A 173 year old document

New old documents are still showing up online, see?  I'm not sure when Larry found this one, but look--it was signed the 13th of May, 1840--

173 years ago today.  Wow!

Johann Gerhard NABER declared his intention to become an American citizen, renouncing his loyalty to the King of Hanover.  But, you say, NEW ORLEANS??

Yes.  We're pretty sure great grandfather Gerhard Naber 

arrived in the port of New Orleans and came up the Mississippi to Iowa.

However, this man wasn't our Gerhard--

ours would have been 11 years old in 1840.

Early in our Naber research,

Larry found an account in an Iowa history book 

about a Gerhard & Elizabeth Naber traveling up the river on a paddlewheeler. 

Tragically, Elizabeth fell overboard and drowned.

Yes, we realized it couldn't have been my Gerhard 

or his Elizabeth (Rupipper), 

but it certainly was THIS Gerhard's Elizabeth. 

"All Aboard!"

We might have been Texans!

Evidently there was a lot of talk around Pierz in 1919 about relative land prices around the country compared to Morrison Co.  Wasn't the soil here just as fertile as soil in Iowa, the Dakotas or Wisconsin?  Then how come we were selling it for so little per acre?

Grandpa Janson decided to check the latest Big Deal state, Texas.  He says "we"--perhaps his brother Eugene went along, we don't know.  It was a big enough deal that he got front page space two weeks in a row in the PJ.

It's kinda fun to speculate about how things might have been different if Grandpa had LOVED Texas, huh? Wow.

Great Grandpa Gerhard Naber

Wow, Larry provides AGAIN--☺--When I first searched the Delaware Co Genweb site in Iowa, there was no mention of Nabers having lived there.  I added (on the search list) that I was interested in the family.  I haven't been back to the site in probably a year tho.  But this week Larry found that they've added grave stones from county cemeteries, Petersburg among em, and LOOK:

(Johannes Gerhard Naber was the father of mom's mom, Margaret).

You can orient yourself by looking for the U shaped "Welcome to Petersburg" sign.  Above, it's on the corner of the cemetery fence.

 No, I zoomed way in and couldn't see a  metal cross near the fence.  

It's okay tho, he's there.

Alternate IDs for some of those kids

Scroll down and re-look at the porch photo from January 8th--turns out Carrie and her mom checked it out this week and they think a couple of the people named might be miss-identified. (Carrie's great-grandparents were  Mike and Toni, #13 and #11, and her grandparents were Alfred & Eva)  Such good genes!  Here's what Carrie wrote: 

 " ....my mom & I both believe that #12 is her uncle Leo (Toni & Mike's son). Leo & Butch (besides their parents) were the ones I knew for sure. I tried to find some pictures of him & am attaching one. My mom also thinks that #10 is her uncle Walter, not a Daniel".

I really wish I'd known these people--they look like fun ☺

Oh, and THANKS to Carrie & her mom!

The Johannes Janson by-the-porch photo, named!

 Woohoo!! Around Christmas, we heard from a descendant of Johannes and Maria (Sauer) Janson who found the porch photo online...and showed it to her mom, who knew most of the people pictured! 
 Her name's Geralyn, and here's how she connects:

Johannes' daughter Sophia
had a daughter, Dorothy, 
whose daughter is Geralyn. 

Dorothy is the littlest kid in the photo below (18).
See?
☺

This photo, too, was a mystery, but by now we recognized faces. Still, all we could do was  speculate it was taken on the same day as the porch pic. Now, according to Geralyn and Dorothy, the two boys were Sophie and Nick's kids Rheinhold (Ray) and Lawrence (Larry) Daniel.  They're pictured with their mom Sophie (left) and their aunt Regina.  

HUGE THANKS to Geralyn and Dorothy!

Speaking of the Nick Daniel family, Sue sent a few more photos of that clan.  Sue's descended from Sophie and Nick, but so is Geralyn.

(Geralyn says " Sue is my 1st cousin once removed, but with 55 first cousins on my Mom's side...." ☺  it's hard to link them all).

A side note: I like this take on ancestors and our relationship to them:  

 Sasha and Zamani are two aspects of time as expressed in some Eastern and Central African cultures. Sasha are spirits known by someone still alive, while Zamani are spirits not known by anyone currently alive. Sasha are concerned with, and are expressed as, the present time, the recent past, and the near future; while Zamani is the limitless past. Potential time is the third part of the space-time continuum in African Thought. People must learn from the past to act wisely in the present to create a good future.

Wendelin Janson--The Mystery Years

The last time we re-visited the "Wendelin saga", we did a short synopsis of what we'd learned about him (through records published online, mostly).  I smugly thought we had about all the info there was on the life of one obscure, never-married, German immigrant. (But wait--Larry kept digging!)
Wendelin was my grandfather's eldest brother.  When the family came here in 1883, he was 12, and on the trip across the ocean he had the humiliating duty of being in charge of the family chamber pot.  As he grew up on the claim in Buckman township, Morrison County, Minnesota, we expect he had an unfair share of the work, since he was oldest. 

By 1895, when he was 24, he probably wanted OUT of farming.  That's when he joined the army at Ft Snelling, in Minneapolis. He served honorably for a three year stint (ending in 1898), but most men who joined the army at the time expected adventure in the Spanish-American War, in the Philippines or Cuba.  We found Private Wendelin Janson re-enlisting in May, 1899.  We knew he deserted 3 months later, but we didn't know that it was in the  Philippines or that he deserted at Bacoor, Luzon. (See above).  By then, he was 29.  
Did he see connections between his own childhood oppression in Germany with the local people near the battles he was in, was it too hot, or did he just  reconsider this "adventure" thing?  Anyway, according to the page above, he went AWOL in August.  With luck (and Larry on it), we'll find out more of what happened, before he shows up again in St Paul in the 1905 Minnesota census. Stay tuned!

Whoa, thanks, Larry!

German farmers in Virginia--early 1900s

A piece from the Sunday paper of the day, about the excellent German farmers who were buying up land in Virginia in 1903....about the time our Jansons decided to return to Minnesota.  Click each section to enlarge, then read between the lines...