Genealogy: Getting Started with the Howe/Kunde lines.

 Howdy! The Old Man here.

Since the name of my blog starts with the word "genealogy" and the fact that today would have been my Grandpa V's 105th birthday, I figured I would talk about how I got started with genealogy and some brief family history/stories.  

Like most people, I never cared much about family history, nor did I ever ask my elders anything as far as who was from where, etc..  In my younger days I was more worried about my next baseball game, fishing, riding my bike, and hanging out with my pals.  It was much later in life that I realized the error of my ways. 

Eldest Daughter gave Baberino and I 23 & Me DNA kits as Christmas gifts in 2020. My results weren't much of a surprise: mostly German, Hungarian, and English.  There were a few surprises in that I had small amounts of Jewish, Native American, and Italian, but nothing earth shattering.  23 & Me has a feature where it shows you relatives who have also had their DNA tested, and allows you to communicate with them.  I have met some cousins and exchanged some family info, pictures and any stories we had to share.  Needless to say, this is when I was bitten by the genealogy bug.  I've only been at it for almost a year, but it is so much fun and so informative, and to meet relatives you never heard of is just downright cool.  

Tackling Ma's family lines was my first priority. Other than my uncles, cousins, and a few others, I knew nothing about them.  I was even more surprised about how little Ma knew about her own family.  Our whole lives we were told that Grandpa K was born in Germany and came to the US when he was a boy.  When I figured out that he was actually born in Rock Falls, IL is the moment I knew I was hooked on genealogy.  It turns out Grandpa K's father, Fred, came to the US from Germany when he was 18 years old, and paid for his passage by working as a chef's assistant aboard the SS Australia in 1881.  (This explains why I could never find Grandpa K in any of Ellis Island's records.) Fred left Ellis Island and hopped a train to Milwaukee, WI where he worked on a dairy farm for a short time. He then moved to Rock Falls, IL and learned large scale farming while working on farms in the area.  He met his future wife, Emelie Plautz, at a box social at Harmon School in Lee County, IL.  Emelie's family arrived in the US in May of 1882.  In September of the same year, her father, Gottlieb, took a train to Nebraska to visit his sister and her family and to look for a possible homestead.  When the train stopped in Council Bluffs, IA, Gottlieb got off of the train like everyone else.  Since he didn't speak or understand English, he didn't know when the train would be leaving. As the train was leaving the station, Gottlieb tried to run and jump on to one of the cars.  He slipped and fell onto the tracks with the train running over both of his legs.  He died several days later as result of his wounds.  Twenty five years later his sons petitioned the train company to pay for his exhumation and reburial in Rock Falls, IL to be closer to family.  Surprisingly for the times, the train company paid for the whole shebang.  Fred and Emelie were married 26 Nov 1886 in Rock Falls, where they lived and farmed for a few years and had their first two children, Elise (Lizzie), and Hedwig (Hattie). In 1890, for some reason, they moved to Ayr, NE and bought a 160 acre farm. They were the first settlers in the area to build a wood frame house, the others being sod huts.  While in Nebraska, seven more children were born: William, Minnie, Frank, Elsa, Oskar, Anne, and Herman.  Lizzie and Oskar died in a typhus outbreak in 1898 and are buried there.  After two kids dying, miserable weather, grasshopper swarms, and continuous crop failures, Fred and Emelie decided Nebraska sucked, and wrote to family in Illinois  requesting they look for a new patch of land for the Kunde's to come home to.  The found a 200 acre farm in Rock Falls, and set up their life there.  The three youngest children, Arthur (Grandpa K), Walter, and Ethel were born here. 12 kids total, 10 made it to adulthood. Pretty good for those days.  Emelie died in 1922 when her gallbladder ruptured and surgery failed to help her, which is not surprising in 1922. In 1947 Fred sold the family farm, and retired.  He built himself a small garden house at his youngest daughter, Ethel's, property and spent the rest of his life tending to his huge garden.  Fred died in 1953 and is buried next to Emelie in Rock Falls.  

This all floored me. In all of the years I was around Grandpa K, I never heard him talk about his family.  I always thought he was either an only child, or had one or two siblings. Twelve!!! He was third youngest of 12 kids! The sad part is that I do not remember meeting any of them.  Granted, half died before i was born, but the ones who were alive in my lifetime all lived and died in the Whiteside/Lee County area all along and I never got to know any of them.  I can't say I'm mad about that, but it sure as hell makes me a bit sad. 

Grandma K's family, even though they have been in America since the 1600s, there was little known about them.  Ma's knowledge is minimal as well. She knows names and some events, but not a whole lot. Grandma K's father was George Washington Howe who was born in 1886 in Iowa.  He was the eldest son of Jessie Durstine Howe and Ida Mae (Wagley) Howe, and was 1 of 10 children, all of whom survived to adulthood.  I haven't found a whole lot of life information on the Howes other than they were farmers. It is also unknown how George met his first wife Lola Mae Fargo, Grandma K's mother.  They were married 4 Sept 1910 in Iowa.  From this union there was 4 children: Harold, Leota (Grandma K), Lois, and Stanley. When I started my journey in genealogy, Ma told me she thought that Harold had been murdered while he was living in California. I did find out that he joined the Navy, then moved to California.  I'm not sure if he was stationed there with the Navy, then stayed after he was discharged, or just found his way out there.  One day while Ma was talking to he brother, Uncle Marv, and he told her that Harold wasn't murdered, but run over by a car while crossing the street in Sacramento. He had married a woman who already had 2 kids of her own, but Harold never had any kids of his own, that I can tell.  Harold died in 1941 at the age of 30.  Growing up, Aunt Lois was always a big part of our lives, especially when her husband and Grandpa K died. Grandma and her became almost inseparable.  

Stanley gets his own paragraph.  One of my first WTF moments was finding Stanley's birth record from February 1921 in Iowa City, IA. I asked Ma who Stanley was, and her reply was "Stanley who?' She had never heard of him, so she called Uncle Marv and he didn't know who he was either.  I did find a Social Security Death Index record with the name Stanley Howe showing he died in 1979, and Find-a-Grave had him buried in Massachusetts. After more research, the SSDI record and Find-a-Grave were for a different Stanley Howe who was born raised and died in Massachusetts. Making things even stranger, this Stanley's father's name was George as well. I did some more digging and saw that George and Lola got divorced in May of 1920.  According to the divorce record I found, George was granted the divorce on the grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment.  (Ma finds that part hard to believe because she says her grandma was one of the sweetest people ever.) Now I'm no obstetrician, but if the divorce was final in May of 1920, and Stanley was born in February of 1921, something isn't quite adding up here.  Part of my theory is Lola had an extramarital affair resulting in her having Stanley. The fact that both her and George are on the birth record is confusing as much as it makes sense.  The old ways of doing public records was less than trustworthy, but they just may have put George's name on there to not make him appear to be a bastard, or that was just how things were done in 1921.  After a ton of fruitless research, I have not found any other records of Stanley. He doesn't appear in any census records, or death records. If he was adopted out, we may never find out exactly what happened to him. I have theories, but Stanley will get his own blog at another time.

Grandma and Grandpa K had both taken some lumps in their personal lives before getting together.  Grandpa K caught his first wife fooling around with the neighbor, so the story goes. His second marriage was going well. He and his wife, Viola, had a daughter, Doris, in 1933. Things started going bad in February of 1935 when their son was stillborn, then his wife got sick and died in November of 1936. Grandpa K's brother, William, and his wife took Doris in and raised her, probably because Grandpa K had no idea how to raise a little girl by himself.  Grandma K had some bad luck with her first husband, a man named William.  They were married in August of 1935, and by all counts it was a good marriage, but in July of 1935 William died of heart disease.  I'm not real sure how Grandma and Grandpa met, but they got married 28 Jan 1938 in Iowa.  While they were dating, Grandma found out that Grandpa's second wife was buried without a headstone, so she offered to pay to have on placed. Grandpa asked her why she would do that, and she replied, "everyone should have a headstone."  She was going to buy a stone for the stillborn boy, but the cemetery couldn't figure out where he was buried.  From this marriage they had three children, Marvin, LaVern (Butch), and Ma. All three survive to this day.  Grandpa K died in 1988. Grandma passed in 2002. I miss them both. 

I will give each person their own blog time as this progresses, and as I attain more information from my research.  I hope y'all are enjoying this as much as I am. 

Until next time.....

The Old Man