LURE OF THE LAND (February 2016)
Not too long ago I was contacted by a member of the Dankbar family. Coincidently this was at the time Jerry and I were trying to find the burial site of Anna Elisabeth Dankbar Schueneman, who was our ancestral grandmother and who we know was buried in St. John's Cemetery in Johnsburg but her grave could not be found. Anna Elisabeth was the mother of Johann Heinrich and accompanied him when he came to the U.S. in 1848. Jerry and I are trying to find her grave marker but that is not this story.
The one who contacted me was a descendant of Anna Elisabeth’s brother who also immigrated about the same time. My informant had been born in South Dakota and since I had been looking for our connection on another story, I asked her to send me her history. Our relationship goes back many years but she related how her side remained in the farming business when they arrived after having had a long history of farming in Germany. In fact, the Dankbars can be traced through many centuries as a result of owning land.
I know that Johann Heinrich, Anna Elisabeth’s son, farmed his whole life in McHenry County and even though my grandfather Lambert John did not carry on the tradition from Germany, there is a family legend about him investing in South Dakota. This made me think about some of our other ancestors who were farmers.
Especially, I thought about Gerret Dorlandt whom we thought was a sailor but I speculate he was the one who started the farming tradition in the family because I have reason to believe that when Holland owned New Netherlands and there was trade by the West Indies, Holland would give land to anyone who would settle in their new world. Then you know the history. The English took over and the Dorlands farmed through the years all the way through several generations until Robert Durland sold the family farm and moved to Flora, Illinois and became a banker. However his son James, my paternal grandfather, is known to have always loved farming.
This brought to mind William Free, who was always a farmer and kept moving westward as land opened up. He was born in Pennsylvania and I followed his farming activity through the census to Flora, Illinois. He had several sons and my records show most of them continued to farm. However, one of them, Milton, after his wife died, decided to follow the westward journeys of his father and he took his family to Oklahoma when it opened up and there he became a rancher, which one could say is a form of farming.
Today, we have a descendant of these ancestors, Nicholas Hodge, who not only has the long history of farming in his blood from the Durland/Free side, but Jerry tells me he also has a paternal great-grandfather who served on the Edgar County (IL) Farm Bureau for seventeen years before becoming an Associate Professor at the Agricultural Extension of the University of Illinois. So though he finished his university degree in a field unrelated to farming, Nicholas has recently decided to use his farming pedigree to try a very specialized realm of farming, one that does not encompass animals but products of the soil. I wish Nicholas the very best with his new venture this summer. Studies tell us that we carry our genes through many generations. Do I dare wonder?
The one who contacted me was a descendant of Anna Elisabeth’s brother who also immigrated about the same time. My informant had been born in South Dakota and since I had been looking for our connection on another story, I asked her to send me her history. Our relationship goes back many years but she related how her side remained in the farming business when they arrived after having had a long history of farming in Germany. In fact, the Dankbars can be traced through many centuries as a result of owning land.
I know that Johann Heinrich, Anna Elisabeth’s son, farmed his whole life in McHenry County and even though my grandfather Lambert John did not carry on the tradition from Germany, there is a family legend about him investing in South Dakota. This made me think about some of our other ancestors who were farmers.
Especially, I thought about Gerret Dorlandt whom we thought was a sailor but I speculate he was the one who started the farming tradition in the family because I have reason to believe that when Holland owned New Netherlands and there was trade by the West Indies, Holland would give land to anyone who would settle in their new world. Then you know the history. The English took over and the Dorlands farmed through the years all the way through several generations until Robert Durland sold the family farm and moved to Flora, Illinois and became a banker. However his son James, my paternal grandfather, is known to have always loved farming.
This brought to mind William Free, who was always a farmer and kept moving westward as land opened up. He was born in Pennsylvania and I followed his farming activity through the census to Flora, Illinois. He had several sons and my records show most of them continued to farm. However, one of them, Milton, after his wife died, decided to follow the westward journeys of his father and he took his family to Oklahoma when it opened up and there he became a rancher, which one could say is a form of farming.
Today, we have a descendant of these ancestors, Nicholas Hodge, who not only has the long history of farming in his blood from the Durland/Free side, but Jerry tells me he also has a paternal great-grandfather who served on the Edgar County (IL) Farm Bureau for seventeen years before becoming an Associate Professor at the Agricultural Extension of the University of Illinois. So though he finished his university degree in a field unrelated to farming, Nicholas has recently decided to use his farming pedigree to try a very specialized realm of farming, one that does not encompass animals but products of the soil. I wish Nicholas the very best with his new venture this summer. Studies tell us that we carry our genes through many generations. Do I dare wonder?