All My Ancestors

2 December 2009

Advent Calendar: Ornaments

Filed under: Germans from Russia, Holidays, Memes, Mom, Texas — allmyanc @ 8:30 pm

December 3 – Christmas Tree Ornaments
Did your family have heirloom or cherished ornaments? Did you ever string popcorn and cranberries? Did your family or ancestors make Christmas ornaments?
(Note: this post can be used for Treasure Chest Thursday as well)

So I’m late joining this exercise, but maybe it will serve the purpose of getting me started writing again.  And help take me away from the frantic-ness that is too often part of these holidays.

I’d love to say we have some heirloom or cherished ornaments.  I think we have some that are on their way to cherished status, but not a lot.  A few years ago, I purchased some retro ornament that reminded me of those smaller glass ornaments of my childhood (1950s)–there are lots of blues and purples and stripes and some sort of rough white glitter “snow.”  They aren’t circular like today’s bulbs–I’ve enjoyed putting them among our other ornaments the past few years.

My favorite ornament that I kept for many many years was a Santa Claus head I made as a first grader.  We were assigned to make or bring an ornament for our classroom tree.  As I recall, Mrs. Price put up some sort of painted twiggy looking tree at the back of the classroom on the counter next to the sink–as I recall, it got decorated for each season so it wasn’t a true Christmas tree in the sense that it was not evergreen.

To make my ornament, my mom blew out an egg and I drew on the face.  He was a little cross-eyed as I recall.   Mom helped me further by sewing a red hat–I remember we had a time making it big enough to fit over the egg–and I glued on some cotton for the white fur.  I loved putting this ornament on the tree for years–first at my parents’ home and then on my own tree.  However, egg-head Santa suffered a crushing blow–someone stepped on him.  I don’t even remember who now but I do remember it was a very sad day when I had to do away with my Santa.  I think his scruffy little red hat still fills one of the corners of the Christmas storage boxes.

But we do have another ornament that is taking on the “heirloom” mantle–it is already cherished.  Our oldest son made an ornament one year out of an even more unlikely household item than an egg–a toilet paper roll.  The ornament represents a man dressed as in Biblical times–or a young child’s idea of what that would be, anyway.   Construction paper was used to make a red undergarment with a blue outer robe.  Now-raveling burlap forms the headdress–glued over the top and partway down the back–and the face matches the artwork of my 1st grade Santa–but this one has a very dark beard colored on.  It’s just so primitive and representative of my son at that young age–I love it and love to tuck it into the tree each year.

I don’t remember ever stringing cranberries or popcorn, but one year I did decorate our family tree in the tradition of what I’d read and learned about our Germans from Russia ancestors.  Here in Oklahoma City, there is always a display of trees decorated by various groups who want to participate.  Persons can tour the display and the event earns money for a local charity.  The local Germans from Russia chapter had a beautiful tree up and it made me think about my own ancestors.   My family were Mennonites so I can imagine their choice of decorations as being practical.  I put unshelled walnuts and apples and candles on my tree that year.  I did spray paint the walnuts with gold paint, and the apples were not “real” fruit–the were smaller shiny apple ornaments, and my candles were lights.  It was beautiful to me but I remember my sons being a little puzzled.  It took me back to the year my mom “flocked” (with that spray snow that was available and a staple of 1950’s Christmases) a tumbleweed for our Christmas tree in the Texas panhandle.  Looking back on it, it seems appropriate but I really was embarrassed and thought it was weird at the time.

3 October 2009

Via the S.S. Vaderland

Filed under: Germans from Russia, Memes, Unruh Family — allmyanc @ 12:49 pm

Here’s this week’s genealogy blog prompt:

Week #39: Did your ancestors come by boat? Talk about the documentation that records their departure and arrival.

I have only one family line that I know of that came by boat.  They are my Mennonite Germans from Russia who came to the US late in 1874.

This is a group of folks not widely known outside of those of us who descend from them.  And, honestly, I didn’t know all that much about them growing up.  The short version is that groups of German farmers were invited into the steppes of Russia by Catherine the Great because she want to settle southern Russia and because she knew they were very good farmers.  Some of them came from Switzerland, originally, but some of them had also gone to Holland.  The went into Russia because they had a deal with Catherine that they could retain their own language, have their own schools, and, perhaps most importantly, not be subject to the draft into the Russian army.  My branch were Mennonites and, as such, did not believe in bearing arms.  There are also groups of Catholics and evangelical Lutherans in the larger group of Germans from Russia.

When the US wanted to develop what had been called “The Great American Desert” in the middle of the country, much of the land was ceded to the railroads.  The railroads began to market this land to persons from Scandinavia as well as to these Germans in Russia.  As it happened, these offers came at an opportune time.  Catherine was dead and her son Peter was re-thinking some of her policies, military service being foremost among them.  So the Germans who were still living in Russia began to leave.  They went to Canada, to Mexico, to South America, and large groups of them came to the plains in the US–the Dakotas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and Kansas.  They brought their ways with them and they also brought what is today known as turkey red wheat, the a strong part of the economy of this area for decades.  This was wheat that would grow over the winter with large yields the following summer.

Passenger lists indicate that my Buller and Unruh family members departed from Antwerp aboard the Vaderland.  I have gleaned this story from various sources–from family members, from a publication entitled Brothers in Deed to Brothers in Need: A Scrapbook about Mennonite Immigrants from Russia, 1870-1885, and from a family publication entitled The Genealogical Record of Henry Schmidt and his Descendants (1807-1954) by Mae Koehn Curtis I was fortunate enough to receive from one of my grandfather’s cousins.  (I have a faint memory of making a photocopy of this book on yellow paper at the church in my rural hometown–the only place in town at that time that had an accessible photocopier.)  The Brothers in Deed book was a treasure for Germans from Russia Mennonite researchers–it really was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and passenger lists.  I had no idea at the time about the existence of passenger lists, much less how to locate one. Clarence Hiebert included them in this publication.  Later, I could confirm what he’d re-printed as well as the stories recorded by Mrs. Curtis.

All of these sources said my families came aboard the Vaderland, a ship from the Belgian Red Star line.  According to Ancestry.com’s Passenger Ships and Images, the maiden voyage for this ship was January 1873, sailing from Antwerp to Philadelphia, a route followed by my ancestors a two years later.  The ship was built in England and its sister ships were Nederland and Switzerland, ship names that occur frequently in the Germans from Russia passenger lists from this time period.

Toward the bottom of this passenger list, accessed at Ancestry.com, my 3rd great-grandparents, Peter David and Eva Schmidt Buller and their family are listed–

PassengerLIst

The family listing continues onto the next page of the passenger list, which confirms that one of the little Buller girls, Anna,  died 12 December 1874, enroute.

PassengerList2

The story of this group of Mennonite’s arrival in Kansas is recorded in Abe Unruh’s The Helpless Poles. Due to the various boundary changes, these people from Volhynia, the area my family lived, were often referred to as Poles, or from Russia-Poland.  This created a great deal of confusion for me as I was starting looking for these folks.  (To add the mix, my granddad’s nickname was “Dutch.”)  The ship had severe problems due to rough seas–propellors broke.  Some accounts indicate they had to return to England for repairs.  It delayed the trip and they finally arrived Christmas eve or day (accounts vary) in Philadelphia.  They almost immediately boarded a train for Hutchinson, Kansas, (recorded as Atchison on the passenger list) but no one was there to meet them in the below freezing temperature.  This was partially due to all the delays that had happened on the journey.  They were finally able to move into a store a merchant opened for them, but my understanding is that they spent the rest of the winter in unheated box cars.

They were, however, industrious and hardy.  My family homesteaded in Lone Tree Township in McPherson County.  They soon grew fairly prosperous and within a few years, had enough land and money to move further south into Oklahoma Territory to homestead in what is now Alfalfa County.  I can remember visiting some of these farms as a young child and again, as an adult, a few years ago when I was invited to one of the collateral family’s reunion.

This is a photo of my Buller family a generation or so after immigration:

Buller Family

The father in this family, seated on the front row, is Jacob Peter Buller, shown as aged 14 on the passenger list.  He married Else Jantz, and they were the parents of 11 children.  The back row of this photo is comprised of in-laws.  The second man from the right is my great-grandfather, John Benjamin Unruh, and directly in front of him is his wife, my great-grandmother, Amanda Matilda Buller Unruh.  Down on the other end, the second man from the left is John Benjamin’s brother Simon Benjamin Unruh and in front of him is his wife Josephine Buller Unruh.  Two more of these Buller sisters married Jantz brothers.  It was a close-knit community.

So that’s the one immigration story I know from my family.  Thanks to a combination of early published and unpublished resources, including some family stories and contacts, I was able to piece together their story.  Most of the published resources were from small publishing companies that family members told me about.  Passenger lists are now much easier to access, thanks to online databases, and it is also wonderful to be able to correspond with others from this extended family.  My other family lines were here much earlier and I have yet to find their origins and dates of arrival.  I suspect the vast majority of them came from the British Isles, including some pesky Scots-Irish, but I have not jumped the pond yet.  Studying my Germans from Russia gives me a whole other perspective on my family lines and their origins

Sources:

Ancestry.com. Philadelphia Passenger Lists, 1800-1945 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2006.  Roll M425_92; Line: 15.

Hiebert, Clarence. Brothers in Deed to Brothers in Need: A Scrapbook about Mennonite Immigrants from Russia, 1870-1885. Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1974.

Curtis, May Koehn.  The Genealogical Record of Henry Schmidt and his Descendants (1807-1954).  Washington, DC: author, 1955.

Unruh, Abe J. The Helpless Poles. Montezuma, KS: author, 1973.

1 June 2009

The Good Earth: Family Ties to the Land

Filed under: Ball Family, Carnival of Genealogy, Dad, Germans from Russia, Iowa, New York City, Osborne Family, South Dakota, Texas — allmyanc @ 3:52 pm

cog73

The Good Earth: Family Ties to the Land

Written for the 73rd Carnival of Genealogy

Writing about this topic could fill a book for me.

As far back as I’ve traced on both sides and all branches of my family, there have been land-owners and farmers.  I learned very early what was meant by a section or a quarter section of land, that there was nearly always a road on the section line, and I learned that land is organized by counties.  I used to take my dad to the county courthouses with me to read the deeds–he taught me to cut through the standard legal language to the “meat.”  He could read the land descriptions which looked like hieroglyphics to me–I still have to be very deliberate when I’m reading and mapping them.

No one was a land baron, though I suspect a couple of great-great grandfathers had such dreams.  For example, John Osborne ((1808 NC – 1865 TN) bought a large amount of land at the intersection of two railroads in what became Humboldt in Gibson County, Tennessee.  My understanding is that this was not an all above-board transaction, but there is even now a part of that town that is called the Osborne Plat.   His son came to Texas and had 9 children, born in about 5 different counties– his letters that survive all refer to his search for land.

My grandfathers kept moving south and west as the nation developed and  land became available.  Everyone farmed.  Even the one professional man, who was born in New York City, William Green Ball (1806 NY – 1881 IA), country doctor, was a founding member of the Warren County Iowa agricultural society.  My third great-grandparents (2 sets of them) who immigrated to McPherson and Harvey Counties in Kansas in 1874 from Russia brought turkey red wheat with them from the steppes of the Ukraine and southern Russia.  I grew up in a town in Texas nicknamed the “Wheatheart of the Nation.”

My dad farmed, his dad farmed, and so did my maternal grandfather.  In fact, my paternal grandfather and uncles often planted and harvested a crop in the Texas panhandle, and then they loaded up their equipment and traveled 640 miles north up Highway 83 to South Dakota to harvest their crop there.  My maternal grandparents left the Dust Bowl scarred Oklahoma panhandle about 1952 for the very cheap land available in South Dakota, and my paternal relatives farmed part time up there as well.

All of the men in my family farmed and all of the women had gardens.  Later, my dad planted a garden out in the field near the irrigation well, but I well remember my mom starting lettuce and some of the more tender plants in hot boxes dad built.  My younger brother was recently recalling his “first job,” at age 7 or 8, hoeing our great-Aunt Eva’s garden– for $.75 per hour and all the candy he could eat.  Aunt Eva managed to make the desert bloom like a rose–the desert of the high plains of the Texas panhandle–she grew peonies and roses and dahlias and foxglove and water lilies in her ponds.  In her garden she grew tomatoes and green beans and cucumbers and onions and peppers and dill for canning.  She also wielded a mean hoe if a snake of any sort dared invade her domain.  Further north, in the even more desolate Oklahoma panhandle, another great aunt grew a garden so lush and beautiful, you knew it had to be tended by a person with very exacting standards.  Aunt Edna always brought us gallon (!) jars of her delicious dill pickles and her pickled, stuffed green peppers, tied with white cotton string.  Yum.  I know now that she learned her gardening and pickling skills from her German Mennonite family.  I’ve given it a try and I can do it, but it sure is a lot of work.

My dad died about 6 years ago.  His brother, my Uncle Ray, is still farming at age 80–just one more year, you know. Uncle Ray is the only one of my dad’s 7 siblings still living.  I suspect my agricultural heritage ends with that generation.  My other brother wanted very badly to farm, but he couldn’t make it pay enough to support his family.  His current place on the lake, though, is tended by a smaller version of his favorite John Deere tractor and his garden is luscious.  And I do have a cousin with a PhD in agronomy–his email “handle” is “Dr. Dirt.”

Every quarter or so, I get a newsletter from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), because I still am part owner of the 1/4 section my dad owned when he died, and am a part of the partnership that still “farms” our grandfather’s land in Texas.  It gives me a sense of pride to get that flyer–I know it is counted as junk mail and unnecessary government intrusion by many of my family members, but when it arrives in my urban mailbox, I like it.

I have my herb garden growing, and I have a couple of vegetable plants in my flower bed.  I started some hollyhocks on the back porch and will transplant them soon.  Every time I do that, I think of my family and how many generations we have worked the land.

“We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand” is part of the Oklahoma state song.  I hope my 6 generations of Texas relatives will forgive me for using it as a way to sum up this posting.


23 November 2008

8 Things about Tex

Filed under: Germans from Russia, Memes, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Osborne Family, Texas — allmyanc @ 6:52 pm

Here are the Tag Rules:
1. Each player starts with eight random fact/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. A the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their name.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

Apple of Apple’s Tree has tagged me for this meme.  I’m always up for an easy way to generate a blog topic.  I’m not so crazy about tagging others because I’m pretty sure I’m not in on this tagging business at the beginning so probably everyone I choose will have been tagged.  But here goes:

1.  Tex, as might be known from her name, is a 6th generation Texan.  She is partial to the Molly Ivins, Ann Richards mode of Texan.

2.  Tex has lived in Oklahoma much longer than she lived in Texas.

3.  As a child, Tex was often called snoopy.  She now knows she was just a budding information professional.  She is a librarian and collecting information for analysis is her passion.

4.  Tex watches (and reads) so many criminal procedurals that her husband believes she may be plotting his demise.  She is not.

5.  Tex may have a touch of agoraphobia.  She really does not like new situations and does not like to leave her comfort zone.  But she will push herself, particularly if new family information is involved.

6.  Tex went to Ireland last year and wishes she had Irish ancestry.  It is truly a magical place.

7.  Tex went to the USSR many years ago–she was there while Yeltsin was being elected–and knows she has Germans from Russia ancestry.  It is a difficult place.

8.  Tex really really really wishes she could get her 4th great-grandfather Christopher Osborne out of North Carolina.

I’m tagging some of my faves with the hope that they have not already been tagged, and as with all “chain letters,”  feel free to ignore  :-)   I promise bad luck will not come to you.:

Olive Tree Genealogy Blog

Moultrie Creek

Ramblings

Genealogy Roots Blog

Before My Time

Genblog by Julie

Jessica’s Genejournal

30 April 2008

Family Myths

Filed under: Germans from Russia, How to, Unruh Family — allmyanc @ 10:20 am

Today Kim Powell at About.com:Genealogy addresses the “our name was changed at Ellis Island” myth in her most excellent column..  She address 4 of the common family myths in an earlier article entitled “Family Legends–Fact or Fiction?“–the 3 brothers, the Indian Princess, name change at Ellis Island, and the family inheritance gone awry.

Where I work, we see these myths on almost a daily basis.   We have one customer who has written us 6 times about his Indian great-grandmother.  No matter how we phrase it, we cannot convince him that the girl with the same name who is on the Dawes Rolls is in fact not his great-grandmother.  And another repeat customer is certain we can find out what happened to the inheritance her mother was “cheated out of” by an uncle who went for ministerial training.

One of my great-aunts insisted that her family name was originally “Unrau” instead of “Unruh” and that it was changed at Ellis Island.   At some point in time, the family name may very well have been “Unrau,” though I’ve found some fairly old church records from the time they spent in Russia that have “Unruh” recorded.  As for the Ellis Island myth, the family actually came in through Philadelphia.  The came at the end of 1874, almost 20 years before Ellis Island was opened in 1892.

I tend to believe that most family stories have a kernel of truth, but it’s my job to research and sort fact from fiction.  It’s one of the things I love most about doing this sort of research.   Our family did indeed immigrate, but the port they came in through was not even in operation at the time of their arrival.  This underscores the importance of doing good, basic research of the history of the time.  Contemporary records, such as the church records, are another means of determining what’s gotten changed through time in the the family story.

29 January 2008

A Float/Wheatfield in the Genealogy Parade

Filed under: Germans from Russia, Texas — allmyanc @ 6:49 pm

OK, so we’ve got the Carnival of Genealogy and now we have a Genealogy Parade. Bill West has challenged us to enter a band or a float. Since it’s a virtual project and I really don’t have to stuff kleenexes through chicken wire (trust me, I’ve worked on my share of actual floats!), I’m entering a float.

When I was growing up, I was part of the school band that marched every year in the annual celebration parade in August. This was at the top of the Texas panhandle, and it was HOT!! The only uniforms our band had were wool, but we were at least exempted from wearing the heavy jacket–we could wear a white shirt. The main street is part of state highway 83, and it is long. It was always a big deal. Imagine my chagrin when after college, I heard the husband of another hometown girl describe the parade as the “tractor parade.”

However, he was probably right. I only knew my little part of the parade, and we were having a great time. But being an agricultural area, there were lots of tractors–the implement dealerships used the occasion to showcase their new products and lots of the floats were also pulled by tractors.

So all that to say, my float has to have a tractor, and it also has to have wheat. The area where I grew up now raises other crops–maize, or milo, and soybeans. But in the 50s and 60s, most of the crops were wheat. And I also descend from the Germans from Russia who brought turkey red wheat to the Great Plains. So there’s gotta be wheat.

Jay in the Wheatfield

The music has to be old-fashioned country-western. One of my uncles played in a western-swing band–maybe we’ll use his recording as part of the music But Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and Ray Price and Skeeter Davis are the people who are singing when I think of my family history. I also have relatives who are accomplished musicians in other genres, an organist who also installs and re-builds organs, for example, but I think the country-western respresents the most people.

That about covers it.

My only non-rural, non-Southern family originated in New York City. But even the descendants of that family ended up in Arkansas–he was a physician, but he also was a founding member of the Agricultural Society in Warren County, Iowa. So we have wheat and country music and a tractor. Not all that exciting but very representative. I suppose I could try to put in some fire and hail to liven things up–we did lose a wheat field and a truck one year to a fire and it was always touch and go as to whether we would be “hailed out.”

I’ll have to work on the weather issue. It might liven things up a bit.

10 November 2007

Fur-bearing Christians

Filed under: Buller Family, Cemeteries, Germans from Russia, Unruh Family — allmyanc @ 10:17 pm

Today at work I was looking for an online listing of a tombstone for a family I assumed was of German from Russia descendancy. I was looking at the usual sites–Findagrave and Internment.net and the web page for the county on Oklahoma’s GenWeb page.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my great Aunt Edna. She was my maternal grandfather’s sister, the oldest child of that family. I was talking to her about the Karoma Cemetery in Goltry, Oklahoma where her parents and both sets of her grandparents, and a few of her great-grandparents are buried. (This is the cemetery I took my husband to early in my genealogy quest. We wrote down all the family names I knew and we came up with 86 people!) I told her that I’d found tombstones for all the family at Goltry but there was only a small funeral home marker on the grave of her Unruh grandparents who had died in 1929 and 1932.

She told me they’d be pretty unhappy to know there was even that much marking of their grave. I knew that side of the family were all Mennonites, but all Mennonites are not created equal. Benjamin John Unruh (1854-1929) and his wife Helena Nachtigal (1852-1932) were evidently from one of the more conservative sects. Aunt Edna said there had been no mirrors and no photographs in their home, and they would not approve of a tombstone to mark their grave. Then she grinned and said they were called the “fur-bearing Christians.” She said her grandfather Unruh always had a big long beard, also part of his religious beliefs. Aunt Edna’s description of them as “fur-bearing” still makes me smile.

11 June 2007

Which ancestor would I most like to meet?

Filed under: Buller Family, Cooper Family, DNA, Germans from Russia, Landrum Family, Osborne Family — allmyanc @ 3:06 pm

Today I was reading Kimberley Powell’s posting of the same title.

My first thought goes to the irksome Christopher Osborne. He’s the one that I can’t get beyond. He may be my immigrant ancestor, but I can’t find his origins so I don’t know for sure. I’ve written about him before, including what I found by going with the DNA test.

But I’d also like to talk to my 3rd great-grandmother, Elizabeth Landrum Cooper. I’d like to know more about her mother and father, and I also would like to talk to her about her losing 4 sons in the Civil War. Would knowing about her descendants and their admiration for her provide any comfort? What was the impetus for her and her family to pull up fairly deep roots in Tennessee and move to Texas in 1841?

And then there are those enigmatic Germans from Russia–the person from that line who I’d most like to talk to is probably my great-grandmother Matilda Amanda Buller Unruh. Yes, she’s the one who shot herself, and I do have some questions for her about that violent act. But I’d also like to know some more about her family and their journey from Russia to Philadelphia to Kansas to Oklahoma. She wasn’t on the original voyage, but her parents were and I guess I think talking to her would be the “most efficient” way to find out about her and her ancestors. And maybe knowing more about her descendants would bring her some peace as well.

The bottom line is there are too many I’d like to talk to. And while it’s not perfect, searching for details about their lives is the only way I know to converse with them. I’m determined that Christopher will give up his secrets.

We’ll see.

Do you have any ancestors you’d like to meet?

21 April 2007

Matilda Amanda Buller Unruh

Filed under: Buller Family, Germans from Russia, Oklahoma, Perryton, Photos, Unruh Family — allmyanc @ 7:42 pm

Amanda Matilda

This is a picture of my great-grandmother. She’s always been an enigma to me. I wish I’d known her. Or maybe I should say I have some questions I wish I could ask her now.

She was one of ten children who were the first generation Americans born to immigrants from Russia. They were part of the German Mennonites who left in 1874 when the agreements their ancestors had made with Catherine the Great were being threatened. They brought their hard red wheat and came to Canada and the Great Plains–my family came to McPherson County, Kansas and then, later, to Woods County, Oklahoma.

And I’ve thought a great deal about posting this story. But I think I have to do it. I mean absolutely no disrespect. I believe that my family has been damaged by the secrets it has kept, though I certainly understand the reasons for wanting to keep those secrets.

One of the early memorable experiences I had in my genealogical adventures was going to the library to look for her obituary. I knew she had killed herself and I wanted to see what her obituary said. No one in my family talked very much about this incident, or at least they didn’t talk very loud about it, all of which I eventually understood, but I was determined to see what I could find out.

I knew she’d died in 1933, and that my mother, who was born in 1932, was of very little help. So I pulled out the Beaver County newspaper microfilm to see what I could find. I started looking for an obit sometime after the 24th of May in 1933. I was shocked when I didn’t find an obituary but a news story on front page of the newspaper. Today that wouldn’t surprise me, but at that time, it was quite a shock. I had to get up a take a little walk down the hall and then come back before I could make the copy. Here’s what I found:

news story

It explained a lot.

It explained why my grandparents always traded in Perryton, Texas rather than Beaver, Oklahoma. It explained why my grandad was so nervous when I started the search and talked about wanting to read the Beaver newspapers. (I’d also found their names listed among the delinquent tax lists–who knows if those were correct. It was the depression, they lived a long way from the county seat, they “traded” in Texas (see comment above), who knows? I know my grandad was a bit of a fanatic when it came to bill paying and I didn’t bring it up–I can’t imagine how much shame it would have brought him.)

Anyway, back to the news story. My grandmother had told me about the previous attempt. She said her mother-in-law drank carbolic acid. She said Doc Smith came out to their house and said Matilda wouldn’t live through the night. He left a signed death certificate with them and said the only thing he knew to do was to feed her raw egg whites or yolks, I can’t remember which now, so my grandmother and my great-grandfather did that. My grandmother said there were holes in the linoleum floor where she threw up from the eggs. I can’t imagine what the acid must have done to her mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach. But she lived.

The other thing my grandmother told me was that my great-grandfather and my grandfather took my great-grandmother “all over the country” trying to get her help. I believe they must have taken her to Mayo Clinic–I recently found a picture of my grandad that has “Elmer at Rochester” written on the back with a date that would match. Research note: I need to see if I can get records from there regarding her being there. I don’t know where else they may have taken her.

I suspect she suffered from depression. I usually blame the Germans from Russia for this family trait, but I don’t know. I do believe that she suffered from some sort of chemical imbalance that resulted in a type of mental illness. You read about people who lived through the Dust Bowl as sometimes having mental issues. Living in Beaver County certainly counts as the Dust Bowl–my grandmother talked about scooping off the window sills and hanging wet sheets and towels over the windows. But I also believe depression is genetic in our family. My grandad used to work like a maniac to get through harvest and then just go to bed for days on end. And I believe it was my grandad who found his mother after she’d shot herself. Again, something we just couldn’t talk about, though my gran and I came pretty close, God bless her.

We know now that women don’t typically use guns to kill themselves, so great- grandmother Tillie, as she was known, was very, very determined. This far after the fact I can’t separate that act from her disease–all I know is that I can see the effect of the lack of good mental health care. What might have happened if she’d had access to some good medication?

10 June 2006

Bladder Training

Filed under: Germans from Russia, Mom — allmyanc @ 6:57 pm

I think all families have stories about bathrooms and underwear. And they’re nearly always told with a grin.

Today we were leaving work and I stopped by the bathroom on the way out. I caught up with my colleagues at the elevator and of course comments ensued. But it reminded me to tell them about an assistant I used to have who always reminded me of how dangerous it was to get on the road without stopping by the bathroom first. I’m sure it would be problematic to have a wreck and suffer internal injuries with a full bladder, but somehow it just always seemed pretty low on my list of considerations as I got ready to get on I-35 for the 40 minute commute home.

Then, of course, one of the other colleagues related how her mother really had always told her and her sibs to have on clean underwear when they left the house. We never got that particular speech at home, unless we were going to the doctor, but it did remind me of my mom telling about taking her 2 aunts to visit their parents’ (and grandparents’) graves.

This would have been about a 4 hour trip. Sometime into the journey, Aunt Edna requested a bathroom stop, with which Mom promptly complied. When Mom noticed Aunt Lorene wasn’t getting out of the car, she asked her if she didn’t need to use the facilities.

“No,” came the reply, “I’m training my bladder.”

I don’t know if my mom laughed then, but I know she did many times later on, as did the rest of us.

This was so typical of Aunt Lorene. She was always training something. She got me started on a quilt of the state birds when I was about 10. I still have most of the pieces and I WILL finish it one of these days. (This project has been complicated by the fact that Aunt Lorene’s house burned with blocks for the states from Texas up through North Dakota). She taught me a how to make hospital corners and a great deal about cooking–she’d trained as an LVN in Albuquerque. She made lots of her gifts and I still like to make presents for others and treasure a handmade gift when it comes my way. She taught my mom a great deal about home decorating and making curtains and slip covers. She was a smart woman. But she did have that “training” gene. She was, after all, the sister to my grandfather who was referenced earlier as drilling holes before he drove in nails. Either one could fix or make almost anything, except peace between them.

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