In 1898, William E. Hillgartner left Iowa and moved to the rolling hill country outside of Fulton, Missouri, where my grandfather, Delbert Benjamin, was born in 1899...
Settling in just outside of town, William and Martha Louise raised three sons: Frank, Roy, and Delbert, who all took up farming in the area as well...
Gladys eventually remarried, to Albert "Pop" Klick, but the Depression forced William to leave school to help out on the farm...
Coming home, Bill became a radio engineer at WIBC in Indianapolis, providing the live coverage of the Indy 500 auto race each year. He married the station's music librarian, Rosamond Tillotson, who also appeared on a morning talk show as "Helen Baker"...
In 1952, William was accepted into the Foreign Service with the Voice of America. His first posting was to Morocco, when Tangier was still an International Zone, where daughter Deborah was born. It was at this time that he made the trip back to Kesselbach to visit his granduncle Jacob, who passed on the records and photographs we have in the family today.