Buckman in the Summertime

Selling sweet corn across from St Michael's Church--a Janson kid summer tradition since Kenny was old enough to make change.  I remember going to the bazaar and wondering where the boys got the money to buy stuff for Aunt Jeanette.  They laughed and said "Selling sweet corn, over there--" and they'd point to the parking lot.
It was surprising to me cuz when we visited the farm in the summer, we were always sent home with a gunny sack of corn, but we never saw the stand they pulled up to town.  Not until I found it on Google Streetview in 2010:

I love that the tradition continues...☺

Innovations in Morrison County History

(Copied-and-pasted from Hesch History):
Honestly, whenever I go to a museum and see the displays and exhibits, I'm always a little...miffed, I guess...because I know this is only the tiny tip of their artifact iceberg.  I'm aware that there's a climate controlled room or a whole warehouse that I'll never have access to, and damn, wouldn't it be COOL to see all that stuff? (Yes, even if I know it's impossible).
WELL, hooray x 3!  the Morrison County Historical Society at the Weyerhaeuser Museum in Little Falls is doing something about it--they're taking pictures of items in their collections, and posting them in an ONLINE Exhibit, with a short description.  Eventually, a good chunk of Morrison Co history will be googleable, both by keywords and by image.  I think this is AMAZING, and spiffy! 
And, if you recognize something there and want to add info, each page has a comment section.

To lead off the website, here's a small part of an embroidered autograph sampler of "family and friends of J.K. and Lottie Lee Martin" from 1897-99.  There's a number on all the items so if you want to go and see the actual artifact, you can go to the museum and ask for it by #!

Go, check it out, comment, and BOOKMARK it--"Exhibits by the Morrison County Historical Society" will only get better!

To Encourage a Vocation

Larry and I were talking about Necco wafers and  "playing mass" when we were kids.  I said that we sisters fought over who got to be "Father" (usually it was the kid who owned the Neccos, or else she'd take 'em away and eat 'em all herself).  


Larry said he and his brother would swipe their mom's bathrobe and play mass till the Neccos were gone or she caught em.  Like all Catholic moms then, it would be a tough decision:  "What if you stopped em cuz it was your bathrobe, but in doing so, you wrecked a vocation?"
(I have that line on a card here on the desk.  It makes me laugh every time)☺

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.