VISITORS AND QUERIES
BY KAREN HANSEN
We were lucky that member Rich Kuhr has had trouble finding information about his great-great-grandparents, Henry and Mary (Becker) AULERICH. They came from Germany when his great-grandmother Lizzie was 9 years old, so that would have been in 1871 or 1872. They were reported to have stopped in Chicago for awhile, and then went to Stuart, Iowa, before arriving in the Walnut area. Lizzie married Claus KUHR in 1880 and they lived northwest of Walnut in Shelby County until 1888, when they moved south of Walnut.
Lizzie’s obituary said her parents died and were buried in Pottawattamie County. Rich has not been able to find out when they died or where they were buried. Hoping to find something on the Aulerich family, Rich started reading The Walnut News from the first microfilm that we have, which begins on June 20, 1878.
My husband, Jim, mentioned to Rich that we were looking for the drowning of Peter HANSEN before 1880. A very short time later, Rich found the article about the drowning of Hans Jacob Hansen. It was the information that we had been wanting for Judith Schulz of Burlington, Wisconsin. She had thought that his name was Peter, and we had not been able to find him in any of the cemetery indexes. Judith had not found a death record for him and we had no date of death, but knew that his wife remarried in 1879.
The article that Rich found in The Walnut News, July 25, 1878, page 3, is mostly pointing out the errors that the Avoca Delta had in their article about the drowning. We did learn that the name was Hans Jacob from the article and found an item about him in our Walnut Cemetery obituary book. It was dated January, 1879. How could this be? After much thinking and looking, we unraveled the mystery. There apparently had been some loose pages of newspapers when the papers were microfilmed. We found 8 pages of previous issues that were put with the January 9, 1879 issue. This is the article, actually from The Walnut News, July 18, 1878, page 3.
“On Wednesday the 10th inst. [Ed Note: 10th day of the present month], a man by the name of Hans Jacob Hanson was drowned in Gray Bill Creek. Mr. Hanson started out about 10 o’clock Wednesday morning, after the heavy storm of Tuesday night, telling his wife that he was going down the creek to look for some young turkeys that had been missing since the storm, also to take out some boards which floated away from the hog pen. As he did not return during the day his wife thought he had gone to a neighbors, but at chore time he was still absent, and his wife aroused some of the neighbors who started in search of him. All night long the search continued but he was not found. About 10 o’clock Thursday morning as parties were looking along down the creek they discovered the body lying on high land out of the water, as it had fallen rapidly during the day and night. About six rods from where the body was found, it was discovered that a piece of the bank, about four feet wide and forty long which had been undermined by the swift running water had caved into the creek, and the general belief is that the deceased, seeing some boards floating away had waded into the water on the treacherous bank, when it gave way and precipitated him into the channel, and as he could not swim the current carried him down. The deceased was a hard working industrious man, a good neighbor and a kind husband. His body was interred in Walnut Cemetery on Friday last.”
We have not been able to find where he is buried in the cemetery here. Unfortunately, there is no microfilm for the 1878 Avoca paper at the library there to check on what they wrote about the drowning.
We have continued the research on the JAVE family for Mickey Floyd of Missouri. We took photos of the tombstones of Marvin, Barney, Lena, August, John, Margaretha, Peter and Infant son of P. J. & L. J. Jave. Mickey found the birth record of her father, Marvin, and sent us a copy, as well as a photo of Marvin and his first wife, Elva Holst Jave. I sent plat maps of Jave property, Jave marriages in our index, and various articles about the Jave family. I found the obituary of Kenneth Riley, but am still seeking one for Dorothy Hess Riley, who died on April 6, 1939 and is buried in Prairie City.
I received another call from Marilyn Pearce of Haslett, Michigan. She is still working on the information to send to us so that we can look for where Jens and Ane NASBY lived.
Visitors to our room have been Craig Frampton of Daphne, Alabama and James Nelson of Manilla, Iowa. They were given information about Herbert FRAMPTON and Daniel WARE and shown the Frampton graves at the Walnut Cemetery.
KH