Gus' immediate relatives including parents, siblings, partnerships and children in the Kurtz family tree.

Gus's Family

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Parent

Gus Kurtz Partner Child Partner Child

Sibling

Photos and snapshots taken of Gus Kurtz, his Kurtz family, and locations and places or events from his life.

Anna Heidke visits Exeter

Age: 61 Age: 61

Heidke Family Members in Exeter

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In 1864, in the year that Gus Kurtz was born, on October 5th, a cyclone killed 70,000 people in Calcutta, India. Calcutta is in a "very high damage risk" cyclone zone, although this was an especially powerful one.

In 1899, the meaning of Chinese "oracle bones" was rediscovered. Farmers in China had been turning up the bones in their fields for generations but most often they were ground up and sold as medicine. The chancellor of the Imperial Academy and a friend noticed, before they ground the bones, that they had writing. The bones had been used around the second millennium BC for divination.

In 1907, radiometric dating, a recently discovered technology that could date rocks, found that the earth was 2.2 billion years old which was dramatically older than previously thought. Later refinements and advancements in science would date the age of the earth at over 4.5 billion years.

In 1920, the Volstead Act became law. Formally called the National Prohibition Act, the Volstead Act enabled law enforcement agencies to carry out the 18th Amendment. It said that "no person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, or furnish any intoxicating liquor except as authorized by this act" and defined intoxicating liquor as any beverage containing more than 0.5% alcohol by volume.

In 1989, on November 9th, the Berlin Wall fell. The Wall was built by the East Germans to keep East Berliners from escaping into West Berlin, separating families and friends. When the head of the East German Communist Party announced that day that East Berliners could cross whenever they pleased, happy crowds surged across the border. People brought tools and took parts of the hated wall.