On August 20, 1824, my maternal great-great grandpa was born in Weggun, Brandenburg, Prussia — about 85 miles north of Berlin and less than 60 miles from the Baltic Sea. His Lutheran parents, Joachim, 52, and Christine Dorothee Ulrich Genschow, 35, named him Gottfried, a German compound consisting of “Gott,” meaning “God” and “Friede,” meaning “peace.” An older brother, Carl Wilhelm, was born five years earlier, and by the summer of 1829 two younger siblings, Marie Sophie and Karl Frederick, completed the household. They grew up in a rural area where their father Joachim farmed, either on a bit of land of his own or on a large estate owned by a landlord. While Gottfried and his siblings might have attended school, they probably received little if any formal education despite the reforms occurring in the country in the early 1800s.
When he was 25 or 26, Gottfried fell for Dorothea Christina Köenig, a twenty-year-old local girl who, like Gottfried, lived at home with siblings and parents. However, suspicious looks and gossip must have followed the couple around Weggun, a small rural village where everyone knew everyone else, when Dorothea, who was unmarried, became pregnant and in June 1851 gave birth to a boy: Ferdinand Friedrich Wilhelm Genschow. She and Gottfried were married a month later, on July 20th, and by late December Dorothea was pregnant again. The newlyweds and their young son may have lived with either of their parents as they tried to make a start for themselves, but their plans must have changed abruptly the next spring when Dorothea was about four months pregnant. Ferdinand, who was just ten months old, died, and on April 28, 1852, he was laid to rest in the cemetery in Weggun.
In September of that year, the birth of their second son, Carl August Theodore Genschow, should have relieved some of the pain Gottfried and Dorothea felt as a result of the loss of Ferdinand. By then they probably also realized, like so many emigrants from that part of Europe, that a better future was possible elsewhere. In the spring of 1853, 29-year-old Gottfried and 22-year-old Dorothea, who may have already been pregnant with a third child, packed their belongings and their young son Carl and traveled west to the port city of Hamburg. Despite the potential dangers of crossing the Atlantic in the mid 1800s — storms, sinkings, and fatal diseases running rampant through the crowded, confined space below deck — they bought passage in steerage on the Patria. The voyage took them down the Elbe River to the North Sea, through the English Channel, and then for the next several weeks 4,000 nautical miles across the Atlantic to New York City.
On May 30th the Patria docked at Battery Park (since Ellis Island didn’t open until 1892); there they entered the country through the Castle Garden Immigration Center, where the official who documented each new arrival identified Gottfried as a farmer; the record says that the extent of his and Dorothea’s literacy was “unknown.” Since neither of them spoke English, they may not have been able either to understand the question or to respond to the official, or maybe in the press of immigrants disembarking, the question of literacy was forgotten or ignored.
That summer the Genschows traveled west, but somewhere between New York City and Michigan, young Carl died. The strain of the journey may have been too much for a child barely seven months old, but Gottlieb and Dorothea journeyed on to China Township in St. Clair County, a point just off the south end of Lake Huron and northeast of Detroit, a small city of about 25,000 residents. Here Gottfried farmed and on Wednesday, November 30, 1853, Dorothea gave birth to Frederica, the daughter she carried halfway around the world. In subsequent years more children followed. My great grandma Wilhelmine (or Minnie) was born in 1855, the same year Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published, and Caroline arrived in 1857, when the financial panic caused nationwide bank closures, foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Dorothea gave birth to another son, August, in 1858, the year Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd state, and in 1860 to Maria, just four days after South Carolina seceded from the Union. The last child, Anna, came in 1863, one month after the largest mass execution in U.S. history; 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, which brought the U.S.-Dakota War to an end and opened much of the southern half of the state to settlement.
During that time, the tide of the Civil War turned, particularly after Union victories at Gettysburg and Lookout Mountain, and though Gottfried wasn’t drafted, he volunteered on October 6, 1864. He served as a private in the 12th Michigan Infantry Regiment, part of his enlistment taking him to Little Rock, Arkansas, which had been occupied by Union forces since September 1863. On April 12, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, General Lee formally surrendered to General Grant, and on May 13 at Palmito Ranch, Texas, Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana was the last man killed in the Civil War. By the end of the year Gottfried was mustered out of the Union army, and on October 10, 1865, he began the trip home to his family in Michigan.
For the next several years in St. Clair County, he ran the farm, which in 1870 was valued at $1200, while Dorothea kept house and the children attended school. Then, early in 1872, the family moved 800 miles west to Minnesota, where country was open to homesteading and where the children — especially August — would have better opportunities for land of their own. They settled in Stark Township in Brown County, less than 50 miles from Mankato and near the bustling little town of Iberia, which had two blacksmiths, a post office, a general store, a saw mill, a grist mill, and a boot maker. During the next year, the two oldest Genschow daughters started lives of their own. In May, Justice of the Peace Silas Blackmann officiated at the marriage of 16-year-old Minnie and 23-year-old Martin Vollmer, a farmer who ten years earlier emigrated from Carhassen, Blankenheim, Prussia; then, on December 19th Frederica became the wife of William Reinmueller, a Civil War veteran who served in the 5th Penn Cavalry.
But given the perils of life on the frontier, tragedy was never far off. On December 12th, a week before Frederica’s wedding, Anna Vollmer, Martin’s 57-year-old widowed mother and my maternal great grandmother, died of typhoid fever, a highly contagious disease. It’s not surprising, then, that four days after Christmas, Martin’s younger brother Wilhelm met the same fate. And the next summer, on July 2, 1874, when the birth of Johannes, the first of Minnie and Martin’s ten children, including my maternal grandma, Delia Marie, might have provided reason for happiness, he struggled for less than three weeks, and on July 20th he, too, passed away.
By 1875 when the census-taker stopped at Gottfried and Dorothea’s farm in Stark Township, they had been married 24 years, their four youngest children still lived at home with them, and both married daughters’ husbands had land and farmed nearby in Stark Township. Though things looked promising that fall and the family may have observed Thanksgiving, a new national holiday established twelve years before by President Lincoln after the Union victory at Gettysburg, they may have had little to celebrate.
In 1875, a swarm of locusts rose out of the Rocky Mountains, swept eastward across the plains states, and destroyed settlers’ crops and livelihoods as far east as Iowa and Minnesota. Dr. Albert Child, a county judge in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, estimated that this winged cloud covered 198,000 square miles — the largest outbreak of locusts in recorded history. While western counties were hit hardest, driving many farmers back east again, the people of Stark Township in south-central Minnesota also suffered the devastating effects of both this infestation and the economic depression.
It all may have been too much for Gottfried. Four months after his fifty-sixth birthday, on the day after Christmas 1875, he died. The Brown County Register of Deaths provides only a one-word explanation: “Poison.” Records don’t specify if it was accidental or intentional, but after surviving the tail end of the Civil War and making the long move from Michigan only to see swarms of locusts ravage his crops in Minnesota and his large family endure an austere Christmas in 1875 may have broken Gottfried’s spirit.
August, just seventeen years old, now headed the household and helped Dorothea run the family farm. Then, a little over a year later, in the midst of another Minnesota winter, twenty-year-old Caroline, the oldest of the four children still at home, developed a bad cough along with a severe sore throat. Dorothea probably wrapped her in blankets and put a cool cloth on her forehead, but when Caroline’s throat became swollen and her breathing increasingly labored, she would have soon realized that her daughter was getting worse. It was diphtheria, and on February 21, 1877, she passed away. She was laid to rest next to her father in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Iberia, the German inscription on the stone a testament to her short life: “Alter 20 Jahre.” Then, the oldest sister Frederica, 24, who had moved with her husband William Reinmueller to Minneapolis, fell ill with typhoid fever. On September 26, 1877, she, too, succumbed to disease. It’s not surprising, then, given the many threats to life on the frontier in the 19th century and the swiftness with which one could suddenly be taken from family and friends, that the second-youngest Genschow daughter, Maria — like her sister Minnie — also married a Vollmer when she was only sixteen years old: Martin’s 21-year-old brother John.
By late 1877, Dorothea, only 47 years old, had already endured the deaths of four children and her husband Gottfried, and now she and fourteen-year-old Anna depended on the youngest son, August, to provide for them. They continued to work the farm in Stark Township for the next several years, and despite his responsibilities since Gottfried’s death and the little time it likely left August to court a wife, he managed to meet Bertha Wessel, who had left Germany as a child and was now seventeen. On April 24, 1885, they were married in Sleepy Eye. After the wedding, Dorothea, who lived with the newlyweds on the home place in Stark Township, must have thought that the farm and the future were once again on solid footing. However, less than two months later, on June 13, 1885, August passed away; the cause, according to the Brown County Register of Deaths, was “paralysis.” He was only 26.
The effect on the family was profound. Two days after August’s death, his sister Anna, who must have realized the precarious financial situation her mother was now in, married Carl Buggert in Sleepy Eye. A year and a half later Dorothea sold the 80-acre farm for $900, filed for a pension as the widow of a Civil War veteran in 1891, and though she remained in Stark Township, census records for her children’s families in 1895 and 1900 don’t include her name. Maybe the new owners of the farm allowed her to stay in the farmhouse. Or maybe she moved in with a friend or neighbor.
On March 20, 1903, fifty years after leaving the Old Country, Dorothea, 72, died of “old age” in Stark Township, Brown County, Minnesota, just a few miles from where one of her great granddaughters — my mom — would be born in Leavenworth Township twenty years later. Today in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Iberia, she shares a five-foot-tall granite marker with Gottfried, Caroline, and August, a name and an inscription on each of the stone’s four faces. It stands at the foot of an oak, probably just a sapling when Gottfried was laid to rest, but now its broad limbs and lobed leaves tower over the cemetery, and the Genschow marker at its foot, slowly lifted by the oak’s expanding roots, tilts to the north, a departure from all the other upright German stones around it.
