Welcome to our family history website. Here you’ll find memoirs, interviews, photos, artwork, letters, and documents chronicling six generations of the Mechner-Ziegler clan’s experiences.
Please feel free to add comments to any pages or photos — to provide context, offer corrections, or share memories or thoughts. In order to do this, you’ll need to log in with your user ID (available to family members upon request).
The biggest part of the site is the massive family autobiography completed by Adolph Mechner (1897-1988) in 1978. In his introduction, he wrote that his purpose was “to let my descendants, children, and grandchildren know where they came from… They will learn what difficulties, enormous efforts, sufferings, and often great tragedies combined to bring them into their present position.
“There are moments in everybody’s life when one thinks of his ancestors, becomes interested in certain details, perhaps in a mood of melancholia. Then these pages may become helpful or perhaps important.
“They will read the story again when they will be grown up and understand better what is described. Then they will perhaps continue by adding their own story and that of their own progeny. Vivant sequentes–May others follow.”
Using the website
This site is meant for the family’s use. It’s semi-private: search engines are discouraged from finding or indexing it, but it’s still accessible without a password to anyone who knows the link. If you have concerns and feel the site should be password-protected, please let us know.
If you have archival materials that you’d like to see added to the site, please tell us.
Happy browsing!