for Highland writer

For Morgan Gray, a 4-H project as a child turned into a lifelong passion, culminating in a book, an award and family history set down for posterity.

Gray’s mother grew up in Highland, and she spent many summers there as a child. She was 10 years old when she was assigned a family tree as her 4-H project, and was fascinated by tracing her family’s history.

“Then I set it aside and never dug it up again until 2018,” she said.

By then Gray was living in Switzerland, and while visiting a museum in Germany, she typed in a few names she remembered from that 4-H project and found ship manifests of her family’s immigration to the United States.

Thus kicked off a years-long project to tell the story of her family.

“For me, it was important to tell the immigration story of each of the family members who left,” she said.

“We never knew why they chose to leave, but I documented where they went.”

A surprising number of her relatives ended up in Highland, which she found interesting.

“They spoke German, they went to a German-language church… It’s as though someone said, ‘We’re all here, it’s a safe landing spot. Come here and we will help you get acclimated,’” she said.

Gray had a unique opportunity to gather information on the European side as she was living in Switzerland and could read the texts herself. As she started compiling information into a shareable format for family members, it “really snowballed from there.”

A lot of the writing was done during COVID, when she was isolating at home like so many others.

“I spent so much time alone working on this book, and it was such a lonely task on lockdown by myself,” she said.

The book, titled “Geigerbuch: Connecting Germany & Switzerland to Illinois and Back,” ended up at 365 pages, filled with reproduced documents and photographs. As a print of the book costs $300, Gray opted to make it digitally available and printed only 30 copies for her family, the library in Switzerland, and the Louis Latzer Library in Highland.

“I found so many cousins and relatives over the course of writing it that I felt there are people in Highland who might be closely related to somebody in the book, and they might like to know about it,” she said.

While the book is about Gray’s family, she believes it has relevance for others as well.

“There’s still a lot to learn about immigration and what has happened in the world in just the time that a few generations have passed,” she said.

Looking at world history and the changes in society over the course of the past several generations “makes it more real and tangible” for people reading the book to see history, she said.

Last week, Gray returned to Illinois to receive a “Best of Illinois History” award from the Illinois State Historical Society. The award recognizes the top achievements in history throughout the state, with nominations begun in late summer from community leaders, museums, historical societies, libraries, publishers and others.

“History brings out passion in people, passion for the past and the lives of those who came before us,” said William Furry, executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society.

“It also gives us hope, reminding us of hardships others endured to prepare us for the storms we might face in the future, such as the recent pandemic.”

Other winners included 14 other books, five projects or exhibitions and a documentary, among others.

Gray still has some loose ends to tie up with documents and photos people have sent her, but soon she’ll be moving on.

“I’m pretty glad to have some free time now; this was a massive amount of time I won’t begin to calculate,” she said.

“I invested fully in writing this book and now I’ve generated something that is hopefully useful to other people.”

“Geigerbuch” is available for perusal at the Latzer Library and online at archive.org.