Taking Stock - Family I

Guess no one every doubted that I came from old German stock. Enough folks have struggled with my name to prove that at least. Here is a pic of some very grim looking grandparents. Grandpa and Grandma Stroede—August and Bertha. I never knew them. The photo is their Golden Wedding portrait—and I was not born yet. As a matter of fact, my brother Ernest (four years older) was eminent and our mother couldn’t make it to the celebration held in Milwaukee. Reportedly, August called Ern “the nuisance” for a while for messing up the party. Probably Mother didn’t really feel badly about missing because she didn’t really like the folks anyway. Seems that for the year or so that the old folks and my parents lived together in the Adams County house, a lot of the conversation was in German—of which my Mother understood not a word.

My forebears came from Pomerania, that flat country—farm land—at the north of Germany that slipped from Germany to Russia and to Poland (which it is currently a part of). The church district was Kris Cammin and the Cathedral still stands though now it is Catholic and any old vestiges of Evangelical Lutheran have been wiped clean. There are public records of a Jacob Strode as a tax paying land owner in Trisbow as early as 1717. A few miles away, in Schwenz, both Martin Ferdinand Stroede and Caroline Gertrude Steffen were born. They became my great grandparents. In 1882, they arrived in the port of Philadelphia, traveling with their son August, a teenager. They quickly found their way to Milwaukee, where there was a huge population of folks from Pomerania. There are records of other Stroede’s there as early as 1841. At the same time, there was a struggling early Evangelical Lutheran movement that resulted in at least three congregations in the north side of Milwaukee (this was the large German part of the town, today it is completely African-American.) The churches have merged over the years and are now Missouri Synod.

As Andy and I worked on this genealogy, we were not even aware of the Great Grandparents. No one in my family ever mentioned them. They were elderly when they emigrated and lived short lives, but they are there, buried in Union Cemetery which all the Ev. Lutheran churches shared. Their graves are lost as they are in the earliest section of the cemetery where no stones exist—apparently most were surface and have been covered by sod. There are many more Stroede’s in the large cemetery, most we can not identify as relatives—yet.

For a couple of years before finding church records from Milwaukee, Andy and I struggled to discover where August was born. He was naturalized near the end of his life and listed his place of birth as Halnor, Russia. No one ever heard of the place. Turns out it is Hellenurme, Estonia. So maybe I am not German. Seems that there was a lot of Germans from the low area who moved north and that they became the middle class merchants of the area. Need to make a trip there—don’t think I will make it. We also discovered that August had two sisters and two brothers—but no names were identified. We are aware of many possible folks who actually lived with or near August in Milwaukee in those early years. Unsolved, but I would guess there are a lot of cousins in Wisconsin of which we are not aware.

One other mystery was solved in our work. The family legend had it that August and Bertha met on the ship emigrating and fell in love. Actually, Bertha Woldt was born in Tribsow (this is where the church was—and is—located that the Stroede’s would have attended) and did not emigrate until a couple of years later. They clearly were acquainted, because they married almost immediately (1885) and started producing offspring.

What did I get from all this heritage? Look at the picture again. I am always accused of slow to smile. Have that square-set jaw as well. I seem to have been born 30, never really had a wild and crazy time—no wild oats. Father at 22, college teacher at 24. Saw my duty, stuck to it, life is serious business you know.