Snaps Ontario, Calif: Visits with Dirks grandparents

After a brief hiatus, I am back on my mission to share the Ontario snaps.

The photo album contains quite a few photos of my great-grandparents Heinrich and Agatha (Dueck Krause) Dirks, both alone and visiting with members of the Peter Janzen family. It is not immediately clear whether these took place in Ontario, Calif. or whether the younger family was able to visit them in their Connecticut home (I am imagining that this would have been difficult for them to achieve at the time, the height of the Great Depression, but have no information to back that up). The pictures that include pigs and chickens make me curious.

The album includes these formal portraits of Heinrich and Agatha:

 

None of the photos throughout the album is labeled, so I’ve added labels as best I can. I am not always able to differentiate the various Janzen toddlers, including my Dad. If any reader can shed light on identifying who is in each individual photo, I’d be grateful.

Agatha and Heinrich in a garden setting

Agatha sitting outdoors

Agatha with what looks like a potted poinsettia

A Janzen child with Agatha and chickens

Agatha with a Janzen child and a chicken

Heinrich with pigs

Heinrich with sheep

Two Janzen toddlers with Heinrich

Heinrich with dog and puppy

Heinrich, unknown youth, Mary, and Janzen toddler

Agatha, two Janzen toddlers, and Opa Peter Janzen on blanket

Agatha, Margaret, Heinz, and Mary holding Herbert

Rundbrief second generation “anchors” are being lost: the third generation now needs to step up

I previously described the Rundbrief, that is, the round-robin letter (actual, physical packet of letters on paper, as opposed to e-) that has made its way around North America among my Dad’s generation—the second generation born on this continent to the original immigrants from the Ukraine of the Krause-Dirks line such as my grandmother (“Oma”) Mary Dirks Janzen—and in recent years, also interested cousins/second cousins of the third generation, such as me.

Two of the biggest cheerleaders of keeping such a correspondence going among the extended family, back in the 1980s, were Dad and his cousin “Reck.” They took much of the initiative to stir up interest among their cousins in the U.S. and Canada. It so happens that in the established circular route of the packet, Reck is the one who sends it on to me from his winter home in Florida. He always e-mails me to let me know the snail mails are on their way!

Let’s back up for a moment, for a kind of sequel to The Batum Story. Great-grandparents Heinrich and Agatha (Krause) Dirks and their three children Heinz, Mary, and Katja landed in Manhattan in 1923. A couple of Agatha’s older children by her previous marriage to the late Kornelius Krause came over at the same time, and the rest eventually followed.

The three youngest children, all in their late teens, worked off their passage for their sponsors in eastern Pennsylvania, then rejoined their parents in Manhattan. Oma Mary married Peter Janzen in 1924; Katja married Herman Niebuhr, a fellow immigrant of the same background, in 1926. Eventually, Peter and Mary, and Herman and Katja, ended up living in the same apartment building in Harlem. Reck N., born 1926, and my Dad Heinz J., born 1927, along with his sister and brother, played together as toddlers until the Janzen family moved west circa 1930.

Well Dad and Reck, although taking very different career paths and having different views on maintaining the family religious tradition, were in many ways two of a kind: that is, both deep thinkers with apparently genius-level IQs and both very concerned with social issues and the betterment of humankind. Dad took the route of theology; Reck that of psychology, eventually becoming an administrator at Temple for a time.

We lost Dad in June 2011. After Reck and I exchanged many letters over a period of close to ten years, not just Rundbrief letters but many personal e-mails back and forth, I and the rest of the family learned last week from his daughters that Reck had suffered a severe stroke and could no longer talk or swallow; his children kept vigil with him as I and my family did with Dad in June. This situation could not but remind me of Dad’s situation, where he also could not swallow the last 10 days of his life, and caregivers could only give him water via a small sponge dipped in a glass and he became skin and bones.

Last evening, I learned that Reck died. His wife died of complications of Alzheimer’s a little over four months ago and the day (we think) that he had the stroke, he e-mailed my aunt to say he was lonely and wished he had someone to talk to. It may seem strange to those outside the family that I feel such sadness at the death of my father’s cousin, who I don’t recollect meeting face-to-face (although I may have in Philadelphia as a middle schooler when his mother, my Oma, and their half-sister Agatha had a reunion), but it does hit hard.

Please let us of the third generation not lose touch and let us continue our connections to the extended family!

Archival treasure

I recently returned from spending two-plus weeks with my mother. In a closet in Mom’s guest room were five plastic tubs of historical “stuff.” While I was there helping Mom during and post-glaucoma surgery, she asked me to open, inventory, and evaluate the contents of these tubs.

Some items were clearly destined for the landfill, such as Dad’s daily planners from the ’80s and ’90s, in his trademark undecipherable handwriting. Posterity does not need to know Dad’s meetings.

However, there were multiple treasures found! It was really something to look at them all.

Some treasures, pertaining to Mom’s side of the family, after being enjoyed by Mom and I, were repacked back in a tub for her to keep, such as letters us three children wrote to grandpa and grandma Wirth as children in the ’60s to thank them for gifts and such, in the form of both text and crayon art, the scrapbook/picture book great-grandmother Elise Reutzel Wirth compiled for Mom when she was a child, which I pored over again and again as a little girl, etched forever into my consciousness–containing a mixture of tributes to one’s mother, vivid color pictures of vegetable plants, sweet pictures of cats and dogs, 1930s ads, etc., etc.

Other treasures, pertaining to Dad’s side of the family, Mom felt like she did not know what to do with; with those, she hinted she might get ruthless and dispose of them, should she move from her present duplex in her “continuous care facility” to an apartment in the main building.

I know I inherit both a strong O/C, or neat-freak, gene from both my parents, but also a strong family history cherishing socialization. Thus it is that I can both identify with Mom’s wish to clean out her closet in case she decides to downsize from her duplex and Dad’s earlier wish to keep all family-related archives. So, I sorted all the tubs, and ended up mailing myself two cartons of archival material to myself, which I received yesterday.

These range from extremely valuable family treasures, such as archives that Dad, in a similar fashion to me, must have preserved from his own parents’ archives–photos from the “old country” in the Ukraine plus very old letters, to semi-valuable folders of material, such as all of Dad’s letters submitted to the cousin letter, a.k.a. Rundbrief, starting in the ’80s, to Oma Mary’s original handwritten manuscripts of several of her books and reports, to material somewhere in the grey area of dear and “interesting.”

Then also, this month, my aunt from Washington state mailed a photo album to my brother with “Ontario, California” on the front, presumably put together by Oma Mary Janzen, with dear, touching photos of Dad and his siblings as toddlers and children. My brother’s and my mission, should we choose to accept it, is to scan the best of these photos, identify who is in them, and share them with the extended family.

Anyhoo, it looks like I don’t need to go through the post-major-project despondence I feared might happen once I completed the latest edition of Oma Mary’s book, which I did at the end of November. There looks to be enough family material to categorize/scan/share/file to get me through another long central PA winter!

Correspondence with a newfound Dirks cousin

A week ago, a long-lost cousin on the Dirks side, J.S., visited this site and e-mailed me. It turns out that we are fifth cousins. Our common ancestor is Heinrich Dirks, born 1779 in Prussia (now Poland). It is always exciting to me when I find out that my site is actually helping others with their genealogical research.

His forebears in the Mennonite colonies in the Ukraine (which were established around 1800 by Prussian and Dutch emigrants) did not join either the large 1870s group that immigrated to the U.S. and Canada and settled in the Midwest then-frontier or the small 1920s group that immigrated here post-Russian Revolution that included my great-grandfather Heinrich Dirks (born 1879) and his daughter, my Oma Mary (born 1905). The family of my newfound cousin stayed in the U.S.S.R. until after its breakup, then emigrated as “Aussiedler” to Germany in the 1990s (as did some of my Dad’s Janzen cousins).

So far, J.S. and his genealogist cousin have not been able to find out about any generations farther back than I had already discovered. However, he was able to fill in some dates, number of children, and an occupation for several generations of Dirks…um, Dirkses?

The new information I learned has been incorporated into the Dirks-Dueck page of this site.

Here’s a short version of what now I understand of this Dirks line:

• Mary Dirks Janzen: b. July 16, 1905 in Gnadenfeld, Ukraine; d. Apr. 16, 1995, North Newton, Kansas
• Heinrich D. Dirks: b. Sept. 8, 1879 in Gnadenfeld, Ukraine; d. 1938; married Agatha Dueck
• David Dirks (or Dircks): b. Sept. 9, 1831 in Alexanderwohl, Ukraine; d. 1907; married Maria Klatt
• Wilhelm Dirks: b. July 8, 1801 in Franzthal, Neumark, Prussia; d. Sept. 20, 1866; married Maria Voth
• Heinrich Dirks: b. Dec. 6, 1779 in Prussia; d. Apr. 9, 1812; married Katharina Ratzlaff
• Heinrich Dircks: b. Oct. 7, 1750, Jeziorka, Schwetz, Prussia; d. Apr. 3, 1812; married Eva Ratzlaff
• Hans (or Johann) Dircks: b. 1725, Klein Konopat, Prussia; d. ?, Jeziorka, Prussia; married Ancke Schmidt; 2 children
• David Dircks: b. circa 1699 (acc. to my previous source) or 1700 (according to J.S.); shoemaker; married Sarcke Schmidt; 1 child

Now, in our correspondence, J.S. also briefly mentioned that we also share the ancestor Peter van Dycke, b. 1632 in Stavoren, Friesland, Netherlands. Confirming my theory that my people are all inbred, that ancestor is the forebear of my great-grandfather Heinrich Dirks’s *wife* Agatha Dueck–a different branch than the Dirks branch!

Making Schput

Trust me, it’s not as weird as it may sound.

Oh, my, I just had a deep-seated neuron jangled tonight while about halfway through reading the rather dark novel A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, a Canadian of Low German descent. “Please don’t schput, Ray would say.”

When over a period of years I compiled my list of Plattdeutsch (Low German) terms handed down in the family lexicon at the end of this site’s Dirks-Dueck page, I omitted this term because it’s been so long since I heard it. However, once I read it tonight, a host of memories crowded in of Dad saying that he or someone was “just making Schput.”

That is, loosely translated, just making fun/a joke. Perhaps a native speaker can shed more light on a more literal translation.

New York trip: family sites visited and not

March 9-13, I joined my sister and her friend from Canada in New York City for an enjoyable vacation and sisterly confab. We of course did lots of activities just for sheer enjoyment.

Family-related activities beyond just the two of us sisters meeting included visiting the Tenement Museum, the Statue of Liberty, and the Ellis Island museum.

The Tenement Museum tour and description of daily life jibed with Mom’s stories of how her friends such as her best childhood friend Antoinette lived in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn during the Depression. For example, the kitchen countertop that lifts up to reveal the family bathtub. Interior photos were not allowed, but following is the exterior of the building we toured.

The Statue of Liberty is so pervasive in our education and visual culture that it may seem trivial or passé at times (this is especially true if, like me, you feel you visited a few too many New York souvenir shops with plastic statues made in China). However, when I saw it up close and in person for the first time, on a stunningly clear and bright day, then visualized how it might have appeared to my grandparents and others of their immigrant group as their ship approached after weeks at sea, I got moist eyes. We did not get the ticket that allows you to enter the interior of the statue, so were content to circle the exterior.

From there, we reboarded the ferry to take us to Ellis Island, the immigrant processing island still in operation when Dad’s parents Peter and Mary (Maria) traveled from Europe and now a National Park and museum.

Written on the plaque in the Ellis Island Registry Room: “Nearly every day for over two decades
(1900-24), the Registry Room was filled with new arrivals waiting to be
inspected and registered by Immigration Service officers. On many days,
over 5,000 people would file through the space.”

We watched an informative documentary I believe was produced by the History channel on the impetus for various waves of migration and what the immigrants experienced.

We then proceeded outdoors to view the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, where my Dad’s sister made a donation years back to have my grandfather and grandmother’s names inscribed.

Peter Martin Janzen

Maria Dirks

It was very amazing and emotional to locate the names on the wall, even though I knew they were there, and had looked up the panel numbers online in advance.

Sites we hoped to visit but did not have the time/foot endurance to seek out include the address in Harlem where Dad and his parents lived until he was 3, the church where Mom worked during grad school, and the rooftop of the Beekman Tower Hotel, where Dad proposed to Mom. We will save those for the next trip.

Batum Story story

Earlier this month, I was at a very low point, learning by a communication from someone who’d supplied information for my 2009 reedit of the Batum Story book compiled by and partially written by my grandmother Mary Dirks Janzen in 1974 that by posting the person’s full name in a blog post here (in a list of people I was expressing gratitude toward) that I’d violated that person’s privacy. As soon as I received the message, of course, I deleted any reference to the person. I have no excuse for posting someone’s full name (other than mine) here who is still living–I guess the giddyness of so many awesome people popping out of the woodwork to help me just overcame my sense of appropriateness. I am still berating myself terribly.

So, it is with a sense of trepidation that I want to thank one more person in regard to the book, a person whose first name begins with “C” who I met on my recent travels in a chance meeting while lunching at an event at my college alma mater. Thirty-six years ago, she was interested enough in my grandmother’s story that she took on the task of typing out the first edition on a typewriter, a task I took on myself more recently on a computer.

Earlier this week, I sent off a copy of my second edition to her (gratis, as were all copies distributed). I hope she will accept it in a good spirit. If she’d not taken on the task of the first edition, I’d not know the rich history of the hard times my grandparents had in coming to the U.S. as refugees from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Thank you, “C.”

How would you like to be immortalized in a short paragraph?

Last week, in the latest Rundbrief packet, second cousin Ralph (grandson of Cornelius Krause, half-brother to my grandmother Mary Dirks), retired library scientist and French literature scholar of Ottawa, Ontario, enclosed the third draft of his extremely ambitious work, Krause/Dirks Descendants, in a partial sense a new edition of The Dueck Family Genealogy by Jacob P. Dick, 1979, Waterloo, ON, self-published.

The earlier Dueck book sought family photos where possible. Here is our 1970s family portrait for that.

If it weren’t for Ralph’s new work, for which he invited us to supply our own version of our immortalizing paragraph, I’d be forever frozen in time as my high school self. In that instance, I believe my parents wrote the blurb; I can’t recall whether I was consulted.

“Mary likes to read, swim, and play the piano. She is the best Dutch Blitz player in the house.” LOL! I could still beat any of youse at Dutch Blitz (form of speed solitaire for 2-4 players with Amish overtones). Just try and challenge me! None of the blurb has been negated by the 30-year interval–it’s just, well, as an adult, I would have hoped I’d go down in history as accomplishing a little more.

So, here is the version of my life in one paragraph in Ralph’s current draft. Would anyone think I’d left out anything crucial for an audience of fellow relatives present and future?

“Mary Elizabeth Janzen was born on June 6, 1962 in Peoria, Illinois. She received a B.A. in English from Bethel College in 1984. Mary also received an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Kansas in 1992. She lived in Newton, Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. She married…so on and so on in 1988 and they were divorced in 2003. Mary moved to State College, Pennsylvania where she worked as a teacher of English as a second language to adults and as a writer/editor.”

Honestly? I think the earlier blurb had more character. Maybe I should ask Mom and Dad to write it again?

Charts/visuals more helpful than text for cousin calculation

This morning, I was happily surprised to “meet” a new relative via his comment to the “Where Do You Fit in the Family Tree” thread here.

He is a mutual descendant from Martin Toews, born 1724 (reference the Dueck line). Tonight, I thought about how to figure out what flavor of cousin that makes us. Starting from the now and going back seemed difficult. Starting from the past and moving towards the present seemed easier. I finally simply got out a piece of paper and a pen and drew a flow chart to figure it out.

                                           Martin Toews b. 1724
                                                  
|              |
   
Judith Toews Reimer Dick b. 1750            Isaac Toews siblings
                                                   |              |
                     Martin Dueck b. 1781            Abraham Toews 1st cousins
                                                   |              |
                      Jakob Dueck b. 1830           Aron Toews 2nd cousins
                                                   |              |
 
Agatha Dueck Krause Dirks b. 1861          Aron Toews, Jr. 3rd cousins
                                                   |              |
             Mary Dirks Janzen b. 1905            Aron Toews III 4th cousins
                                                   |              |
                     Heinz Janzen b. 1927           Walter Thielmann 5th cousins
                                                   |              |
                                   Me! b. 1962           Glen Thielmann 6th cousins

So, we are 6th cousins. Unfortunately, while visuals are more helpful than text, drawing a chart is *infinitely* easier than creating one using the limited editor here in Movable Type.

My family history: a work in progress

The family history information contained in the pages listed at the left was posted on an old site until a couple years ago. I am now recreating it in this new format.

Anyway, as I say, this is a work in progress. I will add to and refine the info as time goes on.

I ask you to please post a comment if there is any information you can add or that I need to correct. I am certain that someone out there can fill in some of the dates where I have question marks. The reason I am converting the genealogy to a blog format rather than just static pages is for just that purpose…plus, just to dialogue with far-flung relatives who may visit here, and who might share some of their memories and anecdotes about our forebears.

To do so, select the Comments link just under the title of this post.