Comes the dawn ☺

Over the years, I've often wondered what it was that a bishop's mitre reminded me of.  This cartoon made me think "Ohhhhhh!" ☺

(The idea of the American government being taken over by Rome has 

been a scare tactic more than once).

Crusin' a local cemetery

...and Larry's part in it.

Yesterday I went to the old St Joseph's parish cemetery here in town to find/take pictures of three graves that were requested by Find a Grave members.  When I'm walking the aisles in a cemetery, camera in hand, I can never resist the oldest monuments--who were they, are they remembered by anyone (and are they accounted for on Find a Grave?)

(The "old" cemetery here is tucked in next to the St Ben's convent graveyard, and is bound on the other sides by the college and the street, so the only available sites are narrow family plots--those headstones with two names, but dates on only one of them, ya know?  The new cemetery is about 6 blocks south on College Ave, in a large treeless field with no ambiance to speak of).

ANYWAY, I found this lovely grave marker with the inscription "Unsere Mutter" or "Our Mother".  At the bottom, barely visible in a later concrete repair was the name URSULA WIDMANN-- which must have been part of the original monument.  Who was this woman, and when was she buried here?  The list on the wall of the building says she was born August 11, 1803 and died December 25, 1870.

 I showed it to the Research King before my afternoon client, and by the time I returned, he knew that she was born Ursula Marie Irtenkauf in Winzingen, Jagskreis, Wurttemburg, Germany, that she'd married Frederich Albrecht Widmann on October 7, 1839, and that she was widowed there.  Ursula Widmann and two sons emigrated in 1869, in time to be included in the 1870 census here in Stearns county. Evidently, they'd come to join her other son who was already here.  It must have been a sweet reunion...sadly, they only had a year together before Ursula died.  We don't know why she was buried so far from Brockway township (NE corner of the county, along the river)...but maybe she became ill and her sons took her to the nuns in St Joe, where she died.  The family probably had little affiliation with whatever church was closest in Brockway.  All the later Widmann family entries are in Holding township (Holdingford area). 

Our only other clue is below: the nearest post office was in Clinton, Minn, the earliest name for the future town of St Joseph.

Accurate Otremba Immigrants

Remember when we talked about Nathan Richardson here on HH?  He was the first Mayor of Little Falls and has had a book written about him (A Big Hearted Paleface Man, by Mary Warner). He might have been a great public servant, but I don't think ol' Nate listened very well, or had a whole lotta common sense.
Above, you see his handwriting.  He was pressed into service enumerating the census in 1870, particularly in Agram township, around "Pierce".  Admittedly, the Otrembas had been in the US less than a year, and probably none of them spoke any English, but how hard is "Ot-rem-ba" to sound out without making it look Irish?  Argh...☺ Too bad he wasn't perfect like the rest of us...

Anyway, whining about Nathan Richardson isn't what this post is about.  It's something Larry noticed about the birth places noted there on the census:  Anton, his wife, and daughter Mary (our future great grandma) were born in Prussia, and the others were born in Poland?  Surely they were all born in Gushwitz, Falkenberg, Silesia, Prussia...but checking Polish history,  we found that Poland became a separate country again after 1853 when Mary was born and before 1857 when Anna was born.  THAT info made a difference to Anton, and he was able to communicate it, even if they got his name wrong.  Whew!

1870

It would help, genealogically,  to have a sort of timeline in my head, with entries for significant events in the last 200 years.  So far, I only have imaginary chunks marked Otremba, Sand, Hesch, Rausch, Janson and Naber, but each family is separate, and I forget that one family was here setting up housekeeping and having babies while another was still waiting for a ship to leave Bremerhaven or Hamburg.

Our Heschs left Europe before 1870--we assume Paul and Mathias arrived here earlier than their parents and little brother--and this week, Larry and I have been perusing the 1870 Federal Census (MN and WI), as well as the Minnesota 1875 census, to see who was where, when.

In 1870, Mary Otremba was 17, and still at home with her parents Anton and Catherine, in 'Pierce', Mn.  By 1875, Paul and Mary were married less than a year, and living in Pierce, too.  They were still in Pierz in 1880, but now they had a 4 year old daughter named Rosa.

I looked through the entire Waumandee, Wisconsin  census for 1870.  It's faded terribly in 140 years so it's hard to read, but I didn't see Mathias Hesch there.  He would have been a farm hand, most likely, as a young man alone...but he and Agnes Trachofsky weren't married until 1879, in Waumandee, and Larry and I have reason to believe that Mathias traveled here on the same ship as the Trachofskys.

Ahh, here he is--in the town of Buffalo, working for a  Carl Williams, in 1870, at 21 years old.  COOL!
(Larry found this tonight ☺--Thanks!)

Interesting:  in the 1870 census for Pierce, Larry found Albert and Anna Trachovsky ►, who we believe were Agnes' brother and wife, so there was a third reason to move to Pierz eventually.


And, as shown above, the Anton Otremba family was already here:

In the fall of 1868 the Anton Otremba family came to America. They had seen an article in the German papers in which Fr. Pierz, the missionary priest, announced that a German Catholic colony was settling in the Rich Prairrie area. He described the country and told of the good qualities of the soil and the climate. This induced the Otremba family to come to the US. They got as far as St. Cloud, Minnesota by railroad. There they bought a team of oxen and a wagon and seven head of cattle and started for Rich Prairie township. They located on a 160 acre homestead in section 32 of what is now Pierz township. As it was late in the fall when they arrived and there were no buildings nor any lumber to be had, they built a dugout in the ground and covered it with poles and long slough grass. They lived in this over the winter. For the cattle they had to make hay of dried grass which did not have much nourishment. There was no protection for the cattle during the winter. The cattle died in the spring. The following year they built a log house and log barn and began clearing and grubbing the land. 
Anton donated the first church bell to St. Michaels Catolic church at Buckman and it rang it's first death toll for him on February 5, 1883. Catherine Otremba donated the large bell to the church when the new church was being built and it rang it's first death toll for her on January 13, 1902. 


And in 1870, St Cloud was the local metropolis, along with Sauk Rapids.  Where the census for an agricultural township had an ag production schedule, a city had an industry production schedule, and WOW is St Cloud's ever interesting.  There are about 75 businesses listed, with brewers, blacksmiths, millers, tinners, wagonmakers, butchers, builders, saddlers, watchmakers, a photographer, a millner, a plow maker, a publisher and a cigar maker.  It's worth looking at, just cuz its so interesting.

Prairie Darkness and the S.S. Union

Last week, there was a recorded phone message saying that the power company needed to turn off power to St Joe for 4 hours during the night, for maintenance.  No biggie--I expected to sleep thru it and reset clocks in the morning.
 Very early Friday morning (no idea when--the power was off ☺), I got up to pee, and MAN, it was dark in here...a DUH situation, for sure...lol  But there was no moon. (And usually in a power outage we have the benefit of lightning).  This was incredibly total darkness.  Outside, I saw they'd installed a temporary flood light on the Kay's Kitchen corner, but otherwise it was dark, dark, dark.
When I told Larry about it online, he said it sounded like "prairie darkness"--just think: homesteaders would have normally lived with such total darkness every night.  Wow. No wonder families were so big.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

OUR Heschs arrived in NYC on the S.S. Union May 28, 1870.  It was a fairly new ship, first launched in 1867.  Its capacity of 700 steerage passengers and 150 cabin passengers was almost met with 682 passengers this trip.  Looking at the ships list, there were clusters of people from the same area traveling together, and four different groups of "Bohemians".

We questioned Anton's age when we first saw this page last year--how could he claim to be 11?  Well, if you look at the stewards' handwriting, you'll see he sometimes missed the bottom stroke of his 6s, as in 463 and 465 there, see?  We knew Anton had to be 16 at the time, and he WAS!
(BTW, that group included Popps and Fidlers, familiar central Minnesota names to this day).

Larry was researching the boat to see if there was more info and possibly a picture of it.  Here's what he found:

Between the 29th of November and the 8th of December (1870), the Union 'ran aground' and broke up at Rattray, Scotland.

Hmm.  You could say the boat was in business just long enough to get our ancestors over here.  But also, we realized that Paul would have been 24 in 1870.  Larry asked if there were any "coming over early" stories re: Paul in the Hesch family?  I don't think so, only the story of Paul as a stowaway in an apple barrel.  We did find a Mathias Hesch from Bohemia (at 21, working as a hired man) in the 1870 census.  If Paul and Mathias left Europe earlier than their parents, and if Paul actually was 21 when they sailed, we should be scouring the 1867 ships lists.
BTW, if you want to look at the whole list from  May 28, 1870, click here. ☺

THANKS AGAIN to Larry!