Steve and Karla Born
I was born in 1955 in Portage, Wisconsin, where my parents lived for two years. I met Karla Martensen in 1980 in Seattle, Washington, where I had moved two years previously to attend the University of Washington. She had also moved to Seattle from the midwest (Iowa) and is also of German descent, as it happens. In fact, her father was born in Germany and had not come to America until he was nine years old. Karla and I were married in 1982 and had our only child, our daughter Juliana, in 1986. Below is a picture of the three of us in 2002.
For our 2001 summer vacation we took a road trip across the northern Great Plains to visit my North Dakota relatives. I had not been back there since 1978, when I had last gone there with my parents on their annual summer vacation. It was at that time I got the idea for doing a Web site dedicated to my North Dakota roots. I am grateful to my relative Jim Puppe of Fargo, North Dakota, for much of the information about my genealogy and for several of the old photos here. In 1998 he published a comprehensive genealogy of the Born family that he had researched and compiled. He is a grandson of Gustav Born's younger sister, Emma, who with her parents Ferdinand and Minna Born and several other brothers and sisters immigrated in 1881, a few years after Gustav.