Wordless Wednesday, (Almost)

This black and white photo of my Great Aunt Pearl doesn't keep the color that graced her personality from shining through. This picture was taken soon after she married my Great Uncle Jarman (Jerry) Dibbens on March 21,1922. I didn't know her at this age, of course, but I'm not surprised at the animation she shows in this picture. They were both full of life and fun and they matched each other perfectly. He teased her just like he teased everyone else and Aunt Pearl would just laugh. They had a farm on the edge of Garden City, Kansas. Their farm had sheep and plenty of chickens that slowly dwindled in number when we came to visit. 

 Uncle Jerry was an individual and very creative. Here is an early picture of him selling corn. I loved going to visit them when I was a little girl. Although it embarassed me, Uncle Jerry and I had a ritual at the dinner table. He would announce his observation that my mouth flew open every time I bent my elbow. He couldn't just say this one time, either. It would be announced several times during dinner causing me to put down my fork until I thought he was distracted by another conversation. I remember him laughing loudly each time. Sometimes I could get a few bites in between announcements but most of the time, not. I think I would have been disappointed if he had forgotten.

At Thanksgiving, we would travel to Garden City and walk into their large shed/garage next to their house. Walking Inside the door, we would find many tables lined with food and relatives to welcome us. Even on a cold day, the atmosphere inside that building was so warm and welcoming that I can still travel there in my memories and visualize in detail.

Simeon's Cave; Stepping Out in Faith

Several years ago, I sat in the living room of my in-laws, Harry and Helen Edwards and read from an old book of family history that my sister-in-law had handed me. A portion of the book told the story of Helen’s great grandfather, Rev. Simeon Swartz. Because of my interest in genealogy, I was immediately engrossed in his story. Helen’s ancestors had their strength, courage and faith tested and proven many times.


The story that Simeon told was about a time soon after he and his wife, Sarah brought their family to Kansas, in 1874. Simeon was a minister and trusted God to guide and protect them in their homesteading venture as they were headed into an area that had a reputation for being dangerous. Many times they prayed and then relied on God; asking Him to guide their journey and give them direction in their lives. A few months after settling in Rice County, they had already experienced the ups and downs of life on the prairie. A good corn crop had disappeared in three days, eaten by a huge cloud of grasshoppers. In the weeks that followed this life-threatening and hunger-producing disaster, Simeon placed his focus on God, scripture and prayer. After an entire week of seeking God, a mysterious thought came and settled in his mind. He felt that God was telling him to dig a cave on their land. The idea wouldn’t go away but instead grew stronger. He and his family dug the ten by twenty foot cave, amid questions from neighbors and friends. “What do you expect to do with a cave?” they asked. The only reply Simeon had for them was, “I might need it sometime.” The act of obeying what they believed God had asked of them relieved the feeling of despair and renewed their faith and courage to face what they thought might be a bleak future.

The cave was finished in September, 1874 and, between rainstorms, Simeon and his neighbors built the Swartz family a sod house. The settlers prepared the soil, once more, for a crop of wheat. In October, the men set off to hunt buffalo down in Oklahoma, hoping to replace the food the grasshoppers had devoured. They returned home four weeks later, in time to celebrate the holidays with their families, bringing buffalo meat, one man with his arm in a sling from an accidental shooting but minus two horses, poisoned by bad water.

Eight days into 1875, the weather turned cold. At twenty degrees below zero, it was colder than any other time Simeon ever experienced in the many years since. Along with the frigid air came snow in blizzard amounts. Sometime, during that cold night, the raging wind carried the roof of the sod house up and away, leaving the family exposed to the blinding snow. It was their fourteen year-old son, Charles, who snapped them out of the shock and dismay of their situation by yelling for everyone to run for the cave.

For the next three weeks of that cold January in 1875, the cave was their home. They waited for the snow to clear and thanked God for His providential care. Simeon didn’t give much of a clue in his story about what those three weeks were like. We don’t get to know what they ate, how they stayed warm or how they spent their days but I can imagine that God took care of that, too.

It was nearly February, that winter of 1875, before the weather cleared enough for neighbors to help Simeon repair the roof on their soddy. They thanked God that they had the cave when it was needed and that they had listened to and obeyed God despite their doubts and the questions of their neighbors.

Amanuensis Monday: John Nelson

John Nelson - cont. from last Tuesday

Journal Free Press - Wednesday, February 7, 1945
Funeral services for John Nelson, who passed away in Trinidad, Colorado on Sunday, Feb. 4, will be held in Osage City on Thursday afternoon, Feb. 8 at 3:00 at the McElfresh Mortuary, the Rev. Reuben P. Kron, Pastor of the Grace Lutheran Church, conducting the services. Burial will be in the Swedish Cemetery. Mr. Nelson was a brother of James Nelson of Kansas City, MO and a Mrs. Ellen Christianson of Osage City and an uncle of Emile Nelson. He lived here a number of years ago and has visited many times since leaving and will be remembered by a number of people.
(copied by Erin Tabor in Cripple Creek, Colorado)

Tombstone Tuesday - John Nelson aka Johan Nilsson

What will we argue about now? What mysteries are left to explore? We have discovered where John is buried. Now what will we do?
For the past few years my dad, my Uncle Don and I have been "arguing" about what happened to their Grandpa (James) Nelson's, brother, John. We had all seen the simple black stone in the cemetery outside of Osage City, Kansas. Uncle Don insisted that he had been buried there but we had doubts about that because he died a long way from his family home.
Johan Nilsson was born in Snårestad, Malmöhus län, Sweden on May 6, 1866. He followed his brother, James, who had left Sweden a few months after their father died in 1883, to America when he was about 21.
Gr gr Uncle John became a miner. He mined  coal around Osage City on his brother's land just at the edge of Dog Town, which is what their part of Osage city had been dubbed. He was injured in the mine early on and walked with a little bit of a limp from then on. Later in his life he found himself mining gold in the Rocky Mountains near a little town called Cripple Creek, Colorado. His nephews remember that he would visit his family in Kansas about once a year and always dug a new hole for their outhouse during his visit.
I wish I had a picture of him. Since I don't, I'll have to use my imagination for this one. I've seen pictures of gold miners in Colorado and that is what I imagine when I think of him. Maybe he still had a slight limp from the earlier mine accident. He never married, so I imagine he arrived in the same type of clothes he worked in every day.
The story we had up until a month ago was that he died in Cripple Creek Feb. 4, 1945 at the age of 78. His sister, Ellen, traveled to Colorado and had his body brought back to Osage City, Kansas before telling the rest of the family that he was gone. We had no proof one way or another but it seemed a little hard to believe that they would bring his body back from Colorado.
That was before my niece, Erin, and her family moved to Colorado Springs. My dad put her husband, Tom, on the project and together, they started investigating. The letter that arrived in the mail a few weeks ago contained some pictures of a mountain town, Cripple Creek, and a one page letter from Erin. They had visited the town the day before and had found something interesting.
An obituary article in the Journal Free Press, dated February 7, 1945 told about the funeral service that would be held in Osage City, Kansas, for him on February 8th. It also stated that he had lived in Trinidad, Colorado for many years after leaving Cripple Creek and that is where he died.
For now we will have to accept that he is truly buried in the cemetery in Kansas...

or WAS he.....?

Wedding Wednesday: Cute picture

Here is one of my favorite wedding pictures. This is Fred and Blanche (Rutkowski) DeVorss on their wedding day. As you can tell, they had a lot of fun together! I've found several silly pictures of them from when they were young and, most of the time, they looked like they were having a great time! Blanche was one of my grandma's (Frances Rutkowski Dibbens) five sisters.

Spooky!

Ok, I have to tell on myself tonight. I scanned a picture of my gr gr grandfather, August Rutkowski, and cropped it so i could use it in my family tree file. This is what it looked like when I started. I decided to put it in Photoshop, just to clean it up. While I was trying to clean the dark area in the upper right corner, I must have hit the wrong button. This is what appeared as I ran the mouse over the area. I actually jumped! Who says genealogy isn't exciting? :)

Halloween - 75 years ago and in the more recent past

Halloween was a different kind of day seventy-five years ago, according to my dad, Earl Johnson. 

My grandchildren: Halloween 2020

He grew up near McPherson, Kansas, on a farm. He was so full of stories, that I began calling him a few times a week just to hear new ones. One October night, all I had to do was ask if he was ready for Trick or Treaters, and the stories started coming!

The president of McPherson College once received the very special treat (or was it a trick) of finding a cow in his office the morning after Halloween and a buggy was found on top of North Union School another year. He told about one dark Halloween night, when a farmer quietly helped some boys carry all of his corn shocks out into the middle of the road. Once they were finished, he politely (but at gunpoint) introduced himself to them as the owner of the shocks and asked them to put them all back. They complied! 

The most common trick to find yourself a victim of in that farming community was the outhouse turnover. That trick you might discover a little earlier the next morning. Uncle LeRay, my dad's youngest brother, found himself a part of one of those tricks. 

LeRay and some friends were talking after a church event one Halloween and one of them mentioned an old outhouse sitting on someone's unused property. They got the idea to load it into the back of a young man's truck and give it a new home at Lambert Lundberg's place. Lambert was a nearby neighbor and the object of many pranks because of his sour disposition. He also had two entrances into his farmyard so it was a good place for a drive-thru prank. The boys piled into the truck and soon had the outhouse loaded in back. They drove in the drive and quickly pushed the outhouse off the truck. It hit the ground, breaking into pieces as the driver gunned the engine; sure that Lambert would be on their heals. Lambert never appeared. Bewildered, and not sure what to do, the boys finally broke for the night and went home. LeRay tells me that he was so curious about the absence of a chase that he returned to the scene of the crime... I mean he drove by the Lundberg farm on his way home. Much to his surprise, Lambert was waiting in his truck at the end of the drive. LeRay hit the gas and after a short chase, he lost his neighbor and headed home another way. The next morning, poor LeRay found that a trick had been played on him. It was a work day and as he walked to the barn, where he always parked his car, he saw Lambert's truck parked nicely in front of the barn door. Lambert leaned against the truck with LeRay's keys in his hand. Lambert laid into LeRay about the prank and demanded he clean the mess up if he wanted his keys back. Grandpa heard the commotion and came to his son's rescue. LeRay describes the scene with Lambert towering over his dad as Grandpa raised his fist into Lambert's face, grazing his neighbor's nose as he said, "Lambert! Can't you take a joke?" Somehow, he got LeRay's keys back so he could get to work with the promise that the outhouse would be removed. LeRay kept the promise and hauled it away later that day.

Dad recalled that it was all tricks back then; never treats.

When I was growing up in the sixties, Halloween was a big deal around Pleasant Valley. For weeks before, plans for costumes, parties and who I would trick or treat with were the main topics of conversation. The parties at my school consisted of lines of children and parading, costumed, through every room and onto the playground, eating giant cookies iced like pumpkins, and playing games such as bobbing for apples in tubs of water or dangling from string. I never enjoyed those games much, except to watch my classmates attempting to snag an apple with their teeth.

It’s funny that I can’t remember very many of my costumes. I do remember an early one. A plastic Snow White costume with a mask that had tiny eye holes that had to be positioned just right to keep me from tripping over everything in my path. That one is hard to forget! Once I was in upper elementary school, I think I just alternated years between homemade hobo and hippy costumes.

In 3rd grade, a boy in my class invited me to his Halloween party. When I knocked on the door of his house the night of the party, it mysteriously opened to reveal a tunnel made of tables covered in sheets. I remember having to immediately drop to my hands and knees and start crawling while someone moved the sheets and made scary noises. I finally came to the family room which was lit only by black lights. The game we played is what I remember the most. Rod’s older sisters told a scary story as we passed bowls around in a circle. Each bowl held something horrible and slimy that went along with the story. They made sure each of us put our hand in each bowl to touch whatever was inside. Such a sensory rich experience full of pealed grape eyeballs and spaghetti brains has stayed with me for many years!

There was always lots of activity on Halloween night as my friends and I would grab the largest paper grocery sack we could find and headed out in our costumes. There were some pretty cold years but that didn’t stop us. We had the entire area to canvas before 10:00 and our plan included every house. Many times we exchanged our weighty sacks of treats for empty ones half way through the evening; hiding the full sack safely at one of our houses before heading out again. The loot included many things that aren’t seen very often now. We found homemade treats; cookies, popcorn balls with sticky, sugar coatings, and caramel apples, along with the regular assortment of candy. No wonder the sack got so heavy! Once in a while someone would feel sorry for us with our red-cold hands grasping tightly to our sacks as we shivered on their front porches. Then we would be invited in to warm up. Sometimes it was a cup of hot chocolate that warmed us. Once we reached our limit of either time, temperature or the heaviness of our sacks, we would head for our homes to sort our goodies on the living room floor, trading certain items with my sisters and dumping everything in a large shopping bag. That bag served as a sweet depository of candy that hung on the back of the utility room door, visited often after supper for months after.

Halloween was different fifty years ago, too.

Updated October 30, 2020 after conversations with my Uncle LeRay.