Days of Yore II: The Ancestry Of Lloyd Raymond Gripentog And Bernice May Mitchell

By Betty Hamby Gripentog

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669856160

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Copyright © 2023 by Betty Hamby Gripentog. 846221

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

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permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris

844-714-8691

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Library of Congress Control Number:       2022921433

Rev. date: 05/19/2023

HEROES

Heroes are people with the strength to achieve,

With the courage to stand up for what they believe,

With the wisdom to cherish that this is true.

Heroes are people just like you and me!

Author Unknown

This

book is dedicated to our Heroes; our ancestors were common people that had the courage to come to a new country, to make a better life. They cleared land, built villages, homes, churches and schools to achieve that life. They worked and stood up for what they believed to be right and what they cherished. They did what was needed! They are our Heroes!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION AND THANKS

PART I     YOUR GERMAN/PRUSSIAN HERTIAGE GRIEPENTROG, LUEBKE, SCHMITT AND VIEGLAHN

Emigration And Immigration

Pomerania, Prussia, Germany

Leaving The Old World

Minnesota In 1862

Minnesota

The Minnesota Girl

Carver County, Minnesota

Hamburg, Minnesota

Waconia, Minnesota

Ottertail County, Minnesota

The Luebke And Vieglahn Families

Carl Friedrick August Luebke And Johanna Dallman

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Luebke And Christine Marie Raether

Johann Friedrich And Christine Luebke’s Children

Gottfried Friedrich Hermann Luebke And Ida Vieglahn

Gottfried And Ida Luebke’s Children

Wilhelmine Ottilie Luebke

Carl Hermann Luebke

Anna Ella Luebke

Wilhelm Carl Luebke

Martha Friederike Luebke

Ida Augusta Luebke

Alfred Gottlieb Luebke

Louise Marie Luebke

Henry Albert Luebke

Bertha Lydia Luebke

Rudoloph Johannes Luebke

Rosa Ella Luebke

Wilhelmine Friederika Augustine Luebke

Johann Hermann Carl Luebke

Marie Augusta Sophia Luebke

August Freidrich Wilhelm Luebke

Albertine Caroline Wilhelmine Luebke

Hulda Ottilie Friederike Luebke

Carl And Frederika Vieglahn

Carl Friedrich August And Johann Dallman Luebke

Heinrich Carl August Luebke

Wisconsin

Watertown, Wisconsin

Pelican Rapids, Minnesota

The Griepentrog And Schmidt Families

Wilhelmania (Minnie) Griepentrog

Emma Bertha Helene Griepentrog

Friedrich Wilhelm (William) Griepentrog

Amanda Marie Louise Griepentrog

Carl Hermann Robert Griepentrog

Friedrich Christian (Fritz) Gripientrog

Robert And Anna Gripentrog

Lloyd And Bernice Gripentog & Sons- Bob, Bill And Jim

PART II     YOUR ENGLISH & SWEDISH HERITAGE BUTTERWORTH, MITCHELL & NELSON

The Butterworth’s

Gouther Butterworth

John Butterworth

The Mitchell’s

John H. Mitchell And Mary A. Hammond

John Adolphus Mitchell And Mary Belle Butterworth

John Adolphus and Mary Belle Mitchell’s children

Ezra Ellsworth Mitchell

Ezra And Jennie’s Children

Your Swedish Heritage

Adolph Ole Nelson

INTRODUCTION AND THANKS

I enjoyed researching and writing my first book, Days of Yore, about the ancestry of my parents’ families. I felt it was only fair to my children and grandchildren to share with them their father’s heritage.

I had collected information and stories from Myrtle Gripentog Johnson and from my mother-in-law, Bernice Mitchell Gripentog over the years. I have been part of the Gripentog family since 1950 and was fortunate enough to know or to have known Bob’s grandparents, aunts and uncles and even many of his great aunts and uncles and cousins.

William G. Gripentog, Bob’s brother, and his wife, Andria had the forethought to interview his mother, Bernice Gripentog and recorded the history and stories of her life and that of the Mitchell family. Thanks to them, I used their records to help recall and verify stories and incidents that I had been told over the years.

Several people over the years had given Myrtle and Bernice copies of genealogy and stories of the families, along with some pictures; these were passed along to me.

Thanks to Lauretta Hulda Luebke Tauscher for her great book, My Father’s House. Her book is a great history book covering many generations of our family and I used it for information and to confirm stories and dates.

Thanks to Robyn Rudolph Benedict for all the old pictures that she sent me. These pictures had belonged to her great grandmother, Anna Luebke Gripentrog and her grandmother, Myrtle Gripentog Johnson and her mother, Marvel Trovaten Rudolph. When that box arrived, I felt as if I had just found a treasure chest!

Thanks to Howard Mitchell and Peggy Dolan for the Mitchell pictures and information. I have so enjoyed the searches on Ancestry.com and comparing other family trees and stories, some match and others are quite different.

Thanks to my daughter, Linda Nelson and granddaughter Candice Nelson-Hayes, without them this book would probably never have gotten finished. I hope reading my book will give you a better understanding of the history of what your forefathers endured all of this being a part of what you are today!

FAMILY TREES

PART I

LUEBKE

SCHMIDT

VIEGLAHN

GRIPENTOG

PART II

MITCHELL

BUTTERWORTH

NELSON

GRIPENTOG

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PART ONE

YOUR GERMAN/PRUSSIAN HERTIAGE

GRIEPENTROG, LUEBKE,

SCHMITT AND VIEGLAHN

EMIGRATION

AND

IMMIGRATION

Emigration, according to the dictionary, is to leave a place or abode of a country for life and residence elsewhere. Immigration is to come into a country of which one is not a native and to establish permanent residence. A person emigrated from his country and immigrated into his new country.

The first immigrants to America, according to history, were the Asians that came in using the Bering Strait. Although that was thousands of years ago, they were immigrants none the less.

During the 1800’s there were three main reasons to emigrate from your native land. The first reason was adventure; this was mostly for the young and brave of heart. The second reason was to escape religious and political persecution; they wanted to worship and live as they pleased not as they were told to. The third was for better opportunities in that new land, America, they were told of that land where there were no kings or overlords that controlled everything you did, and you could own land just by working it.

The shipping trade developed and most of the cargo going from America to Europe was bulky and used up much space. The products being shipped were lumber, raw wool, tobacco, and cotton. The cargo from Europe to America was much lighter; as it was finished cloth, spices and so forth. The companies found they had cargo space on the America bound voyages.

The solution was to carry human cargo. The shipping companies began advertising their fares in many European cities. The shipping companies increased the number of emigrants by sending agents all over Europe seeking passengers and relating the advantages in this land called America. They soon filled up their ships with emigrants as the word spread about America the Promised Land.

Chain migration became quite common. Most young men were looking forward to the adventure and the possibility of owning their own land and left knowing that they would never see their parents again. The young immigrants would work hard and save enough money to send for his younger brothers and sisters. They in return would help bring more of their siblings and eventually maybe their parents to their new country. This was the most common immigration pattern.

Another pattern was for a family to be able to save enough money to be able for the whole family to go to America at the same time. Sometimes countries paid the way for undesirables to leave the country if they signed off their citizenship and signed, they would never come back.

The achievements and contributions of the German Americans have had a profound effect on the United States. The German Americans were known for their practical skills, thrift, demanding work, interest in the arts and their enjoyment of good living and family values. They have left their mark on the American culture and lifestyle.

A lot of people are not aware that German was the largest ancestral group in this country. It is an eye- opener and it is something that is commonly overlooked, according to the author Don Heinrich Tolzmann in his article The Great German-American Experience. In the 2010 census about fifty million Americans considered themselves German-Americans.

There was a steady stream of emigrants; so many that at one time German was considered to become the first language of the United States; English won out. Some say this is not true others say it was proposed.

The American way of life has been enriched by the German Americans; they established the first kindergarten in the United States. They shared the wonderful tradition of the Christmas tree, which most of us observe and they originated such foods as the hot dog and the hamburger.

In a tribute to all the great, near great and the common folk alike; in 1983 the Congress and President Reagan joined by proclamation declaring the TRICENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF GERMAN SETTLEMENT IN AMERICA. They honored the immeasurable contributions to this country made by millions of German immigrants over the past three centuries.

Examples of contributions to the American Society were.

Printer and journalist German American John Peter Zinger was found justified, by a jury, in criticizing the colonial government in 1735. This became the first victory for the Freedom of the Press.

A Prussian military officer General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, at Valley Forge, he turned the colonial army under General Washington into a disciplined force capable of defeating the British army.

Both President Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower were both of German descent. President Eisenhower was born in Pennsylvania of German descent. He was President of Columbia University, Five Star General, and Supreme Commander of NATO and the 34th President of the United States.

The Conestoga wagon that carried the pioneers westward and the Kentucky rifles they carried were all made by Pennsylvania Germans.

Clement Studebaker, a German wagon maker, later produced the Studebaker automobile.

Other great German Americans were.

John Jakob Astor (1763-1848)- was born in Germany and established American Fur Company and was big in real estate in New York City in the 19th century.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in the German Empire won the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics, general relativity, and special relativity. He became an American Citizen in 1940.

Rockefeller Family- Johann Peter Rockefeller emigrated to the United States in 1708. John D. and William formed Standard Oil. Standard Oil is recognized as one of the leading philanthropic families in American history. Nelson A. Rockefeller was Vice-President under Gerald Ford.

Werner Von Braun (1912-1977) was born in the German Empire; he was considered the father of rocket science. He developed the V-2 rockets for the Nazis and later designed the Saturn V rocket for NASA’s Apollo missions.

Henry Kissinger was born in Bavaria in 1923. He escaped to the United States in 1938 and became Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford and was National Security Advisor Concurrently.

Many breweries were started by people of American- German descents such as Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, Stroh’s Millers and Coors.

Our ancestry was not amongst the greats that made the history books; but they did their fair share in developing churches, townships and helping to settle this great United States of America. This book is a story of the common folks the families of Griepentrog, Luebke, Schmidt and Vieglahn leaving Prussia and Germany, the Butterworths leaving England and the Nelsons leaving Sweden for that new land called America.

POMERANIA, PRUSSIA, GERMANY

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Pomerania or Pommern, as it was called in Germany, was a Prussian province in northern Germany bordering the Baltic Sea. Pomerania means the Land at the Sea. The land area is less than 12,000 square miles, about the size of Delaware and Maryland combine. Most of the land was heavily timbered and the winters were very severe.

During the 1700 and 1800’s the lives of the commoners depended upon the dictates of the noble lords and ruling class who were in power at the time. Much of the land was under the control of Junkers, the landed gentry of Prussia’s eastern provinces. Junkers (literally young Lords or young noblemen, members of privileged militaristic land-owning class) who were descendants of the medieval German Knights that had established large feudal estates on the Slavic lands they had conquered in the Middle Ages. Over time large estates were subdivided into smaller ones mostly as the result of inheritance. By 1816 there were 1883 knight’s estates in Pomerania.

Although freedom of worship was decreed in Prussia as early as 1740, King Frederick Wilhelm in 1817 ordered the merger of the Lutheran Churches and the Calvinist Reform Churches to form a single church The Evangelische Kirche. He required every person to attend the church nearest to him. Many staunch Lutherans revolted and formed their own churches. When the states were given full power to enforce the decree in 1830, many Old Lutherans chose to emigrate rather than comply. Old Lutherans were the ones that refused to join the Prussian Union of Churches in the 1800’s.

In 1811, serfdom was abolished in Pomerania and the serfs who had been under hereditary bondage to the estates were now free to move from village to village, choose their own trade and to marry whom they pleased. Tenants were still responsible for rent or labor services to the estate. To become free owners of their land they had to cede part of their land to their masters, one third in case of hereditary rights to the land and one half if they had no hereditary holdings to the land. Many were unable to survive after relinquishing part of their land, they were forced to sell the rest of their land and become day laborers. The peasants could own their land only during their lifetime after which it reverted to the state.

In the rural countryside everyone lived in a small village often centered on the landed estates called Guts. A Gut consisted of a large manor house, several large barns and stables and they usually had a flour mill and perhaps a distillery. A village had less than one hundred inhabitants and they lived in a few dozen households.

The village people worked, played, and celebrated together, all social activities centered on the family, church, and community. They rarely ventured far from their own villages even though the next village was only three or four miles away. They worked long hours usually from sun-up to sun-down at hard labor. Children were required to work at an early age, after confirmation the boys generally left their homestead to work elsewhere. Prussia passed a law in 1839 setting the minimum age of nine for working children.

Houses were constructed of a framework of posts and beams that were filled in and plastered with a mixture of clay and straw. Roofs were thatched with thick layers of reeds and the floors were packed clay. The house was connected to the barn with only a wall between them. Their homes were quite barren of furniture and very plain.

In the1830’s grain prices fell when England placed a high tariff on imports thus causing an economic distress. Potatoes were introduced in 1745 and the government forced the people to raise them. In the early 1830’s they were the major crop of Pomerania.

The first wave of German Old Lutherans to migrate to America peaked in 1854. Many came after the crop failures in 1845-47 which affected most of Europe and was accompanied by a famine and cholera epidemics. Blight on the potato crop came along causing famine and disastrous weather conditions around 1850 only added to their problems.

Meanwhile the United States was booming and promised a better way of life; and maybe even own their own land and to have freedom of religion. The German immigrants settled in small close-knit communities made up almost entirely of Germans very much as they had lived in Pomerania.

A second wave of German immigrants peaked in 1873. Young men left to avoid military service and others emigrated because the Industrial Revolution destroyed the cottage industries. The hardest hit was the linen weavers; they worked on looms in their homes. Mechanical looms and the competition from foreign markets drove many to pack up and leave. Communities tried to get rid of the chronically under privileged members of society by paying the cost of passage in exchange for the individuals giving up all citizenship rights and promising not to return. There was unrest all over Europe.

The United States Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862 providing for the transfer of 160 acres, (65 Hectares) of unoccupied public land to each homesteader for a nominal fee after five years of residence, the land could then be acquired after 6 months of residence for $1.25 an acre. This alone was a big incentive to come to America, the Promised Land. For many, America really was the promise land, most of them were farmers and were able to have their own farms in a few years and they had never experienced the freedoms that were theirs in America, of course hardships and struggles went along with the good, but for most of these new immigrants the good much out weighted the bad.

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LEAVING THE OLD WORLD

Willing to face a perilous journey, the emigrants all shared a secret dream, a hope. Their families and friends that had already made it to America wrote and told them that America had no King; poor men could become rich and that there were vast opportunities. And there were acres and acres of land waiting to be taken by homesteading.

As they left their beloved homelands and bid their families and friends farewell knowing that they would probably never be back and their hearts were filled with all kinds of emotions, fear, excitement, dread, and home sickness already. They knew the journey would be long and treacherous and some would not survive. America was a risk worth taking!

Most of the emigrants had never been any further from their homes and little villages except to go to the nearest market town, some not even there. The first step for them was to obtain an emigrant visa that the German states require. They must provide baptismal and marriage certificates from their parish church, evidence of a trade or profession and proof that all adult males had fulfilled their required military service. This was made difficult for those Germans wishing to start a new life in America, especially if they had moved with their nobles from village to village.

The next step for the emigrants was getting from their village to a major port. This leg of the journey done on foot, or by ox cart or train or riverboat or all of them according to where they were coming from. The nearest port was probably Bremen. The whole family unit might be planning to migrate along with others of the village. They owned little, but what they could take with them was even