Eleanor Anna Johnson Hoel was born on March 23, 1910, in New London, Iowa. Her parents were Walter Carl Johnson and Ellen Lorraine McCabe.
Category: Family History Page 24 of 32
Genealogy, family lore, memoirs, and so forth.
As the weather starts to change, the maple tree in the back yard starts to drip sap. It’s not a sugar maple, so it wouldn’t make a sweet syrup. Plus you need a lot of sap to make syrup.
Georgie talks about making syrup in the notes she wrote about growing up in West Point. On the Bruegenhempke place, there was a row of soft maples north of the house. Sometimes they collected the sap and cooked it down.
Her great-uncle Ben Wellman had a sugar camp in the timber, and in the spring collected maple water. In February, when it froze at night and warmed in the daytime, they collected maple water in buckets. Maple season in Iowa lasts 3 to 4 weeks.
Aunt Teresa would make maple sugar candy in a pan with molds which all had different designs on the bottom. You can buy or make your own maple sugar candy today. It is often shaped in molds that look like a maple leaf.
Digging Deeper
This is an interesting article on the history of making maple syrup posted by the Maple Valley Syrup cooperative.
Arthur Link was the only son of William and Elizabeth Link. He was born on December 11, 1930, and died of pneumonia on March 11, 1932, aged fifteen months.
He was, of course, Mom’s little brother. And she spoke of him pretty often. Losing a child is a traumatic thing for a family, and it was no less so ninety years ago than it would be today. It’s just that back then it was more common.
I’ll just let the photo speak for itself.
Charles Todd Durfee and Anna Harms were married on February 20, 1889 in Rock Port, Missouri. They were my (Michelle’s) great-great-grandparents.
Henry A.N. Hole was Walt’s great grand uncle, brother to his great grandfather, John Swisher Hole.
Henry was born in on February 13, 1834 in Preble County, Ohio to James Anderson Hole and Mary Ann Swisher. By the time of the 1850 census, the family had moved to Darke County, Ohio. By the 1860 census, Henry was working as a farm laborer on the farm of Jacob and Eliza Pratt.
It’s a few days early, but we wanted to be sure to celebrate a special anniversary. This February 14, Carl and Georgie would have been married 80 years.
We became the family historians kind of by accident. Walt always says that his brothers elected him when he wasn’t there. At any rate, we were given a bunch of typed and hand-written sheets of family history and genealogy put together by Georgie (Walt’s mom) and Leonard Brune, Georgie’s second cousin. There were also photocopies of newspaper clippings and a few documents.
When I think of a farm, I naturally think of a tractor. Every farm has a tractor. Most farmers have more than one. Even when I was a kid, farmers would have a “small” tractor for routine hauling and lifting jobs, and a bigger tractor for plowing, cultivating, and other heavy field work.
But in the early 20th century, most farms didn’t have any tractors at all. Farms were smaller, and the most of the work was done with horses or oxen. Tractors did exist, but they were specialist tools. They needed a different set of skills to maintain and operate, and they were quite costly. Since a typical farm only needed a tractor for a few days a year, it made more sense to pay someone to run their tractor than to buy your own.