It Started With a Frame

Mary Jean and Lorraine came to visit Kim and me last year (2025), bringing boxes of framed items, photographs, documents and home movies. This was the starting point for this website that you’re now perusing. One of the items was an elaborately framed piece, which I sort of forgot about, as I was in the middle of scanning and researching other material that they brought. I was also a bit nervous about taking the piece apart, in order to scan the individual photographs, as I didn’t know how complicated the framing was. When Mary Jean and Lorraine returned last week (March 2026), they brought more material and were going to pick up everything from the first trip. We started to talk about the elaborately framed item and Mary Jean explained it’s importance to the family.

Mary and Albert Haag were married in this church on April 2, 1913:

This is the original Holy Redeemer church in Perry, Wisconsin. When German families settled the area, there was no church local to Perry, so folks had to travel 26 miles for the nearest priest. In 1861, the 29 families that made up the local congregation raised enough money to build a church in Perry. The church cost $618.00 to build, roughly $20,000.00 in today’s dollars. A new church was built just a couple of years after Mary and Albert were married. At some point the old frame church was torn down, and somehow Terri managed to save a piece of the altar, which was turned into this frame by a talented individual:

Clockwise from the top are: Lee and Carl Weber, Rosina Maria and John Haag (Albert’s grandparents), Mary Jean and Scott Durant, and Christina and Lawrence Haag (Albert’s parents). Pictured in the center are Mary and Albert Haag on their wedding day. The individuals photographs are pictured below. It turns out that the frame was not nearly as complicated as I thought. With the glass fully cleaned, it shines beautifully.