A Birth Certificate for another Joseph Janson c. 1901

 These two maps show Prince Edward County in the state of Virginia, where our Jansons tried farming for 10 months in 1900.   The map on the left shows the county in relation to larger Va cities, and the one on the right shows Hampden in the middle and Meherrin on the south edge, about 20 miles away.  Turns out that grandpa's brother Sebastian lived in Meherrin while their parents tried Hampton.  They all eventually moved back to Minnesota.

Larry found two interesting pieces of info online yesterday--both having to do with Joseph, Sebastian and Mary's son.  Evidently, in 1942, Joe had to prove when and where he was born to someone here in Stearns county.  Were they enlisting men over 40 then?  Anyway, these are interesting documents--see who little Joe's godfather was?  Anton was 20 years old.  We have no idea who the other sponsor was--looks like Mrs Zerknutzer?  Larry found a family named Zirknitzer but we have no clues beyond that.  Yes, new info always creates more questions!        

The very next day ☺:
Ha! It crossed my mind to check the 1900 census records for Hampden but I didn't actually do it.  Wanna guess who did? The Zirknitzer family lived next door to Joseph and Franziska Janson.  They were from Austria, so would have been as familiar as a lot of their Buckman neighbors.
In June 1900, Sebastian and Mary were still living in Buckman, according to the Minnesota census, with their adopted son John and Seb's brother Eugene.  We assume they left for Virginia shortly afterwords because their son Joseph was born in Meherrin, Va according to the green birth certificate above.
So baby Joseph's sponsors were Anton Janson and Katherine Zirknitzer.
(BTW, Larry scanned the rest of the population living around our great grandparents--almost every one, black or white, were born in Virginia of parents born in Virginia--not exactly the German settlement Joe and Fran hoped for).

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...

Old Newspaper news

I've spent way too much time lately on the CHRONICLING AMERICA site from the Library of Congress, but it's kind of a homage to Grandpa Anton, cuz he'd have loved it so much.  It fascinates me because there are newspapers from as early as the year he was born, 1880, from 15 states, including Virginia and Minnesota. 

After clicking around and downloading lots of those pages, I'm beginning to understand more about the times around 1900--what the topics of conversation probably were (the weather and prices..lol), and what their humor and stories reflected: some prejudice against immigrants, and the normal city-dweller scorn for rural folks. 

I've been curious about the Jansons' decision to move--leaving 18 years of hard work behind--did they have any real facts about where they were going?  This glorious ad and others like it were fairly regular in the Globe pre-1905. 

The northern newspapers realized there were lots of German immigrants here--surely some of them wished they had settled in a warmer climate.  According to a taped biography Dick Janson gave in the 1970s, the family expected a German Catholic Church in Hampden.  There wasn't one.  Dick said, too, that "My mother especially talked about life in Virginia, and that they were looked down on at the time.  The blacks were alot nicer than the whites that they knew".

This article was in the Farmville, Virginia, Herald   in March, 1903.  This was the year all the Jansons returned to Minnesota.  As Larry observed, Virginia seemed to be a revolving door about then.

....................................

Another interesting series in the Globe was the extensive coverage of the cyclone that damaged St Cloud, wiped out Sauk Rapids and continued to Buckman in April, 1886.

This was Grandpa Antons recollection of the 1886 tornado, and how it affected him as a child of 6.

On the Move...

We were looking online for the answers to a fairly complicated set of genealogical questions about the Janson family, and Larry found answers that we could ONLY have found online. I'm still stunned, in awe of how his mind works, and delighted....I feel like Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

What we knew:

1. The Janson family moved to Hampden, Virginia in 1900 after spending 18 years in Minnesota improving their acreage, clearing fields, planting crops, and building a house and out-buildings on the farm west of Buckman.

2. Their eldest son, Wendelin, had enlisted in the military, served a 3 year stint, and was honorably discharged (1898). That summer, he took a trip to Europe.

3. The next spring, he re-enlisted, stayed 3 months, and deserted (1899).

4. In 1903 when Buckman incorporated, Joseph Janson was back there as one of the petitioners.

5. Altho the whole Joseph Janson family is listed in Hampden in the 1900 census, we believe that only Anton, plus 'one brother and three sisters*' accompanied Joseph and Franziska there, and that Anton stayed in Virginia for 3 more years after they went back to Minnesota, according to his WPA bio, right.
(* Anna, Rose, and Frances, plus Sebastian and his wife Mary Roos, who lived in Meherrin, Va).

6. The first two of Sebastian & Mary's kids were born in Virginia.

This all produced quite a few questions for Larry and me--like, what made them decide on Virginia, and why, right then? What kind of farms were available there? How did they find out about Hampden and Prince Edward County? Were there other German families in the area? Was the climate there really similar to southern Germany? (We were suspicious that they moved to hide Wendelin, but no, we don't think he was there at all).

The Library of Congress Chronicling America website: It's digitized historic newspapers from 15 states so far, and they include some from Minnesota and Virginia.

Larry found this article in the St Paul, Minnesota GLOBE Newspaper. A young scholar (W.E.B.DuBois!) uses Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia as a "typical" Southern town 30 years after the Civil War. Farmville happens to be about 5 miles from Hampden, and we think the Jansons may have read it, not with a view to the "Race Problem", but instead, imagining how they might fit there.
Click the article to read it.
Another internet WOW was information found in Google Books: this short rundown of Prince Edward County mentions German farmers moving there about 1900, and another book said it was about 12 families...

Amazingly, this FOR SALE ad appeared in the GLOBE, February 14, 1904--it could certainly have been placed by Grandpa Anton....

A photo of a West Virginia farm about the same time.