Tag Archives: Iowa

Six Young Iowans

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A group of six young Iowans, likely in their mid-to-late teens, posed while sitting on the grass in this photograph taken circa 1916. Believed to feature the three eldest children of German immigrants Mathias and Elisabeth (Hoffman) Noehl, the photograph may have been taken near their home, church, or school in rural Chickasaw County, Iowa. 

Six unidentified young people, perhaps including siblings Leo Noehl, left, Kathryn Noehl, second from left, and Helen Noehl, fourth from left, likely Chickasaw County, Iowa, ca. 1916; digital image courtesy of Jacky Sommer, 2018.

This photograph was uncovered in the collection of a descendant of Kathryn Noehl (1900-1970). Based on its provenance, family resemblances, and the approximate date of the group photograph, I have tentatively identified the individuals as siblings Leo Noehl (left), Kathryn “Katie” Noehl (second from left), and Helen “Lena” Noehl (fourth from left), pictured with two unidentified young women and an unidentified young man who may have been friends, neighbors, classmates, or even cousins.

Does Helen “Lena” Noehl, at top left, resemble the younger woman at top right? Despite the grainy image, it seems possible. Additionally, does Kathryn “Katie” Noehl at lower left resemble the young woman at lower right? The image quality here is much better, so similarities in the shape of the woman’s brows, eyes, and nose, as well as the set of her mouth, seem more apparent.

The young people apparently posed for this photograph in warm weather; the young women wear light colors and their sleeves are pushed up their forearms, although the young men still wear buttoned suit jackets and ties. The pinafore-style dresses worn by the two unidentified young women are the primary clue that allows this photograph to be dated circa 1916, as a similar style appeared in fashion plates that spring. The young woman third from left wears a gingham-patterned pinafore-style dress with a horizontal pin at the collar; she also wears spectacles and a bracelet. The young woman second from right wears a solid-colored pinafore-style dress; she also wears a pendant tied on a ribbon around her neck, and clutches a handkerchief in her hand. 

As of the time of the 1915 Iowa State Census, a year or so before this photograph was believed to have been taken, the three eldest Noehl siblings lived on a farm in rural Ionia, Chickasaw County, Iowa, with their parents and six younger siblings. They still attended school, at least for a few months of the year; Katie placed second and Leo placed fifth in a spelling contest at the rural school in Deerfield in January of that year.

By the summer of 1916, Leo would have been nineteen, Lena eighteen, and Katie sixteen. Lena had been living and working as a laundress in nearby New Hampton at least since October, but it is possible that she might have returned home during seasons when it was “all hands on deck” at the family farm. There would still have been time for fun, too—decades later, a niece recollected hearing that Lena had especially loved barn dances where she was a favorite among her peers.

When Leo registered for the draft in 1918, he was reported to be of medium height and slender build with dark hair and dark brown eyes, a physical description that matches that of the young man at left. He also bears a strong resemblance to later photographs of his much younger brother Frank. Unfortunately, few photographs are known to exist of the nine Noehl siblings before adulthood. Their immigrant parents struggled to find their footing in both America and Canada, and with a steady stream of new mouths to feed, family photographs may have seemed too expensive as well as inconvenient to arrange.

Could the young man at top left be the same man, Leo Noehl, pictured at top right approximately thirty years later? His face is obscured and the image quality is much too poor to be certain. However, the young man at top left does bear a resemblance to Frank Noehl pictured at lower left and right. Frank was born in 1908, making him too young for the group photograph, but it’s quite possible that he looked like his older brother Leo.

Katie would not marry until 1926, and Leo not until 1929, but Lena, believed to be fourth from left, married in 1919. Although the possibility was worth considering, the young man at right could not have been her future husband, John Barnett, as he reported in both his World War I and World War II draft registration cards that his hair was black; the young man pictured here clearly has fair hair. The identities of the two young women in pinafore-style dresses are also mysteries, although it seems possible that they were sisters who shared a dress pattern as well as a desire to keep up with new fashion trends.

Whatever the reason for these young people to gather on a warm day, they surely had more fun than their serious expressions let on!

Copyright © 2026 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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Cupid Fails Fourth Time

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Married at sixteen and widowed at twenty-three, Sarah Ellen Hall lost her first husband, George W. Fenton, when he was accidentally shot by her elder brother.

Her second marriage, to John Hoffman, commenced three years later and lasted eighteen years before she filed for divorce, the proceedings of which cited her husband’s drunkenness and death threats towards her, as well as an alarming incident during which he pursued her with a butcher knife.

Her third marriage, to elderly widower and Civil War veteran Isaac Newton Holman, received much attention in the local newspapers which delighted in the story of the couple’s chance meeting at a land office. However, this marriage lasted only five years before Isaac filed for divorce, a contentious event that also made the news:

“[…] He owned property worth $25,000, and he asserts his wife has wasted $10,000 of that. Part of this went as costly presents to her children by a former marriage, while Mr. Holman’s children were denied even access to his home, it is alleged. […] About April, 1909, she began what appeared to be a systematic effort to drive her husband from home, he avers. She snatched the bedclothes from his couch at night, blew out the light when he wished to read, and invited him often to leave. She sought a lawyer on the subject of divorce, and was told she had no ground for action […]”

The Decatur Herald, Decatur, Nebraska, 28 August 1913

Sarah contested the divorce, but it was finalized nevertheless, and not quite four years later she embarked on her fourth and final attempt to secure a life partner. This marriage, to Swedish immigrant Nels Peter Eklof, lasted just two years. The Sioux City Journal reported:

CUPID FAILS FOURTH TIME.

Husband Tantalized Her When She Was Ill, Wife Says.

Her fourth attempt to obtain matrimonial bliss by the marriage route having proved unsuccessful, Sarah E. Eklof, 61 years old, yesterday was granted a divorce from N. P. Eklof in the district court and permitted to use her maiden name of Sarah E. Holman.

Mrs. Eklof charged her husband with cruel and inhuman treatment. She embarked on her fourth marriage with Mr. Eklof in March [May], 1917, but because of his treatment was compelled to leave him a year later, she asserted in her petition. Eklof is of Swedish descent and is 58 years old.

In addition to using harsh language toward her, Mrs. Eklof charged her husband with denying her the privilege of having a fire in the house and compelled her to use candles for light when the house was equipped with electric lights.

A deposition of testimony by Berletta Cunningham of Oregon [Ogden] City, Utah, was introduced in court. She testified that Mr. Eklof mimicked his wife’s coughing when she was ill and that he failed to provide medical attention for her.

The Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, Iowa, 01 June 1919

It is unknown how Sarah and Nels Peter Eklof would have crossed paths. Nels had spent many years farming with his wife and son in Idaho, and after the death of his wife in 1915, he relocated to Ogden, Utah. Newspaper clippings indicate that he spent the winter of 1916-1917 in Long Beach, California, and that in April 1917, he left Ogden by train bound for Lakeview, Oregon. Somehow, however, Nels found himself in Sioux City, Iowa, where, mere weeks later, on 26 May 1917, he married Sarah Ellen Hall.

Sarah was sixty and Nels fifty-six at the time of their marriage, and it does not seem outside the realm of possibility that, considering he had been recently widowed, Nels might have posted a personal advertisement seeking a wife to make a home with him in the west. Could Sarah have been a mail-order bride? Whatever the case, Sarah accompanied Nels to Utah, where in September of 1917 and March of 1918 they were engaged in real estate transactions in Ogden, but it seems it was not long before their relationship soured. By the time Sarah’s son registered for the draft in September of 1918, at which time he named his mother as his nearest relative and provided her home address, she had apparently returned to Sioux City.

Sarah Ellen (Hall) Fenton Hoffman Holman Eklof, ca. 1920; digital image 2014, privately held by Melanie Frick, 2022. Collection courtesy of David Adam.

Oddly enough, once her divorce to Nels Peter Elkof was finalized, Sarah reverted to the use of the surname Holman—that of her third husband, with whom she had been engaged in a contentious divorce only six years before! One would think she would have wanted no further association with Isaac Newton Holman, particularly when considering that the publicity their divorce received must have caused her great embarrassment. However, further research indicates that there may have been more behind the failure of that marriage than was initially reported in the newspapers.

Just a month after the first details of their divorce proceedings were printed, The Decatur Herald posted a notice that an adult son of Isaac Newton Holman sought to obtain guardianship: “The son alleges that the old man is incompetent by reason of his advanced age to attend to his business affairs and that he is squandering his fortune.” Probate case files provide more detail, again from the perspective of Holman’s son, who stated “[…] that the said Isaac N. Holman has been a user of intoxicating liquors to excess for a number of years during his lifetime; that his home life during later years has been unhappy; that the amount of money demanded from him by his present wife annoyed him considerable.” It was added that “said Isaac N. Holman has become changeable, forgetful and stubborn,” and that he was “easily influenced and brought into expensive litigation.”

This, of course, raises questions: Did this son have valid concerns that his father might reconcile with Sarah, allowing her further financial influence, or was his father actually senile, and, perhaps, an alcoholic as well—and might his mental state and habits have contributed to the downfall of his marriage? The court ruled in the favor of Holman’s son, granting him guardianship, and it is unknown is whether Sarah and her ex-husband ever had any further contact with one another.

In the years to come, Sarah would continue to present herself as the wife or widow of Isaac Newton Holman, who died in 1922, and “Sarah E. Holman” was the name inscribed on her gravestone upon her death in 1930. Perhaps her desire to hold on to the Holman surname was her attempt at erasing what she may have considered to be a mistake—her final brief, unhappy marriage in Utah—when it was simpler to present herself as the widow of a man who had some local prominence as a well-to-do landowner. The five years during which she was married to Isaac Newton Holman may well have been the only period of time during which she had enjoyed a higher social status and relative affluence in a life otherwise riddled with hardship.

Copyright © 2026 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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When Polio Struck

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Roy Louis Christian Walsted, the son of Jens and Kathrine (Christensen) Walsted, was just six years old in 1917 when a wave of infantile paralysis, or polio, swept his hometown of Sioux City, Iowa. He became seriously ill; although the details of his experience are not known, polio can cause flu-like symptoms and, in serious cases, muscle weakness and paralysis that can lead to death. Indeed, several deaths had been reported locally—and many more across the state—by the time the Sioux City Journal printed news of Roy’s anticipated recovery:

SICK AND INJURED | Roy Walstead, 6-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. James Walstead, 406 South Helen avenue, Morningside, is expected to recover completely from an attack of infantile paralysis, according to the attending physician. The boy is able to walk alone now and in six months he is expected to have recovered entirely. If recovery is complete it will constitute one of the few cases on record, according to the physician.

Sioux City Journal, 14 September 1917

Roy did recover from his bout of polio, although not completely. His left leg was left shorter than his right, resulting in a lifelong limp, and it has been said that his younger brother—who was born just two months after Roy’s illness was reported in the newspaper—was his defender when he faced bullies. While his impaired gait may have discouraged him from athletic pursuits, local news clippings point to other activities that occupied Roy’s leisure time. In 1925, as he entered his teen years, he was a member of Boy Scouts, and he must also have been devoted to his studies as he made the honor roll at East Junior High School in Sioux City that same year. The following year, when Roy was fourteen, he moved with his family to the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago where his paternal uncle lived. Roy was confirmed at the Gethsemane Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church, located at 2624 Fairfield Avenue, in June of 1926, when he was fifteen, and he most likely completed his second year of high school the following year before entering the workforce.

Roy Louis Christian Walsted, confirmation, Chicago, Cook, Illinois, 1926; digital image ca. 2010, privately held by Melanie Frick.

By the time he was eighteen, Roy had returned to his native Sioux City while his parents and younger brother remained in Chicago. He at first boarded with relatives and within a few years worked his way up from being an office boy at a hardware store to a clerk at the Sioux City Gas & Electric Company. In his spare time, he was active in the Young People’s Society of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, which conducted its services in Danish, and a 1930 newspaper account reported that he hosted his fellow young congregants at his home at 900 Morningside Avenue. In 1932, as a member of the Sioux City Youth Council, he acted in a biblical drama entitled The Prodigal Son. This was not his only performance that year: he also sang the solo “I Love You Truly” at the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of his maternal aunt and uncle in Storm Lake, Iowa.

The only sport that Roy was known to have dabbled in as a young man was golf, his name appearing as a participant in a few casual tournaments involving employees of the Sioux City Gas & Electric Company throughout the 1930s. When the time came for him to register for the draft in 1940, the draft card reported that Roy, who was slight of build at five feet eight inches and one hundred twenty-five pounds, had the identifying characteristic of “left leg shorter than right due to Infantile Paralysis.”

Roy married Frances Marie Noehl on 17 January 1934, and their first of seven children was born in Sioux City the following year. Polio outbreaks continued to recur, with nearly one thousand cases reported in Iowa in 1940 and a dramatic peak in 1952 when Iowa saw 3,500 cases, a quarter of which were in Sioux City. Roy and Frances had just welcomed their youngest child in February of that year and they must have been terribly afraid that one or more of their children would be taken ill. Doctors, nurses, and iron lungs were flown to Sioux City in the midst of the outbreak, one of the worst in the nation, and 16,500 children there were part of a gamma globulin vaccine trial that ultimately offered only short-term protection against polio.

However, hope was on the horizon. In 1954, the Salk vaccine trial took place and was deemed a success, and in 1955 the vaccine was made available to the public. The Walsted children were vaccinated at a clinic held at St. Boniface Catholic Church, and fears were finally alleviated.

Copyright © 2026 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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Fred the Farmer

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Frederick Thoma might never have had any intention of becoming a farmer. Born on 04 December 1857 in Garnavillo, Clayton County, Iowa, Fred was the eldest of eleven children born to Bavarian immigrants Wilhelm Heinrich Thoma and Anna Margaretha Poesch. His father, a respected community leader, owned and operated a general store in the town of Garnavillo, which is where Fred and his siblings were raised. In 1876, when Fred was eighteen, his father died; three years later, on 29 December 1879, he married Matilda J. Hammond, the daughter of a prosperous local farmer.

Fred and Matilda, who were known familiarly as Fritz and Tillie, had five children: George Hiram (born 1880), Leonard Christopher (born 1885), Ludelia Maria (born 1887), Roselyn Anna (born 1892), and Norma Evaline (born 1895). All lived to adulthood with the exception of Norma, who died in a diphtheria outbreak at the age of ten. This was not the first time that Fred had lost a loved one to communicable disease: two of his brothers had died of consumption, both when they were twenty-four, in 1886 and 1890. One can imagine that each of these losses would have had a profound impact on Fred.

As a young married man, Fred was a store clerk in Garnavillo; according to local news clippings, he then, over the course of several years, opened an agricultural warehouse, carrying “a full line of cultivators, reapers, etc.,” and next operated a saloon or billiard hall, dealing in “pure Wines and Liquors, choice Cigars, etc.,” before briefly entering the “fruit and fancy grocery business.” By 1895, however, when he was thirty-seven, the census recorded that he was a laborer, and his occupation remained the same in both 1900 and 1905. It seems that his business endeavors were ultimately unsuccessful, and family lore gives a clue as to why.

Decades later, Fred’s granddaughter recalled that his vice was alcohol, noting that his eldest son had left home as a teenager for this reason, and also that Fred’s wife, upon receiving an inheritance from the estate of her parents, bought a farm in order to remove Fred from town and from the temptation of the saloon. Indeed, in March of 1910, a local newspaper reported that Matilda Thoma had purchased 80 acres from William D. Harnack and his wife for $4800, and by the time of the U.S. census that April, the couple resided on their farm in rural Clayton.

The move northeast from Garnavillo into rural Clayton Township was a distance of about five miles, and it brought Fred and Matilda closer to the family of their eldest daughter and son-in-law who also farmed there. Newspaper clippings make mention of Fred and his son-in-law engaging in farm work, participating in a barn raising, and hauling sand across the Mississippi River at Clayton.

A newly uncovered photograph of Fred Thoma—in fact, the only photograph of him known to exist—shows him as a mustachioed farmer in overalls and a brimmed hat, standing beside a team of horses in front of a two-story farmhouse. It’s a beautifully kept home, featuring, at the time this photograph was taken circa 1910-1924, an inviting front porch complete with a wicker rocker, potted plants, and vines growing on a trellis. The front porch shelters two front doors, and curtains can be seen at the windows. A screened-in back porch is also visible around the side of the house, and leafy tree branches frame the shot. Fred, photographed, perhaps, after a brief rest in the Windsor chair behind him, appears relaxed and has an amiable expression.

Frederick Thoma (1857-1925), Clayton, Clayton County, Iowa, circa 1910-1924; digital image 2024, privately held by Julie Jentz, 2024.


Fred and Matilda farmed in rural Clayton between 1910 and 1924, when Fred’s poor health necessitated their return to town. In the summer of 1924, Fred had spent some weeks at the Prairie du Chien Sanitarium, where, weakened from a bout of influenza and suffering from dropsy, he had sought medical attention; his health not improved, that fall he auctioned off his livestock and numerous farming implements in a public sale. Late in the year, he and Matilda resettled in the town of Clayton; they lived there for only two months, during which time they would have celebrated forty-five years of marriage, before Fred’s death at the age of sixty-seven on 10 January 1925. The funeral was held at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Garnavillo, with members of the Garnavillo Turnverein, a German-American social club of which he was a member, in attendance.

Fred’s career as a farmer may have made up less than a decade and a half of his adult life, but one can hope that these were at the least peaceful, pleasant years for him and his family—years during which Matilda was able to put to use her skills and knowledge from a childhood spent on a farm, and Fred was able to face fewer temptations, connect with his adult children and young grandchildren, and engage in fulfilling work. The farmhouse where he and Matilda spent these quiet years still stands today on Great River Road between Garnavillo and Clayton.

Copyright © 2025 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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Wedding Wednesday: Puffed Sleeves, Revisited

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It has been nearly a decade since I first featured this photograph on Homestead Genealogy, and at that time, I had never seen the original. The old photocopy in my possession was washed out and grainy, the young couple’s faces barely discernible, and the border with the photographer’s mark was not included. When a nearly pristine original made its way to me last year, I was elated: finally, every detail of the 1896 wedding portrait of my great-grandparents Mathias and Elisabeth (Hoffmann) Noehl of North Washington, Chickasaw County, Iowa, could be fully appreciated, and, in addition, the photographer’s mark offered a new clue about the couple’s lives as newlyweds.

Mathias Noehl and Elisabeth (Hoffman) Noehl, St. Peter, Nicollet County, Minnesota, 1896; digital image 2023, privately held by Melanie Frick, 2024. Courtesy of Richard Buscher (1933-2023).

In this photograph, Elisabeth, with dark hair and eyes and full brows that would be the envy of many young women of today, gazes steadily into the distance, her right hand on her husband’s shoulder and her left holding what is likely a Catholic prayerbook. Her dark dress boasts the elegantly puffed sleeves so popular in the mid-1890s, and a floor-length veil is affixed to the back of her head. A substantial floral arrangement is perched atop her head, cascading over her forehead, while smaller floral sprigs are fastened to her collar and her gathered bodice. These may well have been wax flowers, and appear to be orange blossoms, which were a popular choice for bridal wreaths. Elisabeth, who had immigrated to America from Germany at the age of twenty, had celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday less than a week prior to her marriage.

Mathias, blond and with a fair complexion, gazes in the opposite direction as his bride, his posture upright but casual as he poses seated in a wicker chair, one elbow resting on the arm. He wears a dark suit and vest with a white shirt and necktie, and a floral corsage has been attached to the front of his jacket. What may be a watch chain peeks out underneath. Mathias wears his hair short and has a full mustache; like Elisabeth, his expression is serious. Twenty-eight years old, Mathias had by that point spent a decade in America after emigrating from his native Germany.

Years later, he wrote of his meeting with Elisabeth:

“One day I was standing in front of the house of a venerable old priest, in whose service for five years I found living a good woman. She was reflecting what vocation she should choose. The old pastor had advised her to spend the rest of her life with him, as housekeeper, but on the other side of the house, the nuns beckoned to her, “Come and join us, Lizzie.” Then it happened that I passed by. I was in a neglected condition. My suit of clothes appeared to have seen better days. A hailstorm seemed to have come over my hat. My blond hair lay around my temples unkempt like dried up flowers of the cemetery. When she heard that I had come from her neighborhood village, Holsthum, she said to herself, “That is a disgrace to the whole valley of Prüm. He must be hidden from the streets of North Washington, even if I have to marry him. Perhaps there is hidden in that neglected and careless fellow a good provider, and, if I succeed in making a good Christian out of him, I can earn besides a good crown in heaven.” She thought further, “This is Leap Year and Eve had the job in paradise, a breath-taking job it was, to make the marriage offer. At my first attack, he fell on my breast. Father Probst then tied me to him, on the twenty-second day of September 1896, and he made the knot so tight that I could not think to get away from him anymore.”

Memoirs of Mathias Noehl (Translation)

Although the couple married in Iowa, the mark of the photographer Bancroft on this cabinet card reveals that their wedding portrait was not taken there. St. Peter, Minnesota was well over one hundred miles from North Washington, Iowa, where their marriage had been solemnized on 22 September 1896. What could have brought Mathias and Elisabeth there? I don’t have a good answer. It seems highly unlikely that the couple, certainly not well-to-do, would have set off on a leisurely honeymoon tour of the Midwest; more plausible is that they ventured to Minnesota, where Mathias had spent his first years in America, in order to visit Mathias’s aunts and uncles and/or to scout out a potential place to settle. Mathias and Elisabeth did later reside in Minnesota, but only briefly; after their first two children were born in Iowa, their third child was born in Meeker County, Minnesota in the spring of 1900 following a failed stint in Alberta. However, within months, the family had returned to Chickasaw County, Iowa. A few years later, they made a brief attempt to homestead in Saskatchewan, but, again, ultimately returned to Iowa to raise their nine children. In any case, it is known that Mathias had connections in Minnesota, and undoubtedly some familiarity with the rail lines—one of which did indeed pass through St. Peter.

As North Washington was a small community—its population has hovered between about one hundred to one hundred fifty residents for the past century—a photographer was presumably not available to Mathias and Elisabeth on the day of their marriage. Thus, the couple may have made a point to seek out a photographer during their travels north. Whether Elisabeth traveled with her own veil and flowers or obtained them from the photographer, it seems that this “photo op” must have been carefully planned, and indeed, as Mathias’s parents remained in Germany, it may have meant a great deal to the couple to have a portrait taken in order for Mathias to be able to introduce his parents to his bride.

Copyright © 2024 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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Tombstone Tuesday: Anna Barbara (Ruckdäschel) Poesch (1811-1887)

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Anna Barbara (Ruckdäschel) Poesch was forty-two years old before she saw something of the world. Born on 14 November 1811 in the village of Schönlind near what is now Weißenstadt, Bavaria, Germany, she was said to have been the daughter of Johann Georg Ruckdäschel and Eva Margaretha Brodmerkel. Nothing is known of her early years, but Barbara, as she was known, married shoemaker Wolfgang Poesch on 22 April 1833 when she was twenty-one years old. Five known children would be born to the couple in the years to come, the first that same year: Johann (1833), Catharina (1835), Anna Margaretha (1838), Lorenz (1847), and Paulus (1850).

In 1852, Barbara bade farewell to her eldest son when he departed in the company of another local family, that of Paulus and Elisabeth (Schmidt) Thoma, to seek a better life in America. Young Johann, nineteen at the time of his passage, must have sent a favorable report to his parents of his new home in northeastern Iowa; in 1854, Barbara, Wolfgang, and their four remaining children packed a trunk and left the village of Weißenstadt behind forever.

After making the trek to Bremen and then stepping aboard the Heinrich Von Gagern, the family was at sea for what may have been as long as two months. Barbara must have struggled to keep her family clean and fed in cramped conditions, but surely took solace in the companionship of others from their home village who traveled with them. Her eldest daughters, Catharina, eighteen, and Anna Margaretha, fifteen, would have been a great help to her in caring for the two little boys, Lorenz, seven, and Paulus, just four.

Barbara and her family disembarked in New Orleans on 27 Apr 1854. They may have been wary of lingering long in this bustling port; a devastating yellow fever epidemic had swept through the city the previous summer, and as April turned to May, the weather would likely have become increasingly hot, humid, and inhospitable. A steamboat would have provided the family relatively quick and reliable passage north, at the very least to St. Louis if not all the way to Iowa.

After an arduous journey across the Atlantic and through the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Mississippi River, Barbara was no doubt thrilled to finally be reunited with her eldest son upon their arrival in Clayton County, Iowa; in fact, numerous familiar faces from their home village would have greeted the Poesch family.

However, tragedy would soon strike—if indeed it hadn’t already. Four-year-old Paulus, listed as the youngest member of the family on the 1854 ship manifest, was not present at the time the family was recorded in the 1856 Iowa State Census, which suggests that he had died at some point in the intervening years, either in Iowa or en route there. Then, most likely within a year of that same census, Wolfgang succumbed to sunstroke. In his early fifties at the time, the physical demands of farming in the heat of an Iowa summer were apparently too much for him.

Although Wolfgang did not live to commemorate his silver wedding anniversary with Barbara, the couple was able to celebrate the marriages of their two eldest children: son Johann to fellow immigrant Catharina Weiss, and, in 1855, daughter Catharina to Friederich Thoma. Then, in 1857, Anna Margaretha married Wilhelm Heinrich Thoma. The Poesch sisters had, in fact, married two brothers, members of the same family with whom their brother Johann had emigrated from Weißenstadt in 1852. This made their children—nineteen between them—double first cousins.

Find A Grave, Inc., Find A Grave, digital image (www.findagrave.com : accessed 25 March 2024), photograph, Barbera Poesch (1811-1887), Memorial No. 148724753, Garnavillo Community Cemetery, Garnavillo, Clayton County, Iowa; photograph by Ken Johnson, 2016.

Barbara survived Wolfgang by approximately twenty years. The year 1860 found her living with the family of her daughter Catharina; a few years later, her son Lorenz would serve with the 12th Iowa Infantry in the Civil War, surely an anxious time for Barbara. Lorenz survived the war and married Wilhelmina Best in 1868. In 1870, Barbara lived with the family of her son Johann, and was perhaps still a member of his household during a bitter cold snap in early March of 1873 when her fourteen-year-old granddaughter, her namesake, sadly perished. Young Barbara, who had been ill, had entered an unheated room one night where she fell and lay undetected until morning, by which time her arms and legs were said to have frozen and she was too weakened to recover.

By 1885, Barbara resided in the town of Garnavillo with her daughter Anna Margaretha, who was by that point also widowed. Barbara’s occupation was recorded as “Old Mother.” Having raised four children of her own to adulthood, and having likely had a hand in raising a total of twenty-five grandchildren as well, Barbara certainly earned her title.

Anna Barbara (Ruckdäschel) Poesch died at the home of her daughter in Garnavillo, Clayton County, Iowa, on 07 September 1887, when she was seventy-five years old. Her obituary, printed in a local newspaper, stated, “Her remains were conveyed to their last resting place on Saturday, followed by a large concourse of sorrowing relatives and friends. Rev. F. Sommerlad conducted the ceremony in his usual impressive manner.”

Copyright © 2024 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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The Thatcher’s Family

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When Matthias Hoffmann died in 1879 at the age of fifty-eight, he left a widow and six children, the youngest of whom was only four years old. Matthias, a thatcher by trade, had lived with his family in the village of Prümzurlay, Eifelkreis Bitburg-Prüm, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, near Luxembourg. He and his wife, Anna Marbach, had married in the village of Ernzen on 24 September 1861, and six children were born to them over the next fourteen years: Clara (1861), Nicolaus (1864), Jacob (1867), Elisabeth (1869), Eva (1872), and Matthias (1875).

It is not known how the Hoffmann family supported themselves after Matthias’s death, but as Anna did not remarry, she and her eldest daughters may have been able to earn an income from spinning, weaving, or the like, while her eldest sons may have hired out as shepherds or farm laborers. Perhaps Nicolaus, who was fourteen when his father died, was fortunate enough to have already had an apprenticeship in place; eventually he married and settled in the area, living out his life in Germany.

Prümzurlay, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany photograph, 2009; privately held by Melanie Frick, 2024.

For the others, however, new horizons were sought. Jacob, the second eldest son, who had been twelve years old at the time of his father’s death, was the first to immigrate to America. He traveled alone from Antwerp to New York in the spring of 1887 when he was twenty years old. One can well imagine the hard work that he—and his mother and siblings—must have undertaken in order to book his passage, quite likely with the expectation that he would pave the way for the rest of the family to eventually join him overseas. Jacob then made his way to northeastern Iowa.

Three years later, in the spring of 1890, his sisters Clara and Elisabeth followed. Within a month of their arrival in North Washington, Chickasaw County, Iowa, Clara, who was twenty-eight, married fellow immigrant John Seelhammer. One wonders whether they had been acquainted in Germany, or whether Jacob may have facilitated the match. Elisabeth, twenty, was not so quick to settle down; she found employment as a housekeeper for the local priest, Father Probst, who was a native of Luxembourg.

In the spring of 1891, matriarch Anna (Marbach) Hoffmann, who was by then fifty-five years old, voyaged from Antwerp to New York with her two youngest children, Eva, eighteen, and Matthias, sixteen. They too were bound for Chickasaw County, Iowa, where they would reunite with Jacob, Clara, and Elisabeth.

The 1895 Iowa state census indicates that Anna and at least four of her children resided in Chickasaw County: Anna headed a household that included her sons Jacob and Matthias, both of whom farmed; Clara lived with her husband, a shoemaker, and their children; Elisabeth resided at her place of employment with Father Probst and the Sisters of Charity. Eva is absent from the 1895 Iowa state census, but whether this is because she had moved elsewhere or was simply missed by the census enumerator is not known.

It was in Chickasaw County that Jacob married Margaret Nosbisch in 1895, and where Elisabeth married fellow immigrant Mathias Noehl in 1896. In 1898, however, tragedy struck the Hoffmann family, when Matthias, the youngest child of Matthias and Anna (Marbach) Hoffmann, died at the age of twenty two or twenty three. Another blow occurred that year when Jacob and his wife lost a child at one day old.

It was also in 1898, however, that Eva married in Chicago to Mathias Weyer, and by 1900, her mother had joined her there. Chicago wasn’t a surprising destination for them; Anna’s mother and two of her sisters had settled there decades earlier. Although her mother had since passed away, Anna would have had the opportunity to reunite with her sisters and to meet her nieces and nephews.

Ultimately, Anna seems to have remained in Chicago until her death in 1907; the cause was attributed to asthma. Clara and Elisabeth both raised large families in Chickasaw County, with Clara having eight children and Elisabeth nine. Eva had one child with her first husband, a farm laborer and beer peddler; after she was widowed, she remarried in 1913 to Milton Jonas, and lived out her life in Chicago.

Jacob, whom a local newspaper described as being “of that hustling, genial disposition which makes him companionable and agreeable whether the weather, or something else is or is not just to his liking,” set his sights on South Dakota shortly after the dawn of the new century, and later settled in Hidalgo County, Texas, with his wife and son—who was ultimately the only one of his six children to survive infancy.

Brother and sister Jacob Hoffmann and Elisabeth (Hoffmann) Noehl, Hidalgo County, Texas, 1940; digital image courtesy of Jacky Sommer, 2018.

Whether the scattered Hoffmann siblings were able to remain in close contact in the decades following their mother’s death is unknown, but it is known that Jacob returned to Iowa to bury his wife in 1929, and there is also evidence—in the form of a photograph—that Elisabeth visited her older brother Jacob at his orange grove in Mission, Texas, in 1940. Eva had died in 1936; Jacob would pass away in 1954, Clara in 1955, and Elisabeth in 1957. Of the fate of their brother Nicolaus who was said to have remained in Germany, however, nothing is yet known.

Copyright © 2024 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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A Jolly Sleighing Party

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It was a chilly January night in 1905 when a group of six young people set out on a sleighing party, traversing the thirteen miles from Center to Bloomfield in northeastern Nebraska. The Bloomfield Monitor reported:

A jolly sleighing party from Center, composed of Mr. and Mrs. Geo. A. Neilson, Mr. and Mrs. C.A. Saunders, Miss Maud Walton and O.A. Danielson took in the “Adventures of Fra Diavolo” at the opera house in Bloomfield last Saturday night. After the play, they, in company with the Misses Neff, Peterson and Lee of the Bloomfield schools, and Miss Dunham, were invited to the hospitable and commodious home of Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Frymire, where they were regaled with oyster stews and entertained with music until the wee sma’ hour when the Center people started for home, all vowing that Bloomfield is not so worse and that Mr. and Mrs. Frymire are the best.

Bloomfield Monitor, Bloomfield, Nebraska, 26 January 1905

George A. Neilson had married Anna Leota Fenton three years prior, and both were twenty-four years old at the time of this particular sleighing party. Their son, Fenton, would celebrate his second birthday just a few days later, on January 26, and he was undoubtedly left in the care of a neighbor or his visiting grandmother while his parents were out, a nighttime outing on the snowy plains not being at all suitable for a toddler! George had managed the Edwards and Bradford Lumber Company in Center ever since his marriage, and as he was known to be an affable and outgoing young man, it is no surprise that he and his wife had a lively circle of friends.

Anna Leota (Fenton) Thoma and George Hiram Thoma, alias George A. Neilson, circa 1900-1905; digital images 2010, privately held by Melanie Frick, 2024. Composite image created by the author.

Notably, however, George A. Neilson was not his real name. Born George Hiram Thoma, son of Fred and Matilda (Hammond) Thoma of Clayton County, Iowa, George is believed to have initiated the use of an assumed name around the year 1900. He is thought to have left his home in northeastern Iowa in 1899, and as of June 1900, he can be found recorded in the U.S. Federal Census of Belden, Cedar County, Nebraska, as George Thoma. Employed as a clerk, he boarded with the family of Charles and Anna Nelson, who were Swedish immigrants, along with a number of other young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two: William Reynolds, Morris Nielsen, Thomas Caverhill, William Graham, Arthur Knapp, Albert Brodbrochs, Edgar Stevenson, and Ed Evans. However, a January 1901 news clipping tentatively presumed to refer to him and one of his fellow boarders uses the surname Neilson:

George Neilson and Art Knapp of Belden attended a party in Coleridge Friday evening.

The Coleridge Blade, Coleridge, Nebraska, 24 January 1901

At the time of his marriage in March 1902, which took place in northwestern Iowa, George presented himself officially as George A. Neilson. Decades later, affidavits from George, his mother, and his brother attested that this was an assumed name and that George Hiram Thoma and George A. Neilson were one and the same person. A marriage announcement used the name George Neilson as well and noted an impending move to Nebraska:

George Neilson and Miss Ota Fenton were married Sunday afternoon at the home of the bride’s mother, Mrs. John Hoffman, Rev. Fegtley officiating. Mr. Neilson has been an able assistant in the Edwards & Bradford Lumber Co. for some time past and is a worthy young man. The bride has lived in Ashton for a number of years and needs no introduction. The many friends join in wishing them many happy years of wedded life. Mr. Neilson expects soon to be moved to Nebraska where he will have charge of a lumber yard for the above named firm.

The Sibley Gazette, Sibley, Iowa, 27 March 1902

This move was to Center, where George immediately began placing newspaper advertisements for the Edwards & Bradford Lumber Company under the name George Neilson. He continued to use this alias until at least 1908, through several more moves; by 1909, when he applied for a homestead in western Nebraska, he had reverted to the use of his original name. No reason has yet been uncovered for George’s use of an alias, although it appears to have emerged sometime between June 1900 and January 1901 during his residence in Belden—or perhaps prior, if by chance he had shared his true name with the census enumerator in private.

“Beggar Prince Comic Opera Co. ‘Fra Diavolo,'” Bloomfield Monitor, 12 January 1905; wspapers.com (www.newspapers.com : accessed 25 January 2024).

As he squeezed into a crowded sleigh on the wintry evening of January 21, 1905, however, any secrets that George may have suppressed were likely at the back of his mind. Along with Leota and their group of friends, he enjoyed a play performed at Bloomfield’s opera house by a traveling theater troupe, followed by oyster stew, music, and good company at the home of the owner of a prosperous local hardware store. As night crept on to morning, it was time for the sleighing party to make their return trip to Center, and, just a month or so later, George and Leota—still, at that time, Neilsons—bade their friends a fond farewell as they moved on to the eastern Nebraska town of Newcastle.

Copyright © 2024 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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Back to School

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I first glimpsed this photograph behind clouded glass more than fifteen years ago. I was visiting the Garnavillo Historical Society in northeastern Iowa, a short distance from the Mississippi River, and I was thrilled to spy the face of my great-great-grandfather as a little boy in this cabinet card photograph of the Garnavillo School. However, due to its semi-permanent placement inside glass, it wasn’t until more recent efforts by the historical society to refresh their exhibits and digitize their collections that I was, happily, able to obtain a clear copy.

Garnavillo School, circa 1888, Clayton County, Iowa; digital image 2023, privately held by the Garnavillo Historical Society, 2023. Image shared with permission.

George Hiram Thoma, the son of Frederick Thoma and Matilda Hammond, was born in Garnavillo, Clayton County, Iowa on 29 September 1880. His parents were natives of Clayton County, and, right around the time that George would have started school, his father was known to have operated a restaurant in Garnavillo. Pictured here in the second row, fifth from right, fair-haired George, perhaps eight years old, regards the photographer with a still and serious expression, mimicking his teacher more so than some of his wiggly classmates. Thirty-six students were present for “Picture Day” at the Garnavillo School; this photograph, initially believed to have been taken circa 1886, was in fact more likely taken about two years later based on the birth dates of some of the youngest children pictured.

The teacher, Julia Downey, was said to have taught school in Clayton County for thirteen years prior to her 1893 marriage. Her students, with birth year in parentheses if available, are identified below:

Front row, left to right: Sophia Maack (1877), Ora Ahlitz (1879), Emma Harnack (1879), Severa Wirkler (1881), Harvey Maurer (1882), Norma Maurer (1884), Edna Brumm (1883), Adelia Kuhlman (1880).

Second row, left to right: Aerney Tangeman (1881), Alto (Realto) Schumacher (1881), Erwin Wirkler (1880), Billy Gilmore ( ), Will Schumacher (1880), George Thoma (1880), Gretchen Gilmore ( ), Waldemar Krasinsky (1880), Louise Rohde (1881), Elizabeth Siebertz ( ).

Third row, left to right: George Tangeman (1878), George Hill (1882), Paul Rantzow (1879), Miss Julia Downey, Orville Roebken (1879), Gruel ( ), Abner Roebken (1881), Fred Nieter (1880), Fred Stickfort (1879), Emil Schumacher (1879).

Back row, left to right: Irving Maurer (1879), Bruno Tangeman (1879), Ed Breitsprecher (1879), William Blunck (1877), Henry H. Stickfort (1878), Julius H. Rohde (1879), Gruel ( ), Elmer G. Brumm (1878), Arthur (Art) Gruetzmacher (1878).

Courtesy of the Garnavillo Historical Society

Garnavillo boasted a brick, two-story schoolhouse with four rooms; however, this photograph seems to have been taken instead at the studio of the photographer, Mr. Tangeman, as a hanging backdrop is evident. The students pictured here were between the ages of approximately four and eleven, and one can imagine that a field trip to the photographer’s studio would have made for an exciting school day for them.

George Hiram Thoma, detail from Garnavillo School, circa 1888, Clayton County, Iowa; digital image 2023, privately held by the Garnavillo Historical Society, 2023. Image used with permission.

Little is known about young George’s school days, although he was apparently a motivated student as would go on to complete high school. The high school that he attended was not in Garnavillo, however, but in the town of Postville in neighboring Allamakee County. As his grandparents resided there, it is possible that he boarded with them during his high school years. As a teenager, George worked for a time at a local hardware store, volunteered with the fire department, and then, according to family lore, made his way west with his bicycle and changed his name—but that’s another story!

Copyright © 2023 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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Matilda the Midwife

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“Matilda was a midwife,” so goes the family story, “and delivered a lot of babies in the county.” Despite a lack of definitive documentation, and almost certain lack of opportunity for any formal training, this nevertheless seems plausible. Matilda J. (Hammond) Thoma (1859-1947) of Clayton County, Iowa birthed five children of her own, and it does not seem unlikely that she might have assisted at the births of others in her close-knit community. She had numerous nieces and nephews whose births she might have supported, and she may even have served as midwife at the births of some of her own grandchildren. Indeed, it was her granddaughter Ina Fischer, born in 1907, who recalled nearly eighty years later that Matilda had been a midwife, and a 1920 newspaper announcement indicated that another granddaughter, Jacqueline Chaney, was in fact born at Matilda’s home.

Matilda (Hammond) Thoma and Franque (Friend) Curtis photograph, circa 1922, Clayton County, Iowa; digital image 2023, privately held by Melanie Frick, 2023.

Here, in one of only two photographs known to exist of Matilda, she poses with granddaughter Franque Friend. Matilda would have been in her early sixties at the time that this photograph was taken circa 1922; her hair, loosely coiled into a bun atop her head, seems to have gone mostly white. She wears a somewhat rumpled striped dress with buttons up the front and a wide collar in a contrasting fabric; this was not a studio portrait, but a casual snapshot apparently taken at home. Matilda appears to sit on a sofa near a window, a potted plant beside her, and striped wallpaper is visible in the background. She offers a small smile to the camera. Young Franque, perhaps ten years old here, stands next to her grandmother, grinning beneath the broad brim of a straw hat with a fringe of dark hair just peeking out. She wears a white dress with scalloped cuffs, a bow at the collar, and a leather belt.

Matilda, the daughter of Hiram H. Hammond (1813-1896) and Eva Margaret Stoehr (1831-1906), spent more than sixty-five years in Clayton County, Iowa, where she was born and later married Frederick Thoma (1857-1925). Four of their five children lived to adulthood; the youngest sadly died in a diphtheria outbreak at the age of ten. Following her husband’s death, Matilda eventually relocated, first to Texas with her daughter Roselyn and then to Wisconsin where she lived with her granddaughter Jacqueline. Few other details are known of her life, but what little is known suggests that she was a kind, competent, and maternal individual—just the sort to lend a hand as a midwife.

Copyright © 2023 Melanie Frick. All Rights Reserved.

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