I found someone important in my family tree, how about you?
By nanajanet
@nanajanet (4436)
United States
August 2, 2010 3:04pm CST
I found out that David A. Armbruster, is my distant cousin. He was the cousin of my father's mother. I was so excited as I have been working on my family tree and this was just a wonderful find. In 1935 David A. Armbruster, the first Hawkeye (Iowa State University) swimming coach, originated the butterfly stroke and the flip turn. Eight years earlier, he developed underwater observation windows.
In one article, that I found, it reads...
The dolphin kick—sure to make the butterfly stroke one of the fastest Olympic swimming events at the Los Angeles Games this summer—was born at the University of Iowa. It's hard to believe. But in one serendipitous experience a creative coach and a swimmer who was goofing off with his remarkably flexible feet, both came together in the Field House pool one day and observed a phenomenon that was to make history. The year was 1932.
And the Iowa coach was David Armbruster, the crusty and creative mentor of Iowa swimmers from 1917-1958. During his tenure at the University of Iowa, Armbruster was to coach two of his charges—Wally Ris and Bowen Strassforth—to Olympic medals. He was also the man to perfect the kicking board, to invent the first all-rubber swimming suit and trunks, to design overflow scum gutters to make competitive swimming faster, to come up with the underwater observation window, to develop the tumble turn, and to singlehandedly promote his discovery of the dolphin kick.
Have any of you been working on your family tree and found anything fun, interesting or someone famous or infamous?
2 responses
@ElicBxn (64176)
• United States
2 Aug 10
well, I've know it for a while, but Rex Stout (writer who invented Nero Wolfe) was a very distant cousin
even more distant than your cousin, he was descended from the eldest son of our famous shared ancestress, and my mom from one of the youngest sons... however, his family moved from the area and my mother's family stayed in the New Jersey area...
on my dad's side, they say we go back to the Mayflower - so you can decide if that's bad or good...
@Hatley (163772)
• Garden Grove, California
2 Aug 10
hi nanajanet long time no see hi. I did a lot of wo rk on my family tree and fou nd that right after the civil War my gr gr gr gr grandfather William Spencer and three or four of his cronies, all U nion soldiers were brought up on murder of a young rebel soldier but dut to some complex shennanigans the group were exonerated although most of Missouri at the time of the trial were sure my 4gs grandfather and his friends were the ones who murdered the young man as people had seen them earlier with the reb soldier. I would say he and his cronies were infamous as almost all were sure they were guilty.there was a writeup about it on the net a few years back but do not remember the name, It started with the Great Missouri something but it was not raid. I will look it up on my family tree lol.
