In progress.....
Her father's gravestone of 1890, back in Iowa, now broken and faded, still is marked with Geb and Gest, for born and died, so they still spoke German. She was the Anna Barbara born in 1886; her mother, the Anna Maria born in 1863. Both parts of their names, when used together, sounded pretty, like Mary Anna or Mary Therese. Yet, both Annas, having been born in Wisconsin, were "Britishized enough". They would see county clerks reduce their names to Anna only, whether they liked it or not, for legal records. The younger was allowed to use Anna B., if needed for clarity.
Some federal land records records online for Anna B. Arndorfer show something most unusual for a woman in her era. She filed for homestead rights, no husband signing next to her name on the documents.
A settlement called Coal Springs, in SD, was laid out in 1908, in Barrett Twp. of Perkins County, in or near the region sometimes called the Black Hills. Her name would then be seen in Barrett Twp. on two federal land records over the next decade She filed for adjacent pieces at the land office in Lemmon, in Perkins County, South Dakota, 160 acres each, the first in 1912, then again in 1918, when she would have been 26, then 28. Each time she gave her name two ways, as Anna B. Arndorfer and as Anna Sherrard.
Between Coal Springs' founding in 1908 and her first land buy in 1912, her 1910 US Census would be done in Perkins County, the place name used at the top saying the poll was of the voting precinct called Humphrey. That 1910 survey counted Anna and William Sherrard as farming, married just 0 years, so newly weds.
Both had previously left one surviving parent back in Iowa, his father, her mother. William's father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had died in Webster City, Iowa, in 1910, shortly before the 1910 census, after being left with one of William's married sisters living nearby. Anna had instead come to SD from St. Benedict, Iowa, her mother having remarried to Mr. Huschka.
Her mother would have encouraged her, being still single, to arrive in SD by going with a "double cousin" named Joe Jr. Anna's and Joe Jr's fathers had been brothers, their mothers, sisters. Arranging in avance to be near family support made life easier in a time of no EMS, a lesson surely appreciated by her parents when going from Wisconsin to Iowa. That double cousin, Joe Jr. Arndorfer, had married "Katie" Erdman/Erdmann, back home in St. Benedict, Iowa. Joe and Kate were then of record having the first 2 of their children in Moody County, SD, one born circa 1906. That was after the 1905 State Census was done back in Iowa. Anna B. may have been the young Anna Arndorfer counted back home in 1905 as still single, timing her arrival to coincide with the new baby's.
Their set all eventually left SD. Very few people remained, the Barnhart family, from elsewhere in Iowa, among them.
Why leave?
"Things happened". These included coal mine closings affecting Coal Springs' townpeople. Multiple years of bad weather in most counties would starve the rancher-farmers' livestock, after causing grass and wheat crops to fail.
The area de-populated. Coal Springs would become a ghost town with only a few houses. Not even its post office remained after the mid-1950s. While Lemmon still exists (as the county seat?), Barrett Twp's modern population was last said to be under 20 people (about 13?).
Joe and Katie would return to Iowa. Anna and William had clearly been in Perkins County for her land filing in 1918, yet, seemed to also go "to and fro" between Montana and Canada, beginning with a Prairie Census in Alberta, in 1916, saying they had emigrated to Canada in 1913. They declared an intent to become Canadian/British, that reason used by Wm. in 1918, by then in his 40s, to explain why he could no respond if called for WW I. By that time (1918), he understood he had been born in Indiana. The clerk gave his size and height as medium, his hair as black, his eyes as brown, occupation, sheep-raiser, Anna B. as his emergency contact. They would be counted in Montana for the US Census in 1920. They were later counted by border officials as returning, moving southward across the Canadian border, via Montana.
One of the Sherrard family trees at FamilySearch covers her and William D. (two of the contributors being Carl Watkins and S.M. Rouse). The tree says she died in Alta, Indiana, in 1926. That year matched Iowa records kept of her death date, but the tree said Mar. 6, maybe a funeral date, while her WPA record said Mar. 5, maybe the death date.
Interestingly, the tree says She and William married in McIntosh, Corson County, SD, on Oct. 11, 1911. That does not match their calling themselves married in their 1910 Census. It's possible they were married twice, first in an unapproved way (clergy not registered properly with the US government, for example, someone at the nearby Indian reservation took their vows, married then "In God's eyes, but not the law's") . To be re-married by approved clergy, they had to go to a different place.
That was the beginning of their marriage. The end took them to Alta, a tiny Protestant place, barely inside Indiana, almost in Illinois, well south of Chicago. The lived above Knox County, above where their Wabash River fed its waters into the Ohio, the wide Ohio separating north from south.
Alta's best business connection to the outside, after trains replaced most river boats on the Wabash and Ohio, consisted of two railroads crossing a bit to the west. The junction lay about where the nearby tiny towns of Bono and Toronto merged, thre two a bit closer to the Illinois line than was Alta.
Her death was noted in Kossuth County, Iowa, newspapers, then re-reported by the WPA survey that followed in the next decade's Depression years, as on Mar. 5, 1926. The WPA writer of the 1930s listed her as "wife of W.O." (a mis-reading of W.D, as her spouse was William Dolan Sherrard). The writer noticed her place of burial was uncertain.
There is little to be found now, about her SD life, other than scattered remarks about the place called Coal Springs. Geologists determined that the mines there, now closed, tapped into coal that was "uranium-enriched". How many took sick from radiation exposure? Did "Coal Springs" mean their drinking water was contaminated?
Her rancher-farmer spouse's first wife, a May/Mary "Hanan" or "Hanen", also came from Iowa, after she and "W.D." married in Webster City (Hamilton County) in Jan., 1901, where his father had last moved their family. She apparently died in Perkins County SD or in Iowa, not certain which, as no paper record or gravestone has clearly been found. However, her death date can be inferred as sometime before the 1910 Census in Perkins County.
Long-lived, spouse William would have a third wife in the decades after Anna died. None of the three Mrs. Sherrards apparently had children that lived to maintain the womens' graves.
Modern minds would wonder about this-- did the contaminated coal back in SD have anything to do with the first two women's deaths? the child's? Note that Anna B.'s father, John Arndorfer, and her uncle, Michael Arndorfer, also had died young, without ever moving to Barrett Twp. Instead of radiation, some health issue ran in the family?
However, if the local coal, easily found, maybe even picked up off the ground, no need to pay for it, was burned in the old-time kitchen stove, where a woman spent so much of her day, a husband busy outdoors might not inhale much, but the woman would? When did anyone admit that Madame Curie's experiments with radiation gave her aplastic anemia? Not in Mary Sherrard's and Anna B.'s lifetime?
Anna Barbara, not yet age 40, died "too young". She did have adventure in her life, however.. We've noted she was of record up in Canada, where she and her spouse were listed with an employer. The time was said to be one in which threshing crews took their machines elsewhere, after the harvest season locally had passed. Were they part of that?
Little is said of her Indiana life. A Sherrad family tree archived at FamilySearch.org gave her a remote death place, naming it as Alta, Indiana. There is an Alta in Vermillion County's Helt Township, according to Wiki geographers. Why would they go there? We know her spouse was a William D. Sherrard. When censused in SD with Anna B., he believed he was born in 1873, which is consistent with other things. He also believed he was born in Virginia, like his father, but that is not consistent with other things. Was Virginia perhaps a place he remembered visiting as a child? He was never told by his mother, where he was "really" born?
Other sources, say his father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had taken the growing Sherrard family to Cass County, Indiana, by the time of William's birth, so Indiana is the birth place cited for him in Sharrard family trees. His family resided in Indiana for their 1880 US Censu.
It's maybe relevant to comment that Vermillion County, Indiana, was once busy shipping coal by rail. Consolidated Coal was maybe one of the county's bigger operators, said in an old directory to ship coal by rail to St. Louis, many decades ago. That company and others no longer ship coal out, producing more shrunken towns. Vermillion County's largest town today is under 5000 people.
An old history book of Vermillion County, Indiana written in the 1880s, when Wm. Sherrard was just a child, said Catholics and especially Lutherans were scarce there, not enough Germans, the French too distant in time. Many of the locals had come up from Virginia/West Virgina. (It was common for border southerners to cross the Ohio River, hoping to to find jobs and better land and schools northward, then going up the Wabash.)
Alta meant high in Spanish, above the disease-carrying mosquitoes that tended to infest marshy parts closer to the rivers. Like Palo Alto County in Iowa, it was named using words and phrases learned by veterans of the war with Mexico. That was in the 1840s, many of the veterans earning land bounties in lieu of salaries while soldiering. Their children could use the warrants once "out west", trading them in for land to homestead. More common, the aging soliers or their widows could sell the warrants to unrelated people who wanted to homestead. making the cash received much like a pension
The Vermillion County of her death fell barely inside Indiana, with a different "Vermilion" County nearby, in Illinois (catty-corner, to the northwest, to be spelled with just one L). Both were named for the Vermilion River. Their spellings differ, it's said, by ethnicity. Using two L's were the old-time French fur traders and missionaries founding, for instance, the very old town of Vincennes, in the next county south on the Wabash, that named Knox after the French left. The later arriving British to the Vermilion River, mainly Protestants, if coming pre-Irish famine, instead used just one L.
With no town in Vermillio County today larger than 5000, the county land around Alta stayed minimally agricultural. The land's growing dis-use caused much to become heavily wooded.
Were she and Mr.Sherrard there to work, as they had done in Canada?
The old county history said Alta and Hillsdale, a bit to its north, were, in effect, one town, combined population 200 Catholic churches were mentioned as sparse, served occasionally from outside or by lay people.
The uncertainty back in Kossuth County records over her burial place may have mirrored uncertainty over whether she had kept her parents' Catholic religion during all her travels. An Irish-sounding Dolan was the maiden name of William Dolan Sherrard's mother, so the problem may have been instead that no cemeteries in the place where she died were specifically Catholic. The question then turns into which of the "public" cemeteries would have taken her burial (public meaning Protestant in origin, but not restricted to just one denomination, justifying a subsidy for upkeep paid by town or county taxes) .
The two public candidates for cemeteries begin with Bono/Toronto, at the rail crossing just west of Alta. She could have been buried there temporarily, her spouse hoping his finances would later allow her body to be shipped out by rail, by rail back to her family's Iowa cemetery.
The second public candidate is Dinsmore, closer to Alta, but north of it. Multiple buried occupants were said to be from Virgina/W.Virginia, fitting the past of father-in-law Robert. A child surnamed Barnhart was buried there, no parents at its side. (The Barnhart name was one long in/near Barrett Twp., near Lemmon, SD, the latest Barnhart burials in the Schoolaas cemetery of Shady Hill, one of the few still viable cemeteries back in that deserted area ) In fact, the Dinsmore cemetery has mostly very old graves, as if the families had "up and left", fitting the past of in-law Robert Baker Sherrard as he moved out of Indiana, to buy land in Iowa, doing so agent-style.
---MORE DETAILS----
To be reduced later, moved elsewhere, after people have had a chance to see this.
EARLY LIFE. If her spouse took her to her last towns, her parents took her to her first Iowa town. It still exists, but barely, in NW Iowa, not far from the Minnesota state line
Anna Barbara and her two brothers were born in Wisc., but would reach their teens in the farming community and church town of St. Benedict. Its surrounds were mainly German, yet ethnically diverse, with multiple German dialects, and scatterings of Irish and Czechs and others . The little place has lost its lovely white church recently, its bank lost back in the 1930s, its little store and pool hall, at times in-between.
Once in Iowa, many relatives, some of them half-siblings, others double-cousins and normal cousins, would be born, were neighbors, making it harder to find someone unrelated to marry. Her mother and aunt, both Eisenbarths (Anna Maria and Rosa C.) would marry two brothers, both Arndorfers (John and the younger Joseph. This writer descends of a middle brother, the Michael Arndorfer who married Victore/Victoria/Dora Scheberle).
Anna Barbara's parents, John Arndorfer and Anna Maria Eisenbarth, married at Beaver Dam, Wisc., in 1882. We can assume these older siblings, having found a good match, did some matchmaking for the younger two. They all "went west", following other members of a Wisconsin "colony" that moved in steps, so not everyone moved at the same time.
Some presumably used trains, as the rail companies, one using Asa Call of Algona as their agent, had been given homestead land in Kossuth County as an incentive to build tracks there. That agent must have sold some to this group, as none of the Rahms and Arndorfers early to St. Benedict are seen as individuals in the federal land records for Kossuth. Skipping over Iowa's northeast (Decorah) and north central parts (Forest City and Clear Lake), to go to northwest Iowa, their group stopped just short of Mr. Call's town of Algona.
Her father died quickly once in Iowa, in 1890, after a mere eight years of marriage, with Anna Barbara still little, only four at the time. A marriage record, dated Nov. 23, 1892, then said "Anna Arndorfer", meaning her mother, took as her new spouse, "John Huschka", at "Bavaria" in Kossuth County. (Was Bavaria what St. Benedict's congregation called itself before deciding to go by their church's name?)
A person from Bavaria is a Bavarian, reminding us that the Arndorfers' ethnicity matched that of the neighboring Rahms. According to county and church histories, one of the Rahms had arrived first in Kossuth County and sent word back to Beaver Dam about finding a good place. Others then followed.
The Huschkas had a Bohemian surname. The two ethnic sets, Bavarian and Bohemian, were easily familiar with each other's existence when back in central Europe. Both ethnic names come out of the ancient root word Bo, in the sense of bovine, describing people in places with cows. The two ethnicities, when existing closest to each other, had been a mere boat ride apart, on the Danube River. Its flow went westish, leaving Bavaria in order to cut through the Bohemian Forest, ahead of its descent (through Hungary?) to the Black Sea. Mr. Huschka would describe himself and his parents later as German-born. The early Huschkas thus went in the opposite direction, easterly, upstream, following the Danube or a ridgetop trail above it, to go from Slavic-speaking territory to Germanic-speaking.
Anna Barbara's first US census, the 1900, was at age 14,. It left a "family snapshot" of the blended family, the Baviarian Arndorfers and the German-adapted Huschkas. There may also have been state censuses in 1895 and 1905, one person per interview card, that also caught Anna Barbara in Kossuth County. However, there were too many plain Annas, as the interviewers did not like writing full German names. Thus, Anna Barbara may not have been that Anna counted in 1895 or 1905.
The children her mother and Mr. Huschka added to St. Benedict were born between 1892 and 1900 were in the 1900 US Census. An image is archived online (dated June 6, 1900; check the semi-blurry section for the family's handwritten rows, other rows are neighbors, incluing past an future in-laws):
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-XXZB-WQ
Their interviewer wrote Prairie Township at the top, not "Bavaria", not St. Benedict's name. Maybe a little multi-ethnic church town was deemed too unimportant to politicians to count its voters specifically? never incorporated, so no elections for mayor? The hamlet's church is now gone. Its Austrian windows and some beautifully-turned, castle-like carpentry were saved (by being moved to St. Cecelia's in Algona?).
St. Benedict's church was at the hamlet's south end, as was the church's school. This writer's mother remembers riding her pony to school, where many Arndorfers long attended, all going to Mass every day, Protestant students there exempted from church attendance. The school in her era did one year more than the tinier one-room public schools scattered here and there nearby. The public ones went only through Grade 8, the Catholic, through Grade 9, to allow extra time for teaching religion and language and going into detail on other things.
There would have been no school bus at the time of Anna Barbara's 1900 Census, so she and her siblings would have skipped high school. Yet, they would be better educated than many of the same era if they had had Grade 9.
On June 6, 1900, the three elder children, with Anna "in the middle", were 16, 14, and 12 . Five little half-siblings, ages 5 to 1 that June, would be fun for the teens to chase and tickle and otherwise entertain, but would have been a lot of work for their mother, Anna Maria, unless Anna Barbara helped.
Their interviewer of 1900, Mr. Albert F. Bacon, might have been presented their German and Bohemian (Czech) names, but might have susbstituted British-like ones, "not as strange" to his eyes, telin ghimself he was translating. Another strong possibility, some Irish nuns or students among their school's German ones had already taught the children how to re-write their names as British ones? This would account for Catharinas turning into Kates, Bernards into Barnies. A third factor, if English was not their "neutral territory", then how else would her German-trained mother and a stepfather formerly Bohemian speak to each other?
Maybe for all the reasons above, by June 6, 1900, teen-aged Johan had turned into John Arndorfer; Anna Barbara and Frantz, into Anna and Frank Arndorfer For the tiny Huschkas. little Franceska/Frencesks became Frances, Anton turned into Tony, Rosalia, into Rose, Victora/Victory/Victoria into Dora, and Marie morphed into Mary Huschka. The ethnic names their parents had chosen at their baptisms, however, would still be the names used in church records and by grandparents.
Any grandmother who worked only inside the home would know, at best, only some pidgin English, so not enough English. We can imagine teens able to tell each other their secrets, right in front of a grandmother, avoiding a lecture merely by using English.
We assume Anna Barbara's mother had been raised to speak some Germanic dialect, probably Bavarian, but maybe did so poorly, being Wisconsin-born. Though clearly with a Bohemian/Slavic surname, her stepfather, again, considered himself and his parents of German birth. Huschka was actually a German re-spelling of a Slavic surname (the original something like Huška) . The Huschkas, before becoming German, would have called their Slavic language Boehmisch (pronounced Bay-mish). However, outsiders and strangers called it Czech, to the annoyance of this writer's ethnic grandmother, born in Vienna, Austria, to Bohemian parents, as she considered Czech to be a German word.
The Boehmisch language was put into writing for their Catholic churches by using a Latin alphabet, with some special marks added. The marks, for example, let š stand for what was almost an "sh" sound, but not quite, making Huška sound a lot like Huschka. The other ethnic group in the modern nation of the Czech Republic, located east of the Bohemians, was/is the Moravians. Their Catholic missionaries instead invented a new alphabet for them, called Cyrillic (similar to the alphabets used later by Greek or Russian speakers).
Anna, an English speaker, would soon be treated as a semi-adult, able to work and save money (for future homestead purchases?) after her last school year ended. Her old school's tuition arrangments had let them meet future in-laws, even Protestant ones, which Mr. Sherrard may have been. How would that have happened?
The white two-story clapboard school at St. Benedict was unique as to tuition. The labor of the nuns who taught in English and German was donated by those nuns, their convent and other needs covered by whatever families could afford to put into the collection basket each Sunday, then added to seasonally by goods that families donated from the garden and farm.
Local Protestants could also attend the Catholic school for free, not just the Catholics. The St. Benedict arrangement excused them from all religious instruction, however, not just daily Mass.
St. Benedict's Richtsmeier family (pronounced rich-my-er) came, not from Bavaria, at Germany's southeast end, on the way to Hungary, but from Lippe-Detmold, in northwestern Germany, on the way to Holland and Norway. The old-time princes/barons of Lippe-Detmold resolved the long-lived religious warring of the north (Lutheran vs. Catholic). Their solution was to subsidize exactly one church-run school per town, with those in charge of the school to be that town's majority religion. Those not of the majority religion would attend the school, but were excused from religious classes. Thus, Catholics were in Lutheran schools, and Lutherans were in Catholic schools, keeping costs down via just one school system per town, all students allowed to keep the faith of their parents.
Maybe that place's way of providing school for different faiths came to St. Benedict, with the Richtsmeiers? Was everyone becoming an in-law of just about everyone? A daughter of Barbara Richtsmeier Ludwig would marry a cousin of Anna Barbara Arndorfer Sherrard (that cousin was a son of her middle uncle, Michael Arndorfer. Michael was like her father John in "dying too young"?)
When the trains came through, they brought with them Irish laborers to lay the tracks, some of whom stayed. To the north or backside of the white clapboard church building lay the little hamlet. Its scattering of houses still exists, one of the Irish names being McCarthy. Gone are a creamery and a lumber yard, maybe connected to the Rahms, and the longer-lived poolhall/tavern. What the German-speakers called their "People's Bank", meaning to benefit the many, not the few, would be victimized by a robbery in the Great Depression. It then was closed. Its robber would repent and express remorse at a later date.
The hamlet's small store, remembered by this writer's mother, was willing to grind any coffee beans purchased there, so "smelled really good". It also carried European spices, such as rosemary and needed garden seeds, ones not offered at neighboring towns' British-serving stores. (Sausage-making was considered the men's job, not the women's, to be done by a father and his sons. Sadly, the men too often did not write down their best recipes? Was garden-grown basil required, and garlic, along with bay leaf, to make a truly delicious "blood sausage"? Were mustard seeds and black pepper required for other sausages? Lots of oatmeal was sometimes added with the spices, so 20 minutes cooking time was required, substituting that grain for ground fat making some of the recipes healthier than today's?)
Some British-descended had arrived earlier, pre-statehood. Ambrose and Asa Call, in particular, of future Algona, led many of the future arrivals to the area. For example, one Call had been present in St. Louis when the Mass. group called the Whitinsville colony (including this writer's Scotch-Irish side) came across the Mississippi, intending to settle in Missouri. They instead were convinced by Call to go to Algona, which would have required taking their ox teams and wagons up the east branch of the Missouri River to Algona, a route maybe taken by Daniel Boone when helping to survey the area for its future townships.
The Call's Algona beat out Irvington for the spot of county seat. Thanks also to the Calls, attracted a much desired rail depot and offered a newspaper. Algona survived best, as, in addition to a rail junction, it was also where busier roads crossed. It could offer larger stores, multiple doctors and lawyers, multiple churches, a public high school and later a Catholic high school, and more.
St. Benedict peaked before the 1950s, its surrounding population using Algona more and more for services and purchases in the decades after Anna's death, especially as the smaller rail town of Wesley to the east lost the ability to offer as much as before. Note that Wesley also shrunk, merely later than did St. Benedict.
Algona's Catholic hospital (St. Ann's, since renamed?) was open to all religions. Catholics made a special point of using it, back then, partly as the old-time nursing nuns were viewed as excellent. Algona's Catholic church still exists, called St. Cecelia's. Calvary was that church's cemetery, located on Hwy. 18 east of Algona, maybe halfway to the church of St. Benedict.
Hwy. 18 was a modern version of the old military road across northern Iowa that existed pre-statehood. The tiny rail town of Sexton lay on the south side of Hwy 18, on the St. Benedict side of Calvary. Sexton saw its itty-bitty Protestant church also closed and torn down.
Anna would, as a child, have wondered where Hwy. 18 went if followed west. The answer was, striaght to that end off South Dakota whose top row of counties marks where SD rise to meet North Dakota.. Hwy. 18 still connects Algona and Sexton and Wesley. A deserted piece of its old route used to take Hwy 18 traffic right by St. Benedict, bring in a few convenience shoppers and gasoline buyers. The newer route skipped it, causing worry by those who were forward-thinking that their beloved hamlet and church would die. Machines were replacing the young laborers, Irish, German, British and more in name, seen in past censuses, working for older established farmers that patronize the town. Farming, in that way, became less of a poverty-producer. The young would need educations so they could leave and go elsewhere with good credentials. That was given to them and they did leave, because they had to.
The scatter of houses that mark the remnant of Sexton included Gerrman Catholics farming, for example, the Studers descended of Augustus. They had gone to Canada first, before coming to Iowa.
Augustus Studer, like Asa Call, was some sort of land promoter, seen frequently in the federal land records of Kossuth County. It was not clear for which group he was the agent Robert B. Sherrard, her father-in-law, was similar, in the Kossuth land records a few times, more often seen in other Iowa counties
The Studers were originally from Alsace-Lorraine and probably Switzerland before that, they think. Opportunites opened below the Swiss mountains when the prior German-French population ied of a plague. Once of to Iowa, they and their in-laws brought with them women's names like the French-sounding Genevieve and the Italian-sounding Francesca. The Studers and their in-laws will be found scattered (on land the Calls did not want?), their burials not just at St. Benedict's and St. Cecilia's Catholic cemeteries, but in Wesley's St. Joseph.
The federal officials in Washington DC designing the old US censuses ignored whatever church was attended, but did care what post office was assigned. The 1910 census of Anna's mother and stepfather noted that their part of Prairie Township used the post office at Corwith, to the south. That town had a high school accessed by bus by the late 1940s, attended by this writer's mother, who rode the bus with her year-older Arndorfer cousin, the one who would marry an Oxley.
Other post offices would also be assigned, depending on a farm's location inside Prairie Twp. or next-door Irvington and Wesley. St. Benedict had its own short-lived post office, originally called Rahm by the trainmaster dropping off mail, presumably as the drop location had been one of the Rahm farms.
A MOVE TO SOUTH DAKOTA'S BLACK HILLS. They followe Hwy. 18 west, past West Bend, past Palo Alto County
Her and William Sherrard's 1910 US Census listed them as farming at Humphrey in Perkins Couty SD. Asked how long they had been married, they said 0 years, so were newlyweds.
She bought one parcel in Barrett Twp. in 1912, being careful to list both her maiden and married names, Arndorfer and Sherrard. That first parcel proving satisfactory, she bought the other in 1918, both times going through the land office at Lemmon, S.D.
DE-CODING LAND ESCRIPTIONS. Both parcels made up the bottom half of that square mile inside Barrett Twp called Section 1. That nunber was always given to the far NE corner of Thomas Jefferson-style townships, the perfect township being six miles by six miles, possible if nature kept rivers and lakes out of the way. The last township ir perfect being 36, always in the far SE corner. One of the 36 sections would be dedicated for school use, following Thomas Jefferson's system.
The township of Barrett was next-door to Burdick Twp., names mattering for township elections and taxation. However, the old federal land records listed only surveyors' numbers. There were 6x6 squares identified "checkerboard" style, "this many" hops north, "that many" hops east, from a starting point. ("021 N, 013 E" for Barrett. Making one of the two numbers change, moving the hops east from 13 to 14, gave the surveying id for the twp. next-door named Burdick . The two numbers given, were, thus, distances from two different reference lines, measured as "this many townships north" of a first line, then "that many townships east" of a second line, that second line required to crossed the first at a right angle. The main reference line for their Perkins County townships was the "Black Hills Meridian". From that meridian, Burdick was the 14th township going east and Barrett, the 13th. The meridian's Black Hils name tells us they were near some scenery called "the Badlands". These were strange, yet beautful, formations of rock and soil. (They were made mainly by a millenia of wind beating sand and dirt against rock. )
A NEW COLONY. A group of about 15 Irish-American households from northwestern Iowa put up a "colony" in Lemmon. Lemmon had the govt. office where she applied for and paid for her land. Perhaps she and her spouse heard about Perkins County from the Iowan colony?
A West Bend, Iowa, newspaper reported the colony's move to SD, nicknaming them as the "Palo Alto Colony". (Palo Alto County was just west of Kossuth, had been, for many or all going to Lemmon SD their prior homeplace while still in Iowa. Its county seat was called Emmetsburg. Like nearby Emmet County, Emmetsburg was named for Robert Emmet. From the Irish viewpoint, he was a young 25ish hero, an Irishman wrongly hung for challenging some misguided British royalists.)
Perkins was said to have an above average amount of sheep-raising. This fits, as her spouse, William D. Sherrard, reported the sheep business as his occupation in his 1910 US Census. (There had been some William Sherrards in SD pre-statehood. Tthe earliest one to buy homestead land would pick Day County, did so in the 1890s, had a son in Day County with a Mary Wickham, called Earl, who grew up in SD. That was a William H. Sherrard, not William D., so never seen with Anna B. )
Some went to the Black Hills to mine gold. Perkins County had its own possible resource to attract speculators, a sizeable lignite coal field. The deposits would prove to be dangerously laced with uranium. Whether the Sherralds speculated that way, whether the river running through their land was ever contaminated by lignite runoff, is not known. Whether anyone suffered from radiation sickness is not known. Historically, other people had long managed to live in the area as there was a reservation for Native Americans east of Burdick, their former tribal livelihood indicated by a town called Bison.
Anna B and her William would spend their last US Census together in Montana, renting, so perhaps hard times caused them to lose their SD land.
This next part is repetitious, to be cut.
HER PRIOR AND LATER LIFE Anna Barbara was ethnically German, many of her Arndorfers of the dark-haired Bavarian sort. The Arndorfer name is still found in the Danube River region of Bavaria, just south of the Bohemian portion of the Czech Republic, both very close to Hungary.
She and her spouse were always in remote areas. Her spouse had an unusual combination of siblings, most born in Indiana, one in Virginia. His parents were both born in Virginia, the unique thing that separated him when trying to separate his censuses from those of other William Sherrards.
Her husband was quite different ethnically. He was Irish, but the Irish and Germans would mix as well as did the Bohemians and Germans once in northwestern Iowa. Her spouse sometimes went by W. D., or William D., but was born as William Dolan Sherrard, having been given his mother's maiden name as a middle name. He would cite the sheep business as his occupation for his draft registration for WW I, while in SD,, when he named her as his person of contact in an emergency.
How to account for Irish being born in Virginia? They may have been Scotch-Irish or Anglo-Irish, not native Irish, Virginia was nearby if his Sherrards entered the US through the port in Baltimore, as port cities, not national policy, were the deciders on early immigration, pre-Ellis Island
This uniqueness, ethnically Irish parents born in Virginia, made him trackable by censuses when they moved. The years that censuses asked for his parents' birthplaces.(Virginia) were the easiest to find. He was apparently surprised the first time an interviewer asked for his own birthplace. Virginia "popped into his head", even though his parents said it was Indiana when he still lived with them. By the time the next census-taker asked, he had had a chance to check with relatives. Thereafter, he repeatedly named Indiana. (One record specifically said Logansport, Indiana. An Isaac Sherrard was found in an old Logansport directory, a carpenter, related in some way, not yet determined, to his father, the Robert Baker Sherrard who often went by "Baker Sherrard".
It seems Anna and William never had children? This made their many moves easier, no one to pull out of school, no one repeatedly faced with making new friends at a new school.
He would remarry after her death. It appears he did not have children by the three women he out-lived. His first wife was another Iowa woman who also left him a widower (May Hanon? was may a nickname for Mary, in common use then?). Their era being before childhood vaccinations and other modern medical care, did he suffer sterility from mumps? Or, were his wives May and Anna too sick, although young?
Their freedom to move eventually took them over international borders, not just state lines. Border-crossing records back into the States in 1924 say they originally left for Canada in 1913 (in April of that year, then had become Canadian nationals).
Anna Barbara and William D. Sherrard were thus found on both sides of the US-Canada border. (They spent 10-11 years in Canada, in the Regina, Alberts area. His family's pattern in the US was to move around inside the upper states, those that ran Midwest to Northwest, beginning with Indiana and then Iowa. He and Anna went to SD before leaving the States. They then crossed back into the States via Montana, mere months before what would have been a very ill Anna was taken back to his home state of Indiana, maybe looking for better hospitals or for family assistance with his ill wife.
Her death place and date are given in a family tree, the timing making sense. After Anna's death, he would be found, remarried, in the 1930 US Census, in Washington state, occupation poultry rancher, the timing meaning an inflated mortgage, with balloon payments destructive but common then, a burden hard to handle, in the coming Great Depression. We are not surprised that he had to move again, to die in mid-America, in Nebraska. Handwritten, his 1930 census record is online, viewing free, but login required. The image is archived at:
Familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9RCD-WN3.
Also present in 1930 was Ohio-born third wife Verda Mae. The state of Ohio was next-door to Indiana, with many Ohioans migrating westward into Indiana. He did not to go southward to Nebraska until nearer the end of his life. Dying in Phelps County, Nebraska, Keith was given as the specific death place. Not studied by this writer, was it maybe a hamlet or rural township remembered with unknown accuracy in a family tree? a different county? Several trees are viewable for him at FamilySearch.org, none as of 2018 listing more than one of his three spouses.
Again, he died at 80, almost thirty years after Anna, eventually too old to travel and check on her grave. Having outlived too many, he was the only Sherrard buried in his cemetery.
LAST NOTES. Her last Canada border crossing record, archived at FamilySearch.org, in October of 1924, was before the first snowfalls might be expected. They said they were coming back to the US, having left it in 1913. Whether headed back to relatives or to a new employer was not clear. Their destination was in the vicinity of Lewiston, Montana. Did no precise address being given indicate a sudden decision to move? Before receiving a full reply to whatever letters they suddenly sent south?
They were going by wagon, not train. A wagon let them carry more with them, presumably as they knew the move was permanent. Pending snowfalls forced their move before November, maybe not enough time to wait for reply letters and otherwise scout out the new location? Travel by wagon, not by an easier train, was maybe painful for her. Not being rich, they desperately needed to bring household goods and farming equipment and tools?
They had no children. There were no great-grandchildren to track them, only this writer and other ultra-nieces and ultra-nephews and ultra-cousins trying to "fill in the blanks", many decades after they died.
No children meant no one made sure her stone remained erect and easily found and read. The makers of family trees instead only had whatever remembrances were kept on scraps of paper, discovered decades too late, in some deceased ancestor's "box of things", removed from an "overflowing drawer", saved in some basement or attic.
They had first, names with parents and siblings and ethnicities. Their ethnicities typically loved big family feasts and parties. "The box" usually had dates of celebrations and gatherings, via jottings and news clippings.
Such different dates for their wedding imply a re-taking of vows.. Was a wedding celebration held in their honor, when returning to Iowa to visit family? April of 1911 was given by one source, not confirmed. That would have been before the spring plantings, after the winter birthing season for livestock. As such, April would be a "best guess" for either a re-marriage date or any trip back home.
There would be saved, postmarked envelopes with "thank yous". There would be the decorative church funeral cards with a prayer for the departed, funeral date and location beside the deceased's name. In places where cooler weather preserved bodies, the funerals were typically a few days later. The year of 1926 would be right for both death and funeral, given the return from Canada was late in 1924.
WARNING.-- UNCERTAIN BURIAL Put her in a virtual cemetery if it is important to always find this page.
Why the uncertainty about her burial? Being unincorporated, Alta was not an official address, often seen mis-spelled, even by other Indianans. Examples: "Alter" was seen, perhaps written by people who pronounced "car" as "cah", Boston-style, so guessed the ending vowel and then assumed an R was neeed at the very end.
"Alto" was also seen. Northwestern Iowans of the Irish sort knew about Iowa's heavily Irish Palo Alto County, just beyond of Kossuth, both north of Fort Dodge, on the way to Minnesota, both on tthe way west to SD. The original place of Palo Alto was a battleground, well-remembered by locals who served in or reported on the Mexican-American War. We can imagine their brains tricking them into writing down "Alto", whenever they should have written "Alta".
Finally, some of the unincorporated places in Helt Twp. have become extinct, but had a cemetery. That nearest to Alta was the hamlet or "four corners" called Toronto, which did have a cemetery, also called Bono. Had Bono's sister hamlet of Toronto been settled by Canadians? She could have been buried at their shared cemetery, her stone long hidden by a farmer's plow or weeds or town rubble, if not by the more usual tossed grave dirt. That would be even more true of Dinsmore, its cemetery photo at Findagrave showing two old wagon ruts leading into the woods.
And so on.
Church records might clear a lot up on her burial. Early ones have helped to clarify what happened to her siblings, but they stayed where records were good.
Cousins among these Germans often had matching first and middle names honoring the same grandparents. There was apparently another Anna Barbara Arndorfer, born a tad later, to different parents. How many of the records of the two Anna B's had been confused, by thinking they were the same person?
There were also spelling variations, the original Germanic, Italianized or Frenchish. with lovely sounds for women, but with not-as-sweet British variations. She had a half-sister called both Francesca and Frances. We are still exploring relatives called Michel/Michael. A list of her siblings has been aed (post-2018), with her parents' verified names. We have not verified her gravesite with news clippings, but are still looking for them.
"Ater" Cemetery seems unlikely, as it is the graveyard of the Ater family.
Was there a Catholic cemetery for her? Did they take her body back home, or was the Anna Barbara Arndorfer buried in Kossuth not her, birth year and other things different?
Research by JB, Findagrave member. She was lucky, had some wonderful college classes on group migrations, ethnicity, and religion, how to "read" a cemetery for the area's social history, how to look or events in history that pushed people in new geographic directions.
Her father's gravestone of 1890, back in Iowa, now broken and faded, still is marked with Geb and Gest, for born and died, so they still spoke German. She was the Anna Barbara born in 1886; her mother, the Anna Maria born in 1863. Both parts of their names, when used together, sounded pretty, like Mary Anna or Mary Therese. Yet, both Annas, having been born in Wisconsin, were "Britishized enough". They would see county clerks reduce their names to Anna only, whether they liked it or not, for legal records. The younger was allowed to use Anna B., if needed for clarity.
Some federal land records records online for Anna B. Arndorfer show something most unusual for a woman in her era. She filed for homestead rights, no husband signing next to her name on the documents.
A settlement called Coal Springs, in SD, was laid out in 1908, in Barrett Twp. of Perkins County, in or near the region sometimes called the Black Hills. Her name would then be seen in Barrett Twp. on two federal land records over the next decade She filed for adjacent pieces at the land office in Lemmon, in Perkins County, South Dakota, 160 acres each, the first in 1912, then again in 1918, when she would have been 26, then 28. Each time she gave her name two ways, as Anna B. Arndorfer and as Anna Sherrard.
Between Coal Springs' founding in 1908 and her first land buy in 1912, her 1910 US Census would be done in Perkins County, the place name used at the top saying the poll was of the voting precinct called Humphrey. That 1910 survey counted Anna and William Sherrard as farming, married just 0 years, so newly weds.
Both had previously left one surviving parent back in Iowa, his father, her mother. William's father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had died in Webster City, Iowa, in 1910, shortly before the 1910 census, after being left with one of William's married sisters living nearby. Anna had instead come to SD from St. Benedict, Iowa, her mother having remarried to Mr. Huschka.
Her mother would have encouraged her, being still single, to arrive in SD by going with a "double cousin" named Joe Jr. Anna's and Joe Jr's fathers had been brothers, their mothers, sisters. Arranging in avance to be near family support made life easier in a time of no EMS, a lesson surely appreciated by her parents when going from Wisconsin to Iowa. That double cousin, Joe Jr. Arndorfer, had married "Katie" Erdman/Erdmann, back home in St. Benedict, Iowa. Joe and Kate were then of record having the first 2 of their children in Moody County, SD, one born circa 1906. That was after the 1905 State Census was done back in Iowa. Anna B. may have been the young Anna Arndorfer counted back home in 1905 as still single, timing her arrival to coincide with the new baby's.
Their set all eventually left SD. Very few people remained, the Barnhart family, from elsewhere in Iowa, among them.
Why leave?
"Things happened". These included coal mine closings affecting Coal Springs' townpeople. Multiple years of bad weather in most counties would starve the rancher-farmers' livestock, after causing grass and wheat crops to fail.
The area de-populated. Coal Springs would become a ghost town with only a few houses. Not even its post office remained after the mid-1950s. While Lemmon still exists (as the county seat?), Barrett Twp's modern population was last said to be under 20 people (about 13?).
Joe and Katie would return to Iowa. Anna and William had clearly been in Perkins County for her land filing in 1918, yet, seemed to also go "to and fro" between Montana and Canada, beginning with a Prairie Census in Alberta, in 1916, saying they had emigrated to Canada in 1913. They declared an intent to become Canadian/British, that reason used by Wm. in 1918, by then in his 40s, to explain why he could no respond if called for WW I. By that time (1918), he understood he had been born in Indiana. The clerk gave his size and height as medium, his hair as black, his eyes as brown, occupation, sheep-raiser, Anna B. as his emergency contact. They would be counted in Montana for the US Census in 1920. They were later counted by border officials as returning, moving southward across the Canadian border, via Montana.
One of the Sherrard family trees at FamilySearch covers her and William D. (two of the contributors being Carl Watkins and S.M. Rouse). The tree says she died in Alta, Indiana, in 1926. That year matched Iowa records kept of her death date, but the tree said Mar. 6, maybe a funeral date, while her WPA record said Mar. 5, maybe the death date.
Interestingly, the tree says She and William married in McIntosh, Corson County, SD, on Oct. 11, 1911. That does not match their calling themselves married in their 1910 Census. It's possible they were married twice, first in an unapproved way (clergy not registered properly with the US government, for example, someone at the nearby Indian reservation took their vows, married then "In God's eyes, but not the law's") . To be re-married by approved clergy, they had to go to a different place.
That was the beginning of their marriage. The end took them to Alta, a tiny Protestant place, barely inside Indiana, almost in Illinois, well south of Chicago. The lived above Knox County, above where their Wabash River fed its waters into the Ohio, the wide Ohio separating north from south.
Alta's best business connection to the outside, after trains replaced most river boats on the Wabash and Ohio, consisted of two railroads crossing a bit to the west. The junction lay about where the nearby tiny towns of Bono and Toronto merged, thre two a bit closer to the Illinois line than was Alta.
Her death was noted in Kossuth County, Iowa, newspapers, then re-reported by the WPA survey that followed in the next decade's Depression years, as on Mar. 5, 1926. The WPA writer of the 1930s listed her as "wife of W.O." (a mis-reading of W.D, as her spouse was William Dolan Sherrard). The writer noticed her place of burial was uncertain.
There is little to be found now, about her SD life, other than scattered remarks about the place called Coal Springs. Geologists determined that the mines there, now closed, tapped into coal that was "uranium-enriched". How many took sick from radiation exposure? Did "Coal Springs" mean their drinking water was contaminated?
Her rancher-farmer spouse's first wife, a May/Mary "Hanan" or "Hanen", also came from Iowa, after she and "W.D." married in Webster City (Hamilton County) in Jan., 1901, where his father had last moved their family. She apparently died in Perkins County SD or in Iowa, not certain which, as no paper record or gravestone has clearly been found. However, her death date can be inferred as sometime before the 1910 Census in Perkins County.
Long-lived, spouse William would have a third wife in the decades after Anna died. None of the three Mrs. Sherrards apparently had children that lived to maintain the womens' graves.
Modern minds would wonder about this-- did the contaminated coal back in SD have anything to do with the first two women's deaths? the child's? Note that Anna B.'s father, John Arndorfer, and her uncle, Michael Arndorfer, also had died young, without ever moving to Barrett Twp. Instead of radiation, some health issue ran in the family?
However, if the local coal, easily found, maybe even picked up off the ground, no need to pay for it, was burned in the old-time kitchen stove, where a woman spent so much of her day, a husband busy outdoors might not inhale much, but the woman would? When did anyone admit that Madame Curie's experiments with radiation gave her aplastic anemia? Not in Mary Sherrard's and Anna B.'s lifetime?
Anna Barbara, not yet age 40, died "too young". She did have adventure in her life, however.. We've noted she was of record up in Canada, where she and her spouse were listed with an employer. The time was said to be one in which threshing crews took their machines elsewhere, after the harvest season locally had passed. Were they part of that?
Little is said of her Indiana life. A Sherrad family tree archived at FamilySearch.org gave her a remote death place, naming it as Alta, Indiana. There is an Alta in Vermillion County's Helt Township, according to Wiki geographers. Why would they go there? We know her spouse was a William D. Sherrard. When censused in SD with Anna B., he believed he was born in 1873, which is consistent with other things. He also believed he was born in Virginia, like his father, but that is not consistent with other things. Was Virginia perhaps a place he remembered visiting as a child? He was never told by his mother, where he was "really" born?
Other sources, say his father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had taken the growing Sherrard family to Cass County, Indiana, by the time of William's birth, so Indiana is the birth place cited for him in Sharrard family trees. His family resided in Indiana for their 1880 US Censu.
It's maybe relevant to comment that Vermillion County, Indiana, was once busy shipping coal by rail. Consolidated Coal was maybe one of the county's bigger operators, said in an old directory to ship coal by rail to St. Louis, many decades ago. That company and others no longer ship coal out, producing more shrunken towns. Vermillion County's largest town today is under 5000 people.
An old history book of Vermillion County, Indiana written in the 1880s, when Wm. Sherrard was just a child, said Catholics and especially Lutherans were scarce there, not enough Germans, the French too distant in time. Many of the locals had come up from Virginia/West Virgina. (It was common for border southerners to cross the Ohio River, hoping to to find jobs and better land and schools northward, then going up the Wabash.)
Alta meant high in Spanish, above the disease-carrying mosquitoes that tended to infest marshy parts closer to the rivers. Like Palo Alto County in Iowa, it was named using words and phrases learned by veterans of the war with Mexico. That was in the 1840s, many of the veterans earning land bounties in lieu of salaries while soldiering. Their children could use the warrants once "out west", trading them in for land to homestead. More common, the aging soliers or their widows could sell the warrants to unrelated people who wanted to homestead. making the cash received much like a pension
The Vermillion County of her death fell barely inside Indiana, with a different "Vermilion" County nearby, in Illinois (catty-corner, to the northwest, to be spelled with just one L). Both were named for the Vermilion River. Their spellings differ, it's said, by ethnicity. Using two L's were the old-time French fur traders and missionaries founding, for instance, the very old town of Vincennes, in the next county south on the Wabash, that named Knox after the French left. The later arriving British to the Vermilion River, mainly Protestants, if coming pre-Irish famine, instead used just one L.
With no town in Vermillio County today larger than 5000, the county land around Alta stayed minimally agricultural. The land's growing dis-use caused much to become heavily wooded.
Were she and Mr.Sherrard there to work, as they had done in Canada?
The old county history said Alta and Hillsdale, a bit to its north, were, in effect, one town, combined population 200 Catholic churches were mentioned as sparse, served occasionally from outside or by lay people.
The uncertainty back in Kossuth County records over her burial place may have mirrored uncertainty over whether she had kept her parents' Catholic religion during all her travels. An Irish-sounding Dolan was the maiden name of William Dolan Sherrard's mother, so the problem may have been instead that no cemeteries in the place where she died were specifically Catholic. The question then turns into which of the "public" cemeteries would have taken her burial (public meaning Protestant in origin, but not restricted to just one denomination, justifying a subsidy for upkeep paid by town or county taxes) .
The two public candidates for cemeteries begin with Bono/Toronto, at the rail crossing just west of Alta. She could have been buried there temporarily, her spouse hoping his finances would later allow her body to be shipped out by rail, by rail back to her family's Iowa cemetery.
The second public candidate is Dinsmore, closer to Alta, but north of it. Multiple buried occupants were said to be from Virgina/W.Virginia, fitting the past of father-in-law Robert. A child surnamed Barnhart was buried there, no parents at its side. (The Barnhart name was one long in/near Barrett Twp., near Lemmon, SD, the latest Barnhart burials in the Schoolaas cemetery of Shady Hill, one of the few still viable cemeteries back in that deserted area ) In fact, the Dinsmore cemetery has mostly very old graves, as if the families had "up and left", fitting the past of in-law Robert Baker Sherrard as he moved out of Indiana, to buy land in Iowa, doing so agent-style.
---MORE DETAILS----
To be reduced later, moved elsewhere, after people have had a chance to see this.
EARLY LIFE. If her spouse took her to her last towns, her parents took her to her first Iowa town. It still exists, but barely, in NW Iowa, not far from the Minnesota state line
Anna Barbara and her two brothers were born in Wisc., but would reach their teens in the farming community and church town of St. Benedict. Its surrounds were mainly German, yet ethnically diverse, with multiple German dialects, and scatterings of Irish and Czechs and others . The little place has lost its lovely white church recently, its bank lost back in the 1930s, its little store and pool hall, at times in-between.
Once in Iowa, many relatives, some of them half-siblings, others double-cousins and normal cousins, would be born, were neighbors, making it harder to find someone unrelated to marry. Her mother and aunt, both Eisenbarths (Anna Maria and Rosa C.) would marry two brothers, both Arndorfers (John and the younger Joseph. This writer descends of a middle brother, the Michael Arndorfer who married Victore/Victoria/Dora Scheberle).
Anna Barbara's parents, John Arndorfer and Anna Maria Eisenbarth, married at Beaver Dam, Wisc., in 1882. We can assume these older siblings, having found a good match, did some matchmaking for the younger two. They all "went west", following other members of a Wisconsin "colony" that moved in steps, so not everyone moved at the same time.
Some presumably used trains, as the rail companies, one using Asa Call of Algona as their agent, had been given homestead land in Kossuth County as an incentive to build tracks there. That agent must have sold some to this group, as none of the Rahms and Arndorfers early to St. Benedict are seen as individuals in the federal land records for Kossuth. Skipping over Iowa's northeast (Decorah) and north central parts (Forest City and Clear Lake), to go to northwest Iowa, their group stopped just short of Mr. Call's town of Algona.
Her father died quickly once in Iowa, in 1890, after a mere eight years of marriage, with Anna Barbara still little, only four at the time. A marriage record, dated Nov. 23, 1892, then said "Anna Arndorfer", meaning her mother, took as her new spouse, "John Huschka", at "Bavaria" in Kossuth County. (Was Bavaria what St. Benedict's congregation called itself before deciding to go by their church's name?)
A person from Bavaria is a Bavarian, reminding us that the Arndorfers' ethnicity matched that of the neighboring Rahms. According to county and church histories, one of the Rahms had arrived first in Kossuth County and sent word back to Beaver Dam about finding a good place. Others then followed.
The Huschkas had a Bohemian surname. The two ethnic sets, Bavarian and Bohemian, were easily familiar with each other's existence when back in central Europe. Both ethnic names come out of the ancient root word Bo, in the sense of bovine, describing people in places with cows. The two ethnicities, when existing closest to each other, had been a mere boat ride apart, on the Danube River. Its flow went westish, leaving Bavaria in order to cut through the Bohemian Forest, ahead of its descent (through Hungary?) to the Black Sea. Mr. Huschka would describe himself and his parents later as German-born. The early Huschkas thus went in the opposite direction, easterly, upstream, following the Danube or a ridgetop trail above it, to go from Slavic-speaking territory to Germanic-speaking.
Anna Barbara's first US census, the 1900, was at age 14,. It left a "family snapshot" of the blended family, the Baviarian Arndorfers and the German-adapted Huschkas. There may also have been state censuses in 1895 and 1905, one person per interview card, that also caught Anna Barbara in Kossuth County. However, there were too many plain Annas, as the interviewers did not like writing full German names. Thus, Anna Barbara may not have been that Anna counted in 1895 or 1905.
The children her mother and Mr. Huschka added to St. Benedict were born between 1892 and 1900 were in the 1900 US Census. An image is archived online (dated June 6, 1900; check the semi-blurry section for the family's handwritten rows, other rows are neighbors, incluing past an future in-laws):
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-XXZB-WQ
Their interviewer wrote Prairie Township at the top, not "Bavaria", not St. Benedict's name. Maybe a little multi-ethnic church town was deemed too unimportant to politicians to count its voters specifically? never incorporated, so no elections for mayor? The hamlet's church is now gone. Its Austrian windows and some beautifully-turned, castle-like carpentry were saved (by being moved to St. Cecelia's in Algona?).
St. Benedict's church was at the hamlet's south end, as was the church's school. This writer's mother remembers riding her pony to school, where many Arndorfers long attended, all going to Mass every day, Protestant students there exempted from church attendance. The school in her era did one year more than the tinier one-room public schools scattered here and there nearby. The public ones went only through Grade 8, the Catholic, through Grade 9, to allow extra time for teaching religion and language and going into detail on other things.
There would have been no school bus at the time of Anna Barbara's 1900 Census, so she and her siblings would have skipped high school. Yet, they would be better educated than many of the same era if they had had Grade 9.
On June 6, 1900, the three elder children, with Anna "in the middle", were 16, 14, and 12 . Five little half-siblings, ages 5 to 1 that June, would be fun for the teens to chase and tickle and otherwise entertain, but would have been a lot of work for their mother, Anna Maria, unless Anna Barbara helped.
Their interviewer of 1900, Mr. Albert F. Bacon, might have been presented their German and Bohemian (Czech) names, but might have susbstituted British-like ones, "not as strange" to his eyes, telin ghimself he was translating. Another strong possibility, some Irish nuns or students among their school's German ones had already taught the children how to re-write their names as British ones? This would account for Catharinas turning into Kates, Bernards into Barnies. A third factor, if English was not their "neutral territory", then how else would her German-trained mother and a stepfather formerly Bohemian speak to each other?
Maybe for all the reasons above, by June 6, 1900, teen-aged Johan had turned into John Arndorfer; Anna Barbara and Frantz, into Anna and Frank Arndorfer For the tiny Huschkas. little Franceska/Frencesks became Frances, Anton turned into Tony, Rosalia, into Rose, Victora/Victory/Victoria into Dora, and Marie morphed into Mary Huschka. The ethnic names their parents had chosen at their baptisms, however, would still be the names used in church records and by grandparents.
Any grandmother who worked only inside the home would know, at best, only some pidgin English, so not enough English. We can imagine teens able to tell each other their secrets, right in front of a grandmother, avoiding a lecture merely by using English.
We assume Anna Barbara's mother had been raised to speak some Germanic dialect, probably Bavarian, but maybe did so poorly, being Wisconsin-born. Though clearly with a Bohemian/Slavic surname, her stepfather, again, considered himself and his parents of German birth. Huschka was actually a German re-spelling of a Slavic surname (the original something like Huška) . The Huschkas, before becoming German, would have called their Slavic language Boehmisch (pronounced Bay-mish). However, outsiders and strangers called it Czech, to the annoyance of this writer's ethnic grandmother, born in Vienna, Austria, to Bohemian parents, as she considered Czech to be a German word.
The Boehmisch language was put into writing for their Catholic churches by using a Latin alphabet, with some special marks added. The marks, for example, let š stand for what was almost an "sh" sound, but not quite, making Huška sound a lot like Huschka. The other ethnic group in the modern nation of the Czech Republic, located east of the Bohemians, was/is the Moravians. Their Catholic missionaries instead invented a new alphabet for them, called Cyrillic (similar to the alphabets used later by Greek or Russian speakers).
Anna, an English speaker, would soon be treated as a semi-adult, able to work and save money (for future homestead purchases?) after her last school year ended. Her old school's tuition arrangments had let them meet future in-laws, even Protestant ones, which Mr. Sherrard may have been. How would that have happened?
The white two-story clapboard school at St. Benedict was unique as to tuition. The labor of the nuns who taught in English and German was donated by those nuns, their convent and other needs covered by whatever families could afford to put into the collection basket each Sunday, then added to seasonally by goods that families donated from the garden and farm.
Local Protestants could also attend the Catholic school for free, not just the Catholics. The St. Benedict arrangement excused them from all religious instruction, however, not just daily Mass.
St. Benedict's Richtsmeier family (pronounced rich-my-er) came, not from Bavaria, at Germany's southeast end, on the way to Hungary, but from Lippe-Detmold, in northwestern Germany, on the way to Holland and Norway. The old-time princes/barons of Lippe-Detmold resolved the long-lived religious warring of the north (Lutheran vs. Catholic). Their solution was to subsidize exactly one church-run school per town, with those in charge of the school to be that town's majority religion. Those not of the majority religion would attend the school, but were excused from religious classes. Thus, Catholics were in Lutheran schools, and Lutherans were in Catholic schools, keeping costs down via just one school system per town, all students allowed to keep the faith of their parents.
Maybe that place's way of providing school for different faiths came to St. Benedict, with the Richtsmeiers? Was everyone becoming an in-law of just about everyone? A daughter of Barbara Richtsmeier Ludwig would marry a cousin of Anna Barbara Arndorfer Sherrard (that cousin was a son of her middle uncle, Michael Arndorfer. Michael was like her father John in "dying too young"?)
When the trains came through, they brought with them Irish laborers to lay the tracks, some of whom stayed. To the north or backside of the white clapboard church building lay the little hamlet. Its scattering of houses still exists, one of the Irish names being McCarthy. Gone are a creamery and a lumber yard, maybe connected to the Rahms, and the longer-lived poolhall/tavern. What the German-speakers called their "People's Bank", meaning to benefit the many, not the few, would be victimized by a robbery in the Great Depression. It then was closed. Its robber would repent and express remorse at a later date.
The hamlet's small store, remembered by this writer's mother, was willing to grind any coffee beans purchased there, so "smelled really good". It also carried European spices, such as rosemary and needed garden seeds, ones not offered at neighboring towns' British-serving stores. (Sausage-making was considered the men's job, not the women's, to be done by a father and his sons. Sadly, the men too often did not write down their best recipes? Was garden-grown basil required, and garlic, along with bay leaf, to make a truly delicious "blood sausage"? Were mustard seeds and black pepper required for other sausages? Lots of oatmeal was sometimes added with the spices, so 20 minutes cooking time was required, substituting that grain for ground fat making some of the recipes healthier than today's?)
Some British-descended had arrived earlier, pre-statehood. Ambrose and Asa Call, in particular, of future Algona, led many of the future arrivals to the area. For example, one Call had been present in St. Louis when the Mass. group called the Whitinsville colony (including this writer's Scotch-Irish side) came across the Mississippi, intending to settle in Missouri. They instead were convinced by Call to go to Algona, which would have required taking their ox teams and wagons up the east branch of the Missouri River to Algona, a route maybe taken by Daniel Boone when helping to survey the area for its future townships.
The Call's Algona beat out Irvington for the spot of county seat. Thanks also to the Calls, attracted a much desired rail depot and offered a newspaper. Algona survived best, as, in addition to a rail junction, it was also where busier roads crossed. It could offer larger stores, multiple doctors and lawyers, multiple churches, a public high school and later a Catholic high school, and more.
St. Benedict peaked before the 1950s, its surrounding population using Algona more and more for services and purchases in the decades after Anna's death, especially as the smaller rail town of Wesley to the east lost the ability to offer as much as before. Note that Wesley also shrunk, merely later than did St. Benedict.
Algona's Catholic hospital (St. Ann's, since renamed?) was open to all religions. Catholics made a special point of using it, back then, partly as the old-time nursing nuns were viewed as excellent. Algona's Catholic church still exists, called St. Cecelia's. Calvary was that church's cemetery, located on Hwy. 18 east of Algona, maybe halfway to the church of St. Benedict.
Hwy. 18 was a modern version of the old military road across northern Iowa that existed pre-statehood. The tiny rail town of Sexton lay on the south side of Hwy 18, on the St. Benedict side of Calvary. Sexton saw its itty-bitty Protestant church also closed and torn down.
Anna would, as a child, have wondered where Hwy. 18 went if followed west. The answer was, striaght to that end off South Dakota whose top row of counties marks where SD rise to meet North Dakota.. Hwy. 18 still connects Algona and Sexton and Wesley. A deserted piece of its old route used to take Hwy 18 traffic right by St. Benedict, bring in a few convenience shoppers and gasoline buyers. The newer route skipped it, causing worry by those who were forward-thinking that their beloved hamlet and church would die. Machines were replacing the young laborers, Irish, German, British and more in name, seen in past censuses, working for older established farmers that patronize the town. Farming, in that way, became less of a poverty-producer. The young would need educations so they could leave and go elsewhere with good credentials. That was given to them and they did leave, because they had to.
The scatter of houses that mark the remnant of Sexton included Gerrman Catholics farming, for example, the Studers descended of Augustus. They had gone to Canada first, before coming to Iowa.
Augustus Studer, like Asa Call, was some sort of land promoter, seen frequently in the federal land records of Kossuth County. It was not clear for which group he was the agent Robert B. Sherrard, her father-in-law, was similar, in the Kossuth land records a few times, more often seen in other Iowa counties
The Studers were originally from Alsace-Lorraine and probably Switzerland before that, they think. Opportunites opened below the Swiss mountains when the prior German-French population ied of a plague. Once of to Iowa, they and their in-laws brought with them women's names like the French-sounding Genevieve and the Italian-sounding Francesca. The Studers and their in-laws will be found scattered (on land the Calls did not want?), their burials not just at St. Benedict's and St. Cecilia's Catholic cemeteries, but in Wesley's St. Joseph.
The federal officials in Washington DC designing the old US censuses ignored whatever church was attended, but did care what post office was assigned. The 1910 census of Anna's mother and stepfather noted that their part of Prairie Township used the post office at Corwith, to the south. That town had a high school accessed by bus by the late 1940s, attended by this writer's mother, who rode the bus with her year-older Arndorfer cousin, the one who would marry an Oxley.
Other post offices would also be assigned, depending on a farm's location inside Prairie Twp. or next-door Irvington and Wesley. St. Benedict had its own short-lived post office, originally called Rahm by the trainmaster dropping off mail, presumably as the drop location had been one of the Rahm farms.
A MOVE TO SOUTH DAKOTA'S BLACK HILLS. They followe Hwy. 18 west, past West Bend, past Palo Alto County
Her and William Sherrard's 1910 US Census listed them as farming at Humphrey in Perkins Couty SD. Asked how long they had been married, they said 0 years, so were newlyweds.
She bought one parcel in Barrett Twp. in 1912, being careful to list both her maiden and married names, Arndorfer and Sherrard. That first parcel proving satisfactory, she bought the other in 1918, both times going through the land office at Lemmon, S.D.
DE-CODING LAND ESCRIPTIONS. Both parcels made up the bottom half of that square mile inside Barrett Twp called Section 1. That nunber was always given to the far NE corner of Thomas Jefferson-style townships, the perfect township being six miles by six miles, possible if nature kept rivers and lakes out of the way. The last township ir perfect being 36, always in the far SE corner. One of the 36 sections would be dedicated for school use, following Thomas Jefferson's system.
The township of Barrett was next-door to Burdick Twp., names mattering for township elections and taxation. However, the old federal land records listed only surveyors' numbers. There were 6x6 squares identified "checkerboard" style, "this many" hops north, "that many" hops east, from a starting point. ("021 N, 013 E" for Barrett. Making one of the two numbers change, moving the hops east from 13 to 14, gave the surveying id for the twp. next-door named Burdick . The two numbers given, were, thus, distances from two different reference lines, measured as "this many townships north" of a first line, then "that many townships east" of a second line, that second line required to crossed the first at a right angle. The main reference line for their Perkins County townships was the "Black Hills Meridian". From that meridian, Burdick was the 14th township going east and Barrett, the 13th. The meridian's Black Hils name tells us they were near some scenery called "the Badlands". These were strange, yet beautful, formations of rock and soil. (They were made mainly by a millenia of wind beating sand and dirt against rock. )
A NEW COLONY. A group of about 15 Irish-American households from northwestern Iowa put up a "colony" in Lemmon. Lemmon had the govt. office where she applied for and paid for her land. Perhaps she and her spouse heard about Perkins County from the Iowan colony?
A West Bend, Iowa, newspaper reported the colony's move to SD, nicknaming them as the "Palo Alto Colony". (Palo Alto County was just west of Kossuth, had been, for many or all going to Lemmon SD their prior homeplace while still in Iowa. Its county seat was called Emmetsburg. Like nearby Emmet County, Emmetsburg was named for Robert Emmet. From the Irish viewpoint, he was a young 25ish hero, an Irishman wrongly hung for challenging some misguided British royalists.)
Perkins was said to have an above average amount of sheep-raising. This fits, as her spouse, William D. Sherrard, reported the sheep business as his occupation in his 1910 US Census. (There had been some William Sherrards in SD pre-statehood. Tthe earliest one to buy homestead land would pick Day County, did so in the 1890s, had a son in Day County with a Mary Wickham, called Earl, who grew up in SD. That was a William H. Sherrard, not William D., so never seen with Anna B. )
Some went to the Black Hills to mine gold. Perkins County had its own possible resource to attract speculators, a sizeable lignite coal field. The deposits would prove to be dangerously laced with uranium. Whether the Sherralds speculated that way, whether the river running through their land was ever contaminated by lignite runoff, is not known. Whether anyone suffered from radiation sickness is not known. Historically, other people had long managed to live in the area as there was a reservation for Native Americans east of Burdick, their former tribal livelihood indicated by a town called Bison.
Anna B and her William would spend their last US Census together in Montana, renting, so perhaps hard times caused them to lose their SD land.
This next part is repetitious, to be cut.
HER PRIOR AND LATER LIFE Anna Barbara was ethnically German, many of her Arndorfers of the dark-haired Bavarian sort. The Arndorfer name is still found in the Danube River region of Bavaria, just south of the Bohemian portion of the Czech Republic, both very close to Hungary.
She and her spouse were always in remote areas. Her spouse had an unusual combination of siblings, most born in Indiana, one in Virginia. His parents were both born in Virginia, the unique thing that separated him when trying to separate his censuses from those of other William Sherrards.
Her husband was quite different ethnically. He was Irish, but the Irish and Germans would mix as well as did the Bohemians and Germans once in northwestern Iowa. Her spouse sometimes went by W. D., or William D., but was born as William Dolan Sherrard, having been given his mother's maiden name as a middle name. He would cite the sheep business as his occupation for his draft registration for WW I, while in SD,, when he named her as his person of contact in an emergency.
How to account for Irish being born in Virginia? They may have been Scotch-Irish or Anglo-Irish, not native Irish, Virginia was nearby if his Sherrards entered the US through the port in Baltimore, as port cities, not national policy, were the deciders on early immigration, pre-Ellis Island
This uniqueness, ethnically Irish parents born in Virginia, made him trackable by censuses when they moved. The years that censuses asked for his parents' birthplaces.(Virginia) were the easiest to find. He was apparently surprised the first time an interviewer asked for his own birthplace. Virginia "popped into his head", even though his parents said it was Indiana when he still lived with them. By the time the next census-taker asked, he had had a chance to check with relatives. Thereafter, he repeatedly named Indiana. (One record specifically said Logansport, Indiana. An Isaac Sherrard was found in an old Logansport directory, a carpenter, related in some way, not yet determined, to his father, the Robert Baker Sherrard who often went by "Baker Sherrard".
It seems Anna and William never had children? This made their many moves easier, no one to pull out of school, no one repeatedly faced with making new friends at a new school.
He would remarry after her death. It appears he did not have children by the three women he out-lived. His first wife was another Iowa woman who also left him a widower (May Hanon? was may a nickname for Mary, in common use then?). Their era being before childhood vaccinations and other modern medical care, did he suffer sterility from mumps? Or, were his wives May and Anna too sick, although young?
Their freedom to move eventually took them over international borders, not just state lines. Border-crossing records back into the States in 1924 say they originally left for Canada in 1913 (in April of that year, then had become Canadian nationals).
Anna Barbara and William D. Sherrard were thus found on both sides of the US-Canada border. (They spent 10-11 years in Canada, in the Regina, Alberts area. His family's pattern in the US was to move around inside the upper states, those that ran Midwest to Northwest, beginning with Indiana and then Iowa. He and Anna went to SD before leaving the States. They then crossed back into the States via Montana, mere months before what would have been a very ill Anna was taken back to his home state of Indiana, maybe looking for better hospitals or for family assistance with his ill wife.
Her death place and date are given in a family tree, the timing making sense. After Anna's death, he would be found, remarried, in the 1930 US Census, in Washington state, occupation poultry rancher, the timing meaning an inflated mortgage, with balloon payments destructive but common then, a burden hard to handle, in the coming Great Depression. We are not surprised that he had to move again, to die in mid-America, in Nebraska. Handwritten, his 1930 census record is online, viewing free, but login required. The image is archived at:
Familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9RCD-WN3.
Also present in 1930 was Ohio-born third wife Verda Mae. The state of Ohio was next-door to Indiana, with many Ohioans migrating westward into Indiana. He did not to go southward to Nebraska until nearer the end of his life. Dying in Phelps County, Nebraska, Keith was given as the specific death place. Not studied by this writer, was it maybe a hamlet or rural township remembered with unknown accuracy in a family tree? a different county? Several trees are viewable for him at FamilySearch.org, none as of 2018 listing more than one of his three spouses.
Again, he died at 80, almost thirty years after Anna, eventually too old to travel and check on her grave. Having outlived too many, he was the only Sherrard buried in his cemetery.
LAST NOTES. Her last Canada border crossing record, archived at FamilySearch.org, in October of 1924, was before the first snowfalls might be expected. They said they were coming back to the US, having left it in 1913. Whether headed back to relatives or to a new employer was not clear. Their destination was in the vicinity of Lewiston, Montana. Did no precise address being given indicate a sudden decision to move? Before receiving a full reply to whatever letters they suddenly sent south?
They were going by wagon, not train. A wagon let them carry more with them, presumably as they knew the move was permanent. Pending snowfalls forced their move before November, maybe not enough time to wait for reply letters and otherwise scout out the new location? Travel by wagon, not by an easier train, was maybe painful for her. Not being rich, they desperately needed to bring household goods and farming equipment and tools?
They had no children. There were no great-grandchildren to track them, only this writer and other ultra-nieces and ultra-nephews and ultra-cousins trying to "fill in the blanks", many decades after they died.
No children meant no one made sure her stone remained erect and easily found and read. The makers of family trees instead only had whatever remembrances were kept on scraps of paper, discovered decades too late, in some deceased ancestor's "box of things", removed from an "overflowing drawer", saved in some basement or attic.
They had first, names with parents and siblings and ethnicities. Their ethnicities typically loved big family feasts and parties. "The box" usually had dates of celebrations and gatherings, via jottings and news clippings.
Such different dates for their wedding imply a re-taking of vows.. Was a wedding celebration held in their honor, when returning to Iowa to visit family? April of 1911 was given by one source, not confirmed. That would have been before the spring plantings, after the winter birthing season for livestock. As such, April would be a "best guess" for either a re-marriage date or any trip back home.
There would be saved, postmarked envelopes with "thank yous". There would be the decorative church funeral cards with a prayer for the departed, funeral date and location beside the deceased's name. In places where cooler weather preserved bodies, the funerals were typically a few days later. The year of 1926 would be right for both death and funeral, given the return from Canada was late in 1924.
WARNING.-- UNCERTAIN BURIAL Put her in a virtual cemetery if it is important to always find this page.
Why the uncertainty about her burial? Being unincorporated, Alta was not an official address, often seen mis-spelled, even by other Indianans. Examples: "Alter" was seen, perhaps written by people who pronounced "car" as "cah", Boston-style, so guessed the ending vowel and then assumed an R was neeed at the very end.
"Alto" was also seen. Northwestern Iowans of the Irish sort knew about Iowa's heavily Irish Palo Alto County, just beyond of Kossuth, both north of Fort Dodge, on the way to Minnesota, both on tthe way west to SD. The original place of Palo Alto was a battleground, well-remembered by locals who served in or reported on the Mexican-American War. We can imagine their brains tricking them into writing down "Alto", whenever they should have written "Alta".
Finally, some of the unincorporated places in Helt Twp. have become extinct, but had a cemetery. That nearest to Alta was the hamlet or "four corners" called Toronto, which did have a cemetery, also called Bono. Had Bono's sister hamlet of Toronto been settled by Canadians? She could have been buried at their shared cemetery, her stone long hidden by a farmer's plow or weeds or town rubble, if not by the more usual tossed grave dirt. That would be even more true of Dinsmore, its cemetery photo at Findagrave showing two old wagon ruts leading into the woods.
And so on.
Church records might clear a lot up on her burial. Early ones have helped to clarify what happened to her siblings, but they stayed where records were good.
Cousins among these Germans often had matching first and middle names honoring the same grandparents. There was apparently another Anna Barbara Arndorfer, born a tad later, to different parents. How many of the records of the two Anna B's had been confused, by thinking they were the same person?
There were also spelling variations, the original Germanic, Italianized or Frenchish. with lovely sounds for women, but with not-as-sweet British variations. She had a half-sister called both Francesca and Frances. We are still exploring relatives called Michel/Michael. A list of her siblings has been aed (post-2018), with her parents' verified names. We have not verified her gravesite with news clippings, but are still looking for them.
"Ater" Cemetery seems unlikely, as it is the graveyard of the Ater family.
Was there a Catholic cemetery for her? Did they take her body back home, or was the Anna Barbara Arndorfer buried in Kossuth not her, birth year and other things different?
Research by JB, Findagrave member. She was lucky, had some wonderful college classes on group migrations, ethnicity, and religion, how to "read" a cemetery for the area's social history, how to look or events in history that pushed people in new geographic directions.
In progress.....
Her father's gravestone of 1890, back in Iowa, now broken and faded, still is marked with Geb and Gest, for born and died, so they still spoke German. She was the Anna Barbara born in 1886; her mother, the Anna Maria born in 1863. Both parts of their names, when used together, sounded pretty, like Mary Anna or Mary Therese. Yet, both Annas, having been born in Wisconsin, were "Britishized enough". They would see county clerks reduce their names to Anna only, whether they liked it or not, for legal records. The younger was allowed to use Anna B., if needed for clarity.
Some federal land records records online for Anna B. Arndorfer show something most unusual for a woman in her era. She filed for homestead rights, no husband signing next to her name on the documents.
A settlement called Coal Springs, in SD, was laid out in 1908, in Barrett Twp. of Perkins County, in or near the region sometimes called the Black Hills. Her name would then be seen in Barrett Twp. on two federal land records over the next decade She filed for adjacent pieces at the land office in Lemmon, in Perkins County, South Dakota, 160 acres each, the first in 1912, then again in 1918, when she would have been 26, then 28. Each time she gave her name two ways, as Anna B. Arndorfer and as Anna Sherrard.
Between Coal Springs' founding in 1908 and her first land buy in 1912, her 1910 US Census would be done in Perkins County, the place name used at the top saying the poll was of the voting precinct called Humphrey. That 1910 survey counted Anna and William Sherrard as farming, married just 0 years, so newly weds.
Both had previously left one surviving parent back in Iowa, his father, her mother. William's father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had died in Webster City, Iowa, in 1910, shortly before the 1910 census, after being left with one of William's married sisters living nearby. Anna had instead come to SD from St. Benedict, Iowa, her mother having remarried to Mr. Huschka.
Her mother would have encouraged her, being still single, to arrive in SD by going with a "double cousin" named Joe Jr. Anna's and Joe Jr's fathers had been brothers, their mothers, sisters. Arranging in avance to be near family support made life easier in a time of no EMS, a lesson surely appreciated by her parents when going from Wisconsin to Iowa. That double cousin, Joe Jr. Arndorfer, had married "Katie" Erdman/Erdmann, back home in St. Benedict, Iowa. Joe and Kate were then of record having the first 2 of their children in Moody County, SD, one born circa 1906. That was after the 1905 State Census was done back in Iowa. Anna B. may have been the young Anna Arndorfer counted back home in 1905 as still single, timing her arrival to coincide with the new baby's.
Their set all eventually left SD. Very few people remained, the Barnhart family, from elsewhere in Iowa, among them.
Why leave?
"Things happened". These included coal mine closings affecting Coal Springs' townpeople. Multiple years of bad weather in most counties would starve the rancher-farmers' livestock, after causing grass and wheat crops to fail.
The area de-populated. Coal Springs would become a ghost town with only a few houses. Not even its post office remained after the mid-1950s. While Lemmon still exists (as the county seat?), Barrett Twp's modern population was last said to be under 20 people (about 13?).
Joe and Katie would return to Iowa. Anna and William had clearly been in Perkins County for her land filing in 1918, yet, seemed to also go "to and fro" between Montana and Canada, beginning with a Prairie Census in Alberta, in 1916, saying they had emigrated to Canada in 1913. They declared an intent to become Canadian/British, that reason used by Wm. in 1918, by then in his 40s, to explain why he could no respond if called for WW I. By that time (1918), he understood he had been born in Indiana. The clerk gave his size and height as medium, his hair as black, his eyes as brown, occupation, sheep-raiser, Anna B. as his emergency contact. They would be counted in Montana for the US Census in 1920. They were later counted by border officials as returning, moving southward across the Canadian border, via Montana.
One of the Sherrard family trees at FamilySearch covers her and William D. (two of the contributors being Carl Watkins and S.M. Rouse). The tree says she died in Alta, Indiana, in 1926. That year matched Iowa records kept of her death date, but the tree said Mar. 6, maybe a funeral date, while her WPA record said Mar. 5, maybe the death date.
Interestingly, the tree says She and William married in McIntosh, Corson County, SD, on Oct. 11, 1911. That does not match their calling themselves married in their 1910 Census. It's possible they were married twice, first in an unapproved way (clergy not registered properly with the US government, for example, someone at the nearby Indian reservation took their vows, married then "In God's eyes, but not the law's") . To be re-married by approved clergy, they had to go to a different place.
That was the beginning of their marriage. The end took them to Alta, a tiny Protestant place, barely inside Indiana, almost in Illinois, well south of Chicago. The lived above Knox County, above where their Wabash River fed its waters into the Ohio, the wide Ohio separating north from south.
Alta's best business connection to the outside, after trains replaced most river boats on the Wabash and Ohio, consisted of two railroads crossing a bit to the west. The junction lay about where the nearby tiny towns of Bono and Toronto merged, thre two a bit closer to the Illinois line than was Alta.
Her death was noted in Kossuth County, Iowa, newspapers, then re-reported by the WPA survey that followed in the next decade's Depression years, as on Mar. 5, 1926. The WPA writer of the 1930s listed her as "wife of W.O." (a mis-reading of W.D, as her spouse was William Dolan Sherrard). The writer noticed her place of burial was uncertain.
There is little to be found now, about her SD life, other than scattered remarks about the place called Coal Springs. Geologists determined that the mines there, now closed, tapped into coal that was "uranium-enriched". How many took sick from radiation exposure? Did "Coal Springs" mean their drinking water was contaminated?
Her rancher-farmer spouse's first wife, a May/Mary "Hanan" or "Hanen", also came from Iowa, after she and "W.D." married in Webster City (Hamilton County) in Jan., 1901, where his father had last moved their family. She apparently died in Perkins County SD or in Iowa, not certain which, as no paper record or gravestone has clearly been found. However, her death date can be inferred as sometime before the 1910 Census in Perkins County.
Long-lived, spouse William would have a third wife in the decades after Anna died. None of the three Mrs. Sherrards apparently had children that lived to maintain the womens' graves.
Modern minds would wonder about this-- did the contaminated coal back in SD have anything to do with the first two women's deaths? the child's? Note that Anna B.'s father, John Arndorfer, and her uncle, Michael Arndorfer, also had died young, without ever moving to Barrett Twp. Instead of radiation, some health issue ran in the family?
However, if the local coal, easily found, maybe even picked up off the ground, no need to pay for it, was burned in the old-time kitchen stove, where a woman spent so much of her day, a husband busy outdoors might not inhale much, but the woman would? When did anyone admit that Madame Curie's experiments with radiation gave her aplastic anemia? Not in Mary Sherrard's and Anna B.'s lifetime?
Anna Barbara, not yet age 40, died "too young". She did have adventure in her life, however.. We've noted she was of record up in Canada, where she and her spouse were listed with an employer. The time was said to be one in which threshing crews took their machines elsewhere, after the harvest season locally had passed. Were they part of that?
Little is said of her Indiana life. A Sherrad family tree archived at FamilySearch.org gave her a remote death place, naming it as Alta, Indiana. There is an Alta in Vermillion County's Helt Township, according to Wiki geographers. Why would they go there? We know her spouse was a William D. Sherrard. When censused in SD with Anna B., he believed he was born in 1873, which is consistent with other things. He also believed he was born in Virginia, like his father, but that is not consistent with other things. Was Virginia perhaps a place he remembered visiting as a child? He was never told by his mother, where he was "really" born?
Other sources, say his father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had taken the growing Sherrard family to Cass County, Indiana, by the time of William's birth, so Indiana is the birth place cited for him in Sharrard family trees. His family resided in Indiana for their 1880 US Censu.
It's maybe relevant to comment that Vermillion County, Indiana, was once busy shipping coal by rail. Consolidated Coal was maybe one of the county's bigger operators, said in an old directory to ship coal by rail to St. Louis, many decades ago. That company and others no longer ship coal out, producing more shrunken towns. Vermillion County's largest town today is under 5000 people.
An old history book of Vermillion County, Indiana written in the 1880s, when Wm. Sherrard was just a child, said Catholics and especially Lutherans were scarce there, not enough Germans, the French too distant in time. Many of the locals had come up from Virginia/West Virgina. (It was common for border southerners to cross the Ohio River, hoping to to find jobs and better land and schools northward, then going up the Wabash.)
Alta meant high in Spanish, above the disease-carrying mosquitoes that tended to infest marshy parts closer to the rivers. Like Palo Alto County in Iowa, it was named using words and phrases learned by veterans of the war with Mexico. That was in the 1840s, many of the veterans earning land bounties in lieu of salaries while soldiering. Their children could use the warrants once "out west", trading them in for land to homestead. More common, the aging soliers or their widows could sell the warrants to unrelated people who wanted to homestead. making the cash received much like a pension
The Vermillion County of her death fell barely inside Indiana, with a different "Vermilion" County nearby, in Illinois (catty-corner, to the northwest, to be spelled with just one L). Both were named for the Vermilion River. Their spellings differ, it's said, by ethnicity. Using two L's were the old-time French fur traders and missionaries founding, for instance, the very old town of Vincennes, in the next county south on the Wabash, that named Knox after the French left. The later arriving British to the Vermilion River, mainly Protestants, if coming pre-Irish famine, instead used just one L.
With no town in Vermillio County today larger than 5000, the county land around Alta stayed minimally agricultural. The land's growing dis-use caused much to become heavily wooded.
Were she and Mr.Sherrard there to work, as they had done in Canada?
The old county history said Alta and Hillsdale, a bit to its north, were, in effect, one town, combined population 200 Catholic churches were mentioned as sparse, served occasionally from outside or by lay people.
The uncertainty back in Kossuth County records over her burial place may have mirrored uncertainty over whether she had kept her parents' Catholic religion during all her travels. An Irish-sounding Dolan was the maiden name of William Dolan Sherrard's mother, so the problem may have been instead that no cemeteries in the place where she died were specifically Catholic. The question then turns into which of the "public" cemeteries would have taken her burial (public meaning Protestant in origin, but not restricted to just one denomination, justifying a subsidy for upkeep paid by town or county taxes) .
The two public candidates for cemeteries begin with Bono/Toronto, at the rail crossing just west of Alta. She could have been buried there temporarily, her spouse hoping his finances would later allow her body to be shipped out by rail, by rail back to her family's Iowa cemetery.
The second public candidate is Dinsmore, closer to Alta, but north of it. Multiple buried occupants were said to be from Virgina/W.Virginia, fitting the past of father-in-law Robert. A child surnamed Barnhart was buried there, no parents at its side. (The Barnhart name was one long in/near Barrett Twp., near Lemmon, SD, the latest Barnhart burials in the Schoolaas cemetery of Shady Hill, one of the few still viable cemeteries back in that deserted area ) In fact, the Dinsmore cemetery has mostly very old graves, as if the families had "up and left", fitting the past of in-law Robert Baker Sherrard as he moved out of Indiana, to buy land in Iowa, doing so agent-style.
---MORE DETAILS----
To be reduced later, moved elsewhere, after people have had a chance to see this.
EARLY LIFE. If her spouse took her to her last towns, her parents took her to her first Iowa town. It still exists, but barely, in NW Iowa, not far from the Minnesota state line
Anna Barbara and her two brothers were born in Wisc., but would reach their teens in the farming community and church town of St. Benedict. Its surrounds were mainly German, yet ethnically diverse, with multiple German dialects, and scatterings of Irish and Czechs and others . The little place has lost its lovely white church recently, its bank lost back in the 1930s, its little store and pool hall, at times in-between.
Once in Iowa, many relatives, some of them half-siblings, others double-cousins and normal cousins, would be born, were neighbors, making it harder to find someone unrelated to marry. Her mother and aunt, both Eisenbarths (Anna Maria and Rosa C.) would marry two brothers, both Arndorfers (John and the younger Joseph. This writer descends of a middle brother, the Michael Arndorfer who married Victore/Victoria/Dora Scheberle).
Anna Barbara's parents, John Arndorfer and Anna Maria Eisenbarth, married at Beaver Dam, Wisc., in 1882. We can assume these older siblings, having found a good match, did some matchmaking for the younger two. They all "went west", following other members of a Wisconsin "colony" that moved in steps, so not everyone moved at the same time.
Some presumably used trains, as the rail companies, one using Asa Call of Algona as their agent, had been given homestead land in Kossuth County as an incentive to build tracks there. That agent must have sold some to this group, as none of the Rahms and Arndorfers early to St. Benedict are seen as individuals in the federal land records for Kossuth. Skipping over Iowa's northeast (Decorah) and north central parts (Forest City and Clear Lake), to go to northwest Iowa, their group stopped just short of Mr. Call's town of Algona.
Her father died quickly once in Iowa, in 1890, after a mere eight years of marriage, with Anna Barbara still little, only four at the time. A marriage record, dated Nov. 23, 1892, then said "Anna Arndorfer", meaning her mother, took as her new spouse, "John Huschka", at "Bavaria" in Kossuth County. (Was Bavaria what St. Benedict's congregation called itself before deciding to go by their church's name?)
A person from Bavaria is a Bavarian, reminding us that the Arndorfers' ethnicity matched that of the neighboring Rahms. According to county and church histories, one of the Rahms had arrived first in Kossuth County and sent word back to Beaver Dam about finding a good place. Others then followed.
The Huschkas had a Bohemian surname. The two ethnic sets, Bavarian and Bohemian, were easily familiar with each other's existence when back in central Europe. Both ethnic names come out of the ancient root word Bo, in the sense of bovine, describing people in places with cows. The two ethnicities, when existing closest to each other, had been a mere boat ride apart, on the Danube River. Its flow went westish, leaving Bavaria in order to cut through the Bohemian Forest, ahead of its descent (through Hungary?) to the Black Sea. Mr. Huschka would describe himself and his parents later as German-born. The early Huschkas thus went in the opposite direction, easterly, upstream, following the Danube or a ridgetop trail above it, to go from Slavic-speaking territory to Germanic-speaking.
Anna Barbara's first US census, the 1900, was at age 14,. It left a "family snapshot" of the blended family, the Baviarian Arndorfers and the German-adapted Huschkas. There may also have been state censuses in 1895 and 1905, one person per interview card, that also caught Anna Barbara in Kossuth County. However, there were too many plain Annas, as the interviewers did not like writing full German names. Thus, Anna Barbara may not have been that Anna counted in 1895 or 1905.
The children her mother and Mr. Huschka added to St. Benedict were born between 1892 and 1900 were in the 1900 US Census. An image is archived online (dated June 6, 1900; check the semi-blurry section for the family's handwritten rows, other rows are neighbors, incluing past an future in-laws):
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-XXZB-WQ
Their interviewer wrote Prairie Township at the top, not "Bavaria", not St. Benedict's name. Maybe a little multi-ethnic church town was deemed too unimportant to politicians to count its voters specifically? never incorporated, so no elections for mayor? The hamlet's church is now gone. Its Austrian windows and some beautifully-turned, castle-like carpentry were saved (by being moved to St. Cecelia's in Algona?).
St. Benedict's church was at the hamlet's south end, as was the church's school. This writer's mother remembers riding her pony to school, where many Arndorfers long attended, all going to Mass every day, Protestant students there exempted from church attendance. The school in her era did one year more than the tinier one-room public schools scattered here and there nearby. The public ones went only through Grade 8, the Catholic, through Grade 9, to allow extra time for teaching religion and language and going into detail on other things.
There would have been no school bus at the time of Anna Barbara's 1900 Census, so she and her siblings would have skipped high school. Yet, they would be better educated than many of the same era if they had had Grade 9.
On June 6, 1900, the three elder children, with Anna "in the middle", were 16, 14, and 12 . Five little half-siblings, ages 5 to 1 that June, would be fun for the teens to chase and tickle and otherwise entertain, but would have been a lot of work for their mother, Anna Maria, unless Anna Barbara helped.
Their interviewer of 1900, Mr. Albert F. Bacon, might have been presented their German and Bohemian (Czech) names, but might have susbstituted British-like ones, "not as strange" to his eyes, telin ghimself he was translating. Another strong possibility, some Irish nuns or students among their school's German ones had already taught the children how to re-write their names as British ones? This would account for Catharinas turning into Kates, Bernards into Barnies. A third factor, if English was not their "neutral territory", then how else would her German-trained mother and a stepfather formerly Bohemian speak to each other?
Maybe for all the reasons above, by June 6, 1900, teen-aged Johan had turned into John Arndorfer; Anna Barbara and Frantz, into Anna and Frank Arndorfer For the tiny Huschkas. little Franceska/Frencesks became Frances, Anton turned into Tony, Rosalia, into Rose, Victora/Victory/Victoria into Dora, and Marie morphed into Mary Huschka. The ethnic names their parents had chosen at their baptisms, however, would still be the names used in church records and by grandparents.
Any grandmother who worked only inside the home would know, at best, only some pidgin English, so not enough English. We can imagine teens able to tell each other their secrets, right in front of a grandmother, avoiding a lecture merely by using English.
We assume Anna Barbara's mother had been raised to speak some Germanic dialect, probably Bavarian, but maybe did so poorly, being Wisconsin-born. Though clearly with a Bohemian/Slavic surname, her stepfather, again, considered himself and his parents of German birth. Huschka was actually a German re-spelling of a Slavic surname (the original something like Huška) . The Huschkas, before becoming German, would have called their Slavic language Boehmisch (pronounced Bay-mish). However, outsiders and strangers called it Czech, to the annoyance of this writer's ethnic grandmother, born in Vienna, Austria, to Bohemian parents, as she considered Czech to be a German word.
The Boehmisch language was put into writing for their Catholic churches by using a Latin alphabet, with some special marks added. The marks, for example, let š stand for what was almost an "sh" sound, but not quite, making Huška sound a lot like Huschka. The other ethnic group in the modern nation of the Czech Republic, located east of the Bohemians, was/is the Moravians. Their Catholic missionaries instead invented a new alphabet for them, called Cyrillic (similar to the alphabets used later by Greek or Russian speakers).
Anna, an English speaker, would soon be treated as a semi-adult, able to work and save money (for future homestead purchases?) after her last school year ended. Her old school's tuition arrangments had let them meet future in-laws, even Protestant ones, which Mr. Sherrard may have been. How would that have happened?
The white two-story clapboard school at St. Benedict was unique as to tuition. The labor of the nuns who taught in English and German was donated by those nuns, their convent and other needs covered by whatever families could afford to put into the collection basket each Sunday, then added to seasonally by goods that families donated from the garden and farm.
Local Protestants could also attend the Catholic school for free, not just the Catholics. The St. Benedict arrangement excused them from all religious instruction, however, not just daily Mass.
St. Benedict's Richtsmeier family (pronounced rich-my-er) came, not from Bavaria, at Germany's southeast end, on the way to Hungary, but from Lippe-Detmold, in northwestern Germany, on the way to Holland and Norway. The old-time princes/barons of Lippe-Detmold resolved the long-lived religious warring of the north (Lutheran vs. Catholic). Their solution was to subsidize exactly one church-run school per town, with those in charge of the school to be that town's majority religion. Those not of the majority religion would attend the school, but were excused from religious classes. Thus, Catholics were in Lutheran schools, and Lutherans were in Catholic schools, keeping costs down via just one school system per town, all students allowed to keep the faith of their parents.
Maybe that place's way of providing school for different faiths came to St. Benedict, with the Richtsmeiers? Was everyone becoming an in-law of just about everyone? A daughter of Barbara Richtsmeier Ludwig would marry a cousin of Anna Barbara Arndorfer Sherrard (that cousin was a son of her middle uncle, Michael Arndorfer. Michael was like her father John in "dying too young"?)
When the trains came through, they brought with them Irish laborers to lay the tracks, some of whom stayed. To the north or backside of the white clapboard church building lay the little hamlet. Its scattering of houses still exists, one of the Irish names being McCarthy. Gone are a creamery and a lumber yard, maybe connected to the Rahms, and the longer-lived poolhall/tavern. What the German-speakers called their "People's Bank", meaning to benefit the many, not the few, would be victimized by a robbery in the Great Depression. It then was closed. Its robber would repent and express remorse at a later date.
The hamlet's small store, remembered by this writer's mother, was willing to grind any coffee beans purchased there, so "smelled really good". It also carried European spices, such as rosemary and needed garden seeds, ones not offered at neighboring towns' British-serving stores. (Sausage-making was considered the men's job, not the women's, to be done by a father and his sons. Sadly, the men too often did not write down their best recipes? Was garden-grown basil required, and garlic, along with bay leaf, to make a truly delicious "blood sausage"? Were mustard seeds and black pepper required for other sausages? Lots of oatmeal was sometimes added with the spices, so 20 minutes cooking time was required, substituting that grain for ground fat making some of the recipes healthier than today's?)
Some British-descended had arrived earlier, pre-statehood. Ambrose and Asa Call, in particular, of future Algona, led many of the future arrivals to the area. For example, one Call had been present in St. Louis when the Mass. group called the Whitinsville colony (including this writer's Scotch-Irish side) came across the Mississippi, intending to settle in Missouri. They instead were convinced by Call to go to Algona, which would have required taking their ox teams and wagons up the east branch of the Missouri River to Algona, a route maybe taken by Daniel Boone when helping to survey the area for its future townships.
The Call's Algona beat out Irvington for the spot of county seat. Thanks also to the Calls, attracted a much desired rail depot and offered a newspaper. Algona survived best, as, in addition to a rail junction, it was also where busier roads crossed. It could offer larger stores, multiple doctors and lawyers, multiple churches, a public high school and later a Catholic high school, and more.
St. Benedict peaked before the 1950s, its surrounding population using Algona more and more for services and purchases in the decades after Anna's death, especially as the smaller rail town of Wesley to the east lost the ability to offer as much as before. Note that Wesley also shrunk, merely later than did St. Benedict.
Algona's Catholic hospital (St. Ann's, since renamed?) was open to all religions. Catholics made a special point of using it, back then, partly as the old-time nursing nuns were viewed as excellent. Algona's Catholic church still exists, called St. Cecelia's. Calvary was that church's cemetery, located on Hwy. 18 east of Algona, maybe halfway to the church of St. Benedict.
Hwy. 18 was a modern version of the old military road across northern Iowa that existed pre-statehood. The tiny rail town of Sexton lay on the south side of Hwy 18, on the St. Benedict side of Calvary. Sexton saw its itty-bitty Protestant church also closed and torn down.
Anna would, as a child, have wondered where Hwy. 18 went if followed west. The answer was, striaght to that end off South Dakota whose top row of counties marks where SD rise to meet North Dakota.. Hwy. 18 still connects Algona and Sexton and Wesley. A deserted piece of its old route used to take Hwy 18 traffic right by St. Benedict, bring in a few convenience shoppers and gasoline buyers. The newer route skipped it, causing worry by those who were forward-thinking that their beloved hamlet and church would die. Machines were replacing the young laborers, Irish, German, British and more in name, seen in past censuses, working for older established farmers that patronize the town. Farming, in that way, became less of a poverty-producer. The young would need educations so they could leave and go elsewhere with good credentials. That was given to them and they did leave, because they had to.
The scatter of houses that mark the remnant of Sexton included Gerrman Catholics farming, for example, the Studers descended of Augustus. They had gone to Canada first, before coming to Iowa.
Augustus Studer, like Asa Call, was some sort of land promoter, seen frequently in the federal land records of Kossuth County. It was not clear for which group he was the agent Robert B. Sherrard, her father-in-law, was similar, in the Kossuth land records a few times, more often seen in other Iowa counties
The Studers were originally from Alsace-Lorraine and probably Switzerland before that, they think. Opportunites opened below the Swiss mountains when the prior German-French population ied of a plague. Once of to Iowa, they and their in-laws brought with them women's names like the French-sounding Genevieve and the Italian-sounding Francesca. The Studers and their in-laws will be found scattered (on land the Calls did not want?), their burials not just at St. Benedict's and St. Cecilia's Catholic cemeteries, but in Wesley's St. Joseph.
The federal officials in Washington DC designing the old US censuses ignored whatever church was attended, but did care what post office was assigned. The 1910 census of Anna's mother and stepfather noted that their part of Prairie Township used the post office at Corwith, to the south. That town had a high school accessed by bus by the late 1940s, attended by this writer's mother, who rode the bus with her year-older Arndorfer cousin, the one who would marry an Oxley.
Other post offices would also be assigned, depending on a farm's location inside Prairie Twp. or next-door Irvington and Wesley. St. Benedict had its own short-lived post office, originally called Rahm by the trainmaster dropping off mail, presumably as the drop location had been one of the Rahm farms.
A MOVE TO SOUTH DAKOTA'S BLACK HILLS. They followe Hwy. 18 west, past West Bend, past Palo Alto County
Her and William Sherrard's 1910 US Census listed them as farming at Humphrey in Perkins Couty SD. Asked how long they had been married, they said 0 years, so were newlyweds.
She bought one parcel in Barrett Twp. in 1912, being careful to list both her maiden and married names, Arndorfer and Sherrard. That first parcel proving satisfactory, she bought the other in 1918, both times going through the land office at Lemmon, S.D.
DE-CODING LAND ESCRIPTIONS. Both parcels made up the bottom half of that square mile inside Barrett Twp called Section 1. That nunber was always given to the far NE corner of Thomas Jefferson-style townships, the perfect township being six miles by six miles, possible if nature kept rivers and lakes out of the way. The last township ir perfect being 36, always in the far SE corner. One of the 36 sections would be dedicated for school use, following Thomas Jefferson's system.
The township of Barrett was next-door to Burdick Twp., names mattering for township elections and taxation. However, the old federal land records listed only surveyors' numbers. There were 6x6 squares identified "checkerboard" style, "this many" hops north, "that many" hops east, from a starting point. ("021 N, 013 E" for Barrett. Making one of the two numbers change, moving the hops east from 13 to 14, gave the surveying id for the twp. next-door named Burdick . The two numbers given, were, thus, distances from two different reference lines, measured as "this many townships north" of a first line, then "that many townships east" of a second line, that second line required to crossed the first at a right angle. The main reference line for their Perkins County townships was the "Black Hills Meridian". From that meridian, Burdick was the 14th township going east and Barrett, the 13th. The meridian's Black Hils name tells us they were near some scenery called "the Badlands". These were strange, yet beautful, formations of rock and soil. (They were made mainly by a millenia of wind beating sand and dirt against rock. )
A NEW COLONY. A group of about 15 Irish-American households from northwestern Iowa put up a "colony" in Lemmon. Lemmon had the govt. office where she applied for and paid for her land. Perhaps she and her spouse heard about Perkins County from the Iowan colony?
A West Bend, Iowa, newspaper reported the colony's move to SD, nicknaming them as the "Palo Alto Colony". (Palo Alto County was just west of Kossuth, had been, for many or all going to Lemmon SD their prior homeplace while still in Iowa. Its county seat was called Emmetsburg. Like nearby Emmet County, Emmetsburg was named for Robert Emmet. From the Irish viewpoint, he was a young 25ish hero, an Irishman wrongly hung for challenging some misguided British royalists.)
Perkins was said to have an above average amount of sheep-raising. This fits, as her spouse, William D. Sherrard, reported the sheep business as his occupation in his 1910 US Census. (There had been some William Sherrards in SD pre-statehood. Tthe earliest one to buy homestead land would pick Day County, did so in the 1890s, had a son in Day County with a Mary Wickham, called Earl, who grew up in SD. That was a William H. Sherrard, not William D., so never seen with Anna B. )
Some went to the Black Hills to mine gold. Perkins County had its own possible resource to attract speculators, a sizeable lignite coal field. The deposits would prove to be dangerously laced with uranium. Whether the Sherralds speculated that way, whether the river running through their land was ever contaminated by lignite runoff, is not known. Whether anyone suffered from radiation sickness is not known. Historically, other people had long managed to live in the area as there was a reservation for Native Americans east of Burdick, their former tribal livelihood indicated by a town called Bison.
Anna B and her William would spend their last US Census together in Montana, renting, so perhaps hard times caused them to lose their SD land.
This next part is repetitious, to be cut.
HER PRIOR AND LATER LIFE Anna Barbara was ethnically German, many of her Arndorfers of the dark-haired Bavarian sort. The Arndorfer name is still found in the Danube River region of Bavaria, just south of the Bohemian portion of the Czech Republic, both very close to Hungary.
She and her spouse were always in remote areas. Her spouse had an unusual combination of siblings, most born in Indiana, one in Virginia. His parents were both born in Virginia, the unique thing that separated him when trying to separate his censuses from those of other William Sherrards.
Her husband was quite different ethnically. He was Irish, but the Irish and Germans would mix as well as did the Bohemians and Germans once in northwestern Iowa. Her spouse sometimes went by W. D., or William D., but was born as William Dolan Sherrard, having been given his mother's maiden name as a middle name. He would cite the sheep business as his occupation for his draft registration for WW I, while in SD,, when he named her as his person of contact in an emergency.
How to account for Irish being born in Virginia? They may have been Scotch-Irish or Anglo-Irish, not native Irish, Virginia was nearby if his Sherrards entered the US through the port in Baltimore, as port cities, not national policy, were the deciders on early immigration, pre-Ellis Island
This uniqueness, ethnically Irish parents born in Virginia, made him trackable by censuses when they moved. The years that censuses asked for his parents' birthplaces.(Virginia) were the easiest to find. He was apparently surprised the first time an interviewer asked for his own birthplace. Virginia "popped into his head", even though his parents said it was Indiana when he still lived with them. By the time the next census-taker asked, he had had a chance to check with relatives. Thereafter, he repeatedly named Indiana. (One record specifically said Logansport, Indiana. An Isaac Sherrard was found in an old Logansport directory, a carpenter, related in some way, not yet determined, to his father, the Robert Baker Sherrard who often went by "Baker Sherrard".
It seems Anna and William never had children? This made their many moves easier, no one to pull out of school, no one repeatedly faced with making new friends at a new school.
He would remarry after her death. It appears he did not have children by the three women he out-lived. His first wife was another Iowa woman who also left him a widower (May Hanon? was may a nickname for Mary, in common use then?). Their era being before childhood vaccinations and other modern medical care, did he suffer sterility from mumps? Or, were his wives May and Anna too sick, although young?
Their freedom to move eventually took them over international borders, not just state lines. Border-crossing records back into the States in 1924 say they originally left for Canada in 1913 (in April of that year, then had become Canadian nationals).
Anna Barbara and William D. Sherrard were thus found on both sides of the US-Canada border. (They spent 10-11 years in Canada, in the Regina, Alberts area. His family's pattern in the US was to move around inside the upper states, those that ran Midwest to Northwest, beginning with Indiana and then Iowa. He and Anna went to SD before leaving the States. They then crossed back into the States via Montana, mere months before what would have been a very ill Anna was taken back to his home state of Indiana, maybe looking for better hospitals or for family assistance with his ill wife.
Her death place and date are given in a family tree, the timing making sense. After Anna's death, he would be found, remarried, in the 1930 US Census, in Washington state, occupation poultry rancher, the timing meaning an inflated mortgage, with balloon payments destructive but common then, a burden hard to handle, in the coming Great Depression. We are not surprised that he had to move again, to die in mid-America, in Nebraska. Handwritten, his 1930 census record is online, viewing free, but login required. The image is archived at:
Familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9RCD-WN3.
Also present in 1930 was Ohio-born third wife Verda Mae. The state of Ohio was next-door to Indiana, with many Ohioans migrating westward into Indiana. He did not to go southward to Nebraska until nearer the end of his life. Dying in Phelps County, Nebraska, Keith was given as the specific death place. Not studied by this writer, was it maybe a hamlet or rural township remembered with unknown accuracy in a family tree? a different county? Several trees are viewable for him at FamilySearch.org, none as of 2018 listing more than one of his three spouses.
Again, he died at 80, almost thirty years after Anna, eventually too old to travel and check on her grave. Having outlived too many, he was the only Sherrard buried in his cemetery.
LAST NOTES. Her last Canada border crossing record, archived at FamilySearch.org, in October of 1924, was before the first snowfalls might be expected. They said they were coming back to the US, having left it in 1913. Whether headed back to relatives or to a new employer was not clear. Their destination was in the vicinity of Lewiston, Montana. Did no precise address being given indicate a sudden decision to move? Before receiving a full reply to whatever letters they suddenly sent south?
They were going by wagon, not train. A wagon let them carry more with them, presumably as they knew the move was permanent. Pending snowfalls forced their move before November, maybe not enough time to wait for reply letters and otherwise scout out the new location? Travel by wagon, not by an easier train, was maybe painful for her. Not being rich, they desperately needed to bring household goods and farming equipment and tools?
They had no children. There were no great-grandchildren to track them, only this writer and other ultra-nieces and ultra-nephews and ultra-cousins trying to "fill in the blanks", many decades after they died.
No children meant no one made sure her stone remained erect and easily found and read. The makers of family trees instead only had whatever remembrances were kept on scraps of paper, discovered decades too late, in some deceased ancestor's "box of things", removed from an "overflowing drawer", saved in some basement or attic.
They had first, names with parents and siblings and ethnicities. Their ethnicities typically loved big family feasts and parties. "The box" usually had dates of celebrations and gatherings, via jottings and news clippings.
Such different dates for their wedding imply a re-taking of vows.. Was a wedding celebration held in their honor, when returning to Iowa to visit family? April of 1911 was given by one source, not confirmed. That would have been before the spring plantings, after the winter birthing season for livestock. As such, April would be a "best guess" for either a re-marriage date or any trip back home.
There would be saved, postmarked envelopes with "thank yous". There would be the decorative church funeral cards with a prayer for the departed, funeral date and location beside the deceased's name. In places where cooler weather preserved bodies, the funerals were typically a few days later. The year of 1926 would be right for both death and funeral, given the return from Canada was late in 1924.
WARNING.-- UNCERTAIN BURIAL Put her in a virtual cemetery if it is important to always find this page.
Why the uncertainty about her burial? Being unincorporated, Alta was not an official address, often seen mis-spelled, even by other Indianans. Examples: "Alter" was seen, perhaps written by people who pronounced "car" as "cah", Boston-style, so guessed the ending vowel and then assumed an R was neeed at the very end.
"Alto" was also seen. Northwestern Iowans of the Irish sort knew about Iowa's heavily Irish Palo Alto County, just beyond of Kossuth, both north of Fort Dodge, on the way to Minnesota, both on tthe way west to SD. The original place of Palo Alto was a battleground, well-remembered by locals who served in or reported on the Mexican-American War. We can imagine their brains tricking them into writing down "Alto", whenever they should have written "Alta".
Finally, some of the unincorporated places in Helt Twp. have become extinct, but had a cemetery. That nearest to Alta was the hamlet or "four corners" called Toronto, which did have a cemetery, also called Bono. Had Bono's sister hamlet of Toronto been settled by Canadians? She could have been buried at their shared cemetery, her stone long hidden by a farmer's plow or weeds or town rubble, if not by the more usual tossed grave dirt. That would be even more true of Dinsmore, its cemetery photo at Findagrave showing two old wagon ruts leading into the woods.
And so on.
Church records might clear a lot up on her burial. Early ones have helped to clarify what happened to her siblings, but they stayed where records were good.
Cousins among these Germans often had matching first and middle names honoring the same grandparents. There was apparently another Anna Barbara Arndorfer, born a tad later, to different parents. How many of the records of the two Anna B's had been confused, by thinking they were the same person?
There were also spelling variations, the original Germanic, Italianized or Frenchish. with lovely sounds for women, but with not-as-sweet British variations. She had a half-sister called both Francesca and Frances. We are still exploring relatives called Michel/Michael. A list of her siblings has been aed (post-2018), with her parents' verified names. We have not verified her gravesite with news clippings, but are still looking for them.
"Ater" Cemetery seems unlikely, as it is the graveyard of the Ater family.
Was there a Catholic cemetery for her? Did they take her body back home, or was the Anna Barbara Arndorfer buried in Kossuth not her, birth year and other things different?
Research by JB, Findagrave member. She was lucky, had some wonderful college classes on group migrations, ethnicity, and religion, how to "read" a cemetery for the area's social history, how to look or events in history that pushed people in new geographic directions.
Her father's gravestone of 1890, back in Iowa, now broken and faded, still is marked with Geb and Gest, for born and died, so they still spoke German. She was the Anna Barbara born in 1886; her mother, the Anna Maria born in 1863. Both parts of their names, when used together, sounded pretty, like Mary Anna or Mary Therese. Yet, both Annas, having been born in Wisconsin, were "Britishized enough". They would see county clerks reduce their names to Anna only, whether they liked it or not, for legal records. The younger was allowed to use Anna B., if needed for clarity.
Some federal land records records online for Anna B. Arndorfer show something most unusual for a woman in her era. She filed for homestead rights, no husband signing next to her name on the documents.
A settlement called Coal Springs, in SD, was laid out in 1908, in Barrett Twp. of Perkins County, in or near the region sometimes called the Black Hills. Her name would then be seen in Barrett Twp. on two federal land records over the next decade She filed for adjacent pieces at the land office in Lemmon, in Perkins County, South Dakota, 160 acres each, the first in 1912, then again in 1918, when she would have been 26, then 28. Each time she gave her name two ways, as Anna B. Arndorfer and as Anna Sherrard.
Between Coal Springs' founding in 1908 and her first land buy in 1912, her 1910 US Census would be done in Perkins County, the place name used at the top saying the poll was of the voting precinct called Humphrey. That 1910 survey counted Anna and William Sherrard as farming, married just 0 years, so newly weds.
Both had previously left one surviving parent back in Iowa, his father, her mother. William's father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had died in Webster City, Iowa, in 1910, shortly before the 1910 census, after being left with one of William's married sisters living nearby. Anna had instead come to SD from St. Benedict, Iowa, her mother having remarried to Mr. Huschka.
Her mother would have encouraged her, being still single, to arrive in SD by going with a "double cousin" named Joe Jr. Anna's and Joe Jr's fathers had been brothers, their mothers, sisters. Arranging in avance to be near family support made life easier in a time of no EMS, a lesson surely appreciated by her parents when going from Wisconsin to Iowa. That double cousin, Joe Jr. Arndorfer, had married "Katie" Erdman/Erdmann, back home in St. Benedict, Iowa. Joe and Kate were then of record having the first 2 of their children in Moody County, SD, one born circa 1906. That was after the 1905 State Census was done back in Iowa. Anna B. may have been the young Anna Arndorfer counted back home in 1905 as still single, timing her arrival to coincide with the new baby's.
Their set all eventually left SD. Very few people remained, the Barnhart family, from elsewhere in Iowa, among them.
Why leave?
"Things happened". These included coal mine closings affecting Coal Springs' townpeople. Multiple years of bad weather in most counties would starve the rancher-farmers' livestock, after causing grass and wheat crops to fail.
The area de-populated. Coal Springs would become a ghost town with only a few houses. Not even its post office remained after the mid-1950s. While Lemmon still exists (as the county seat?), Barrett Twp's modern population was last said to be under 20 people (about 13?).
Joe and Katie would return to Iowa. Anna and William had clearly been in Perkins County for her land filing in 1918, yet, seemed to also go "to and fro" between Montana and Canada, beginning with a Prairie Census in Alberta, in 1916, saying they had emigrated to Canada in 1913. They declared an intent to become Canadian/British, that reason used by Wm. in 1918, by then in his 40s, to explain why he could no respond if called for WW I. By that time (1918), he understood he had been born in Indiana. The clerk gave his size and height as medium, his hair as black, his eyes as brown, occupation, sheep-raiser, Anna B. as his emergency contact. They would be counted in Montana for the US Census in 1920. They were later counted by border officials as returning, moving southward across the Canadian border, via Montana.
One of the Sherrard family trees at FamilySearch covers her and William D. (two of the contributors being Carl Watkins and S.M. Rouse). The tree says she died in Alta, Indiana, in 1926. That year matched Iowa records kept of her death date, but the tree said Mar. 6, maybe a funeral date, while her WPA record said Mar. 5, maybe the death date.
Interestingly, the tree says She and William married in McIntosh, Corson County, SD, on Oct. 11, 1911. That does not match their calling themselves married in their 1910 Census. It's possible they were married twice, first in an unapproved way (clergy not registered properly with the US government, for example, someone at the nearby Indian reservation took their vows, married then "In God's eyes, but not the law's") . To be re-married by approved clergy, they had to go to a different place.
That was the beginning of their marriage. The end took them to Alta, a tiny Protestant place, barely inside Indiana, almost in Illinois, well south of Chicago. The lived above Knox County, above where their Wabash River fed its waters into the Ohio, the wide Ohio separating north from south.
Alta's best business connection to the outside, after trains replaced most river boats on the Wabash and Ohio, consisted of two railroads crossing a bit to the west. The junction lay about where the nearby tiny towns of Bono and Toronto merged, thre two a bit closer to the Illinois line than was Alta.
Her death was noted in Kossuth County, Iowa, newspapers, then re-reported by the WPA survey that followed in the next decade's Depression years, as on Mar. 5, 1926. The WPA writer of the 1930s listed her as "wife of W.O." (a mis-reading of W.D, as her spouse was William Dolan Sherrard). The writer noticed her place of burial was uncertain.
There is little to be found now, about her SD life, other than scattered remarks about the place called Coal Springs. Geologists determined that the mines there, now closed, tapped into coal that was "uranium-enriched". How many took sick from radiation exposure? Did "Coal Springs" mean their drinking water was contaminated?
Her rancher-farmer spouse's first wife, a May/Mary "Hanan" or "Hanen", also came from Iowa, after she and "W.D." married in Webster City (Hamilton County) in Jan., 1901, where his father had last moved their family. She apparently died in Perkins County SD or in Iowa, not certain which, as no paper record or gravestone has clearly been found. However, her death date can be inferred as sometime before the 1910 Census in Perkins County.
Long-lived, spouse William would have a third wife in the decades after Anna died. None of the three Mrs. Sherrards apparently had children that lived to maintain the womens' graves.
Modern minds would wonder about this-- did the contaminated coal back in SD have anything to do with the first two women's deaths? the child's? Note that Anna B.'s father, John Arndorfer, and her uncle, Michael Arndorfer, also had died young, without ever moving to Barrett Twp. Instead of radiation, some health issue ran in the family?
However, if the local coal, easily found, maybe even picked up off the ground, no need to pay for it, was burned in the old-time kitchen stove, where a woman spent so much of her day, a husband busy outdoors might not inhale much, but the woman would? When did anyone admit that Madame Curie's experiments with radiation gave her aplastic anemia? Not in Mary Sherrard's and Anna B.'s lifetime?
Anna Barbara, not yet age 40, died "too young". She did have adventure in her life, however.. We've noted she was of record up in Canada, where she and her spouse were listed with an employer. The time was said to be one in which threshing crews took their machines elsewhere, after the harvest season locally had passed. Were they part of that?
Little is said of her Indiana life. A Sherrad family tree archived at FamilySearch.org gave her a remote death place, naming it as Alta, Indiana. There is an Alta in Vermillion County's Helt Township, according to Wiki geographers. Why would they go there? We know her spouse was a William D. Sherrard. When censused in SD with Anna B., he believed he was born in 1873, which is consistent with other things. He also believed he was born in Virginia, like his father, but that is not consistent with other things. Was Virginia perhaps a place he remembered visiting as a child? He was never told by his mother, where he was "really" born?
Other sources, say his father, Robert Baker Sherrard, had taken the growing Sherrard family to Cass County, Indiana, by the time of William's birth, so Indiana is the birth place cited for him in Sharrard family trees. His family resided in Indiana for their 1880 US Censu.
It's maybe relevant to comment that Vermillion County, Indiana, was once busy shipping coal by rail. Consolidated Coal was maybe one of the county's bigger operators, said in an old directory to ship coal by rail to St. Louis, many decades ago. That company and others no longer ship coal out, producing more shrunken towns. Vermillion County's largest town today is under 5000 people.
An old history book of Vermillion County, Indiana written in the 1880s, when Wm. Sherrard was just a child, said Catholics and especially Lutherans were scarce there, not enough Germans, the French too distant in time. Many of the locals had come up from Virginia/West Virgina. (It was common for border southerners to cross the Ohio River, hoping to to find jobs and better land and schools northward, then going up the Wabash.)
Alta meant high in Spanish, above the disease-carrying mosquitoes that tended to infest marshy parts closer to the rivers. Like Palo Alto County in Iowa, it was named using words and phrases learned by veterans of the war with Mexico. That was in the 1840s, many of the veterans earning land bounties in lieu of salaries while soldiering. Their children could use the warrants once "out west", trading them in for land to homestead. More common, the aging soliers or their widows could sell the warrants to unrelated people who wanted to homestead. making the cash received much like a pension
The Vermillion County of her death fell barely inside Indiana, with a different "Vermilion" County nearby, in Illinois (catty-corner, to the northwest, to be spelled with just one L). Both were named for the Vermilion River. Their spellings differ, it's said, by ethnicity. Using two L's were the old-time French fur traders and missionaries founding, for instance, the very old town of Vincennes, in the next county south on the Wabash, that named Knox after the French left. The later arriving British to the Vermilion River, mainly Protestants, if coming pre-Irish famine, instead used just one L.
With no town in Vermillio County today larger than 5000, the county land around Alta stayed minimally agricultural. The land's growing dis-use caused much to become heavily wooded.
Were she and Mr.Sherrard there to work, as they had done in Canada?
The old county history said Alta and Hillsdale, a bit to its north, were, in effect, one town, combined population 200 Catholic churches were mentioned as sparse, served occasionally from outside or by lay people.
The uncertainty back in Kossuth County records over her burial place may have mirrored uncertainty over whether she had kept her parents' Catholic religion during all her travels. An Irish-sounding Dolan was the maiden name of William Dolan Sherrard's mother, so the problem may have been instead that no cemeteries in the place where she died were specifically Catholic. The question then turns into which of the "public" cemeteries would have taken her burial (public meaning Protestant in origin, but not restricted to just one denomination, justifying a subsidy for upkeep paid by town or county taxes) .
The two public candidates for cemeteries begin with Bono/Toronto, at the rail crossing just west of Alta. She could have been buried there temporarily, her spouse hoping his finances would later allow her body to be shipped out by rail, by rail back to her family's Iowa cemetery.
The second public candidate is Dinsmore, closer to Alta, but north of it. Multiple buried occupants were said to be from Virgina/W.Virginia, fitting the past of father-in-law Robert. A child surnamed Barnhart was buried there, no parents at its side. (The Barnhart name was one long in/near Barrett Twp., near Lemmon, SD, the latest Barnhart burials in the Schoolaas cemetery of Shady Hill, one of the few still viable cemeteries back in that deserted area ) In fact, the Dinsmore cemetery has mostly very old graves, as if the families had "up and left", fitting the past of in-law Robert Baker Sherrard as he moved out of Indiana, to buy land in Iowa, doing so agent-style.
---MORE DETAILS----
To be reduced later, moved elsewhere, after people have had a chance to see this.
EARLY LIFE. If her spouse took her to her last towns, her parents took her to her first Iowa town. It still exists, but barely, in NW Iowa, not far from the Minnesota state line
Anna Barbara and her two brothers were born in Wisc., but would reach their teens in the farming community and church town of St. Benedict. Its surrounds were mainly German, yet ethnically diverse, with multiple German dialects, and scatterings of Irish and Czechs and others . The little place has lost its lovely white church recently, its bank lost back in the 1930s, its little store and pool hall, at times in-between.
Once in Iowa, many relatives, some of them half-siblings, others double-cousins and normal cousins, would be born, were neighbors, making it harder to find someone unrelated to marry. Her mother and aunt, both Eisenbarths (Anna Maria and Rosa C.) would marry two brothers, both Arndorfers (John and the younger Joseph. This writer descends of a middle brother, the Michael Arndorfer who married Victore/Victoria/Dora Scheberle).
Anna Barbara's parents, John Arndorfer and Anna Maria Eisenbarth, married at Beaver Dam, Wisc., in 1882. We can assume these older siblings, having found a good match, did some matchmaking for the younger two. They all "went west", following other members of a Wisconsin "colony" that moved in steps, so not everyone moved at the same time.
Some presumably used trains, as the rail companies, one using Asa Call of Algona as their agent, had been given homestead land in Kossuth County as an incentive to build tracks there. That agent must have sold some to this group, as none of the Rahms and Arndorfers early to St. Benedict are seen as individuals in the federal land records for Kossuth. Skipping over Iowa's northeast (Decorah) and north central parts (Forest City and Clear Lake), to go to northwest Iowa, their group stopped just short of Mr. Call's town of Algona.
Her father died quickly once in Iowa, in 1890, after a mere eight years of marriage, with Anna Barbara still little, only four at the time. A marriage record, dated Nov. 23, 1892, then said "Anna Arndorfer", meaning her mother, took as her new spouse, "John Huschka", at "Bavaria" in Kossuth County. (Was Bavaria what St. Benedict's congregation called itself before deciding to go by their church's name?)
A person from Bavaria is a Bavarian, reminding us that the Arndorfers' ethnicity matched that of the neighboring Rahms. According to county and church histories, one of the Rahms had arrived first in Kossuth County and sent word back to Beaver Dam about finding a good place. Others then followed.
The Huschkas had a Bohemian surname. The two ethnic sets, Bavarian and Bohemian, were easily familiar with each other's existence when back in central Europe. Both ethnic names come out of the ancient root word Bo, in the sense of bovine, describing people in places with cows. The two ethnicities, when existing closest to each other, had been a mere boat ride apart, on the Danube River. Its flow went westish, leaving Bavaria in order to cut through the Bohemian Forest, ahead of its descent (through Hungary?) to the Black Sea. Mr. Huschka would describe himself and his parents later as German-born. The early Huschkas thus went in the opposite direction, easterly, upstream, following the Danube or a ridgetop trail above it, to go from Slavic-speaking territory to Germanic-speaking.
Anna Barbara's first US census, the 1900, was at age 14,. It left a "family snapshot" of the blended family, the Baviarian Arndorfers and the German-adapted Huschkas. There may also have been state censuses in 1895 and 1905, one person per interview card, that also caught Anna Barbara in Kossuth County. However, there were too many plain Annas, as the interviewers did not like writing full German names. Thus, Anna Barbara may not have been that Anna counted in 1895 or 1905.
The children her mother and Mr. Huschka added to St. Benedict were born between 1892 and 1900 were in the 1900 US Census. An image is archived online (dated June 6, 1900; check the semi-blurry section for the family's handwritten rows, other rows are neighbors, incluing past an future in-laws):
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-XXZB-WQ
Their interviewer wrote Prairie Township at the top, not "Bavaria", not St. Benedict's name. Maybe a little multi-ethnic church town was deemed too unimportant to politicians to count its voters specifically? never incorporated, so no elections for mayor? The hamlet's church is now gone. Its Austrian windows and some beautifully-turned, castle-like carpentry were saved (by being moved to St. Cecelia's in Algona?).
St. Benedict's church was at the hamlet's south end, as was the church's school. This writer's mother remembers riding her pony to school, where many Arndorfers long attended, all going to Mass every day, Protestant students there exempted from church attendance. The school in her era did one year more than the tinier one-room public schools scattered here and there nearby. The public ones went only through Grade 8, the Catholic, through Grade 9, to allow extra time for teaching religion and language and going into detail on other things.
There would have been no school bus at the time of Anna Barbara's 1900 Census, so she and her siblings would have skipped high school. Yet, they would be better educated than many of the same era if they had had Grade 9.
On June 6, 1900, the three elder children, with Anna "in the middle", were 16, 14, and 12 . Five little half-siblings, ages 5 to 1 that June, would be fun for the teens to chase and tickle and otherwise entertain, but would have been a lot of work for their mother, Anna Maria, unless Anna Barbara helped.
Their interviewer of 1900, Mr. Albert F. Bacon, might have been presented their German and Bohemian (Czech) names, but might have susbstituted British-like ones, "not as strange" to his eyes, telin ghimself he was translating. Another strong possibility, some Irish nuns or students among their school's German ones had already taught the children how to re-write their names as British ones? This would account for Catharinas turning into Kates, Bernards into Barnies. A third factor, if English was not their "neutral territory", then how else would her German-trained mother and a stepfather formerly Bohemian speak to each other?
Maybe for all the reasons above, by June 6, 1900, teen-aged Johan had turned into John Arndorfer; Anna Barbara and Frantz, into Anna and Frank Arndorfer For the tiny Huschkas. little Franceska/Frencesks became Frances, Anton turned into Tony, Rosalia, into Rose, Victora/Victory/Victoria into Dora, and Marie morphed into Mary Huschka. The ethnic names their parents had chosen at their baptisms, however, would still be the names used in church records and by grandparents.
Any grandmother who worked only inside the home would know, at best, only some pidgin English, so not enough English. We can imagine teens able to tell each other their secrets, right in front of a grandmother, avoiding a lecture merely by using English.
We assume Anna Barbara's mother had been raised to speak some Germanic dialect, probably Bavarian, but maybe did so poorly, being Wisconsin-born. Though clearly with a Bohemian/Slavic surname, her stepfather, again, considered himself and his parents of German birth. Huschka was actually a German re-spelling of a Slavic surname (the original something like Huška) . The Huschkas, before becoming German, would have called their Slavic language Boehmisch (pronounced Bay-mish). However, outsiders and strangers called it Czech, to the annoyance of this writer's ethnic grandmother, born in Vienna, Austria, to Bohemian parents, as she considered Czech to be a German word.
The Boehmisch language was put into writing for their Catholic churches by using a Latin alphabet, with some special marks added. The marks, for example, let š stand for what was almost an "sh" sound, but not quite, making Huška sound a lot like Huschka. The other ethnic group in the modern nation of the Czech Republic, located east of the Bohemians, was/is the Moravians. Their Catholic missionaries instead invented a new alphabet for them, called Cyrillic (similar to the alphabets used later by Greek or Russian speakers).
Anna, an English speaker, would soon be treated as a semi-adult, able to work and save money (for future homestead purchases?) after her last school year ended. Her old school's tuition arrangments had let them meet future in-laws, even Protestant ones, which Mr. Sherrard may have been. How would that have happened?
The white two-story clapboard school at St. Benedict was unique as to tuition. The labor of the nuns who taught in English and German was donated by those nuns, their convent and other needs covered by whatever families could afford to put into the collection basket each Sunday, then added to seasonally by goods that families donated from the garden and farm.
Local Protestants could also attend the Catholic school for free, not just the Catholics. The St. Benedict arrangement excused them from all religious instruction, however, not just daily Mass.
St. Benedict's Richtsmeier family (pronounced rich-my-er) came, not from Bavaria, at Germany's southeast end, on the way to Hungary, but from Lippe-Detmold, in northwestern Germany, on the way to Holland and Norway. The old-time princes/barons of Lippe-Detmold resolved the long-lived religious warring of the north (Lutheran vs. Catholic). Their solution was to subsidize exactly one church-run school per town, with those in charge of the school to be that town's majority religion. Those not of the majority religion would attend the school, but were excused from religious classes. Thus, Catholics were in Lutheran schools, and Lutherans were in Catholic schools, keeping costs down via just one school system per town, all students allowed to keep the faith of their parents.
Maybe that place's way of providing school for different faiths came to St. Benedict, with the Richtsmeiers? Was everyone becoming an in-law of just about everyone? A daughter of Barbara Richtsmeier Ludwig would marry a cousin of Anna Barbara Arndorfer Sherrard (that cousin was a son of her middle uncle, Michael Arndorfer. Michael was like her father John in "dying too young"?)
When the trains came through, they brought with them Irish laborers to lay the tracks, some of whom stayed. To the north or backside of the white clapboard church building lay the little hamlet. Its scattering of houses still exists, one of the Irish names being McCarthy. Gone are a creamery and a lumber yard, maybe connected to the Rahms, and the longer-lived poolhall/tavern. What the German-speakers called their "People's Bank", meaning to benefit the many, not the few, would be victimized by a robbery in the Great Depression. It then was closed. Its robber would repent and express remorse at a later date.
The hamlet's small store, remembered by this writer's mother, was willing to grind any coffee beans purchased there, so "smelled really good". It also carried European spices, such as rosemary and needed garden seeds, ones not offered at neighboring towns' British-serving stores. (Sausage-making was considered the men's job, not the women's, to be done by a father and his sons. Sadly, the men too often did not write down their best recipes? Was garden-grown basil required, and garlic, along with bay leaf, to make a truly delicious "blood sausage"? Were mustard seeds and black pepper required for other sausages? Lots of oatmeal was sometimes added with the spices, so 20 minutes cooking time was required, substituting that grain for ground fat making some of the recipes healthier than today's?)
Some British-descended had arrived earlier, pre-statehood. Ambrose and Asa Call, in particular, of future Algona, led many of the future arrivals to the area. For example, one Call had been present in St. Louis when the Mass. group called the Whitinsville colony (including this writer's Scotch-Irish side) came across the Mississippi, intending to settle in Missouri. They instead were convinced by Call to go to Algona, which would have required taking their ox teams and wagons up the east branch of the Missouri River to Algona, a route maybe taken by Daniel Boone when helping to survey the area for its future townships.
The Call's Algona beat out Irvington for the spot of county seat. Thanks also to the Calls, attracted a much desired rail depot and offered a newspaper. Algona survived best, as, in addition to a rail junction, it was also where busier roads crossed. It could offer larger stores, multiple doctors and lawyers, multiple churches, a public high school and later a Catholic high school, and more.
St. Benedict peaked before the 1950s, its surrounding population using Algona more and more for services and purchases in the decades after Anna's death, especially as the smaller rail town of Wesley to the east lost the ability to offer as much as before. Note that Wesley also shrunk, merely later than did St. Benedict.
Algona's Catholic hospital (St. Ann's, since renamed?) was open to all religions. Catholics made a special point of using it, back then, partly as the old-time nursing nuns were viewed as excellent. Algona's Catholic church still exists, called St. Cecelia's. Calvary was that church's cemetery, located on Hwy. 18 east of Algona, maybe halfway to the church of St. Benedict.
Hwy. 18 was a modern version of the old military road across northern Iowa that existed pre-statehood. The tiny rail town of Sexton lay on the south side of Hwy 18, on the St. Benedict side of Calvary. Sexton saw its itty-bitty Protestant church also closed and torn down.
Anna would, as a child, have wondered where Hwy. 18 went if followed west. The answer was, striaght to that end off South Dakota whose top row of counties marks where SD rise to meet North Dakota.. Hwy. 18 still connects Algona and Sexton and Wesley. A deserted piece of its old route used to take Hwy 18 traffic right by St. Benedict, bring in a few convenience shoppers and gasoline buyers. The newer route skipped it, causing worry by those who were forward-thinking that their beloved hamlet and church would die. Machines were replacing the young laborers, Irish, German, British and more in name, seen in past censuses, working for older established farmers that patronize the town. Farming, in that way, became less of a poverty-producer. The young would need educations so they could leave and go elsewhere with good credentials. That was given to them and they did leave, because they had to.
The scatter of houses that mark the remnant of Sexton included Gerrman Catholics farming, for example, the Studers descended of Augustus. They had gone to Canada first, before coming to Iowa.
Augustus Studer, like Asa Call, was some sort of land promoter, seen frequently in the federal land records of Kossuth County. It was not clear for which group he was the agent Robert B. Sherrard, her father-in-law, was similar, in the Kossuth land records a few times, more often seen in other Iowa counties
The Studers were originally from Alsace-Lorraine and probably Switzerland before that, they think. Opportunites opened below the Swiss mountains when the prior German-French population ied of a plague. Once of to Iowa, they and their in-laws brought with them women's names like the French-sounding Genevieve and the Italian-sounding Francesca. The Studers and their in-laws will be found scattered (on land the Calls did not want?), their burials not just at St. Benedict's and St. Cecilia's Catholic cemeteries, but in Wesley's St. Joseph.
The federal officials in Washington DC designing the old US censuses ignored whatever church was attended, but did care what post office was assigned. The 1910 census of Anna's mother and stepfather noted that their part of Prairie Township used the post office at Corwith, to the south. That town had a high school accessed by bus by the late 1940s, attended by this writer's mother, who rode the bus with her year-older Arndorfer cousin, the one who would marry an Oxley.
Other post offices would also be assigned, depending on a farm's location inside Prairie Twp. or next-door Irvington and Wesley. St. Benedict had its own short-lived post office, originally called Rahm by the trainmaster dropping off mail, presumably as the drop location had been one of the Rahm farms.
A MOVE TO SOUTH DAKOTA'S BLACK HILLS. They followe Hwy. 18 west, past West Bend, past Palo Alto County
Her and William Sherrard's 1910 US Census listed them as farming at Humphrey in Perkins Couty SD. Asked how long they had been married, they said 0 years, so were newlyweds.
She bought one parcel in Barrett Twp. in 1912, being careful to list both her maiden and married names, Arndorfer and Sherrard. That first parcel proving satisfactory, she bought the other in 1918, both times going through the land office at Lemmon, S.D.
DE-CODING LAND ESCRIPTIONS. Both parcels made up the bottom half of that square mile inside Barrett Twp called Section 1. That nunber was always given to the far NE corner of Thomas Jefferson-style townships, the perfect township being six miles by six miles, possible if nature kept rivers and lakes out of the way. The last township ir perfect being 36, always in the far SE corner. One of the 36 sections would be dedicated for school use, following Thomas Jefferson's system.
The township of Barrett was next-door to Burdick Twp., names mattering for township elections and taxation. However, the old federal land records listed only surveyors' numbers. There were 6x6 squares identified "checkerboard" style, "this many" hops north, "that many" hops east, from a starting point. ("021 N, 013 E" for Barrett. Making one of the two numbers change, moving the hops east from 13 to 14, gave the surveying id for the twp. next-door named Burdick . The two numbers given, were, thus, distances from two different reference lines, measured as "this many townships north" of a first line, then "that many townships east" of a second line, that second line required to crossed the first at a right angle. The main reference line for their Perkins County townships was the "Black Hills Meridian". From that meridian, Burdick was the 14th township going east and Barrett, the 13th. The meridian's Black Hils name tells us they were near some scenery called "the Badlands". These were strange, yet beautful, formations of rock and soil. (They were made mainly by a millenia of wind beating sand and dirt against rock. )
A NEW COLONY. A group of about 15 Irish-American households from northwestern Iowa put up a "colony" in Lemmon. Lemmon had the govt. office where she applied for and paid for her land. Perhaps she and her spouse heard about Perkins County from the Iowan colony?
A West Bend, Iowa, newspaper reported the colony's move to SD, nicknaming them as the "Palo Alto Colony". (Palo Alto County was just west of Kossuth, had been, for many or all going to Lemmon SD their prior homeplace while still in Iowa. Its county seat was called Emmetsburg. Like nearby Emmet County, Emmetsburg was named for Robert Emmet. From the Irish viewpoint, he was a young 25ish hero, an Irishman wrongly hung for challenging some misguided British royalists.)
Perkins was said to have an above average amount of sheep-raising. This fits, as her spouse, William D. Sherrard, reported the sheep business as his occupation in his 1910 US Census. (There had been some William Sherrards in SD pre-statehood. Tthe earliest one to buy homestead land would pick Day County, did so in the 1890s, had a son in Day County with a Mary Wickham, called Earl, who grew up in SD. That was a William H. Sherrard, not William D., so never seen with Anna B. )
Some went to the Black Hills to mine gold. Perkins County had its own possible resource to attract speculators, a sizeable lignite coal field. The deposits would prove to be dangerously laced with uranium. Whether the Sherralds speculated that way, whether the river running through their land was ever contaminated by lignite runoff, is not known. Whether anyone suffered from radiation sickness is not known. Historically, other people had long managed to live in the area as there was a reservation for Native Americans east of Burdick, their former tribal livelihood indicated by a town called Bison.
Anna B and her William would spend their last US Census together in Montana, renting, so perhaps hard times caused them to lose their SD land.
This next part is repetitious, to be cut.
HER PRIOR AND LATER LIFE Anna Barbara was ethnically German, many of her Arndorfers of the dark-haired Bavarian sort. The Arndorfer name is still found in the Danube River region of Bavaria, just south of the Bohemian portion of the Czech Republic, both very close to Hungary.
She and her spouse were always in remote areas. Her spouse had an unusual combination of siblings, most born in Indiana, one in Virginia. His parents were both born in Virginia, the unique thing that separated him when trying to separate his censuses from those of other William Sherrards.
Her husband was quite different ethnically. He was Irish, but the Irish and Germans would mix as well as did the Bohemians and Germans once in northwestern Iowa. Her spouse sometimes went by W. D., or William D., but was born as William Dolan Sherrard, having been given his mother's maiden name as a middle name. He would cite the sheep business as his occupation for his draft registration for WW I, while in SD,, when he named her as his person of contact in an emergency.
How to account for Irish being born in Virginia? They may have been Scotch-Irish or Anglo-Irish, not native Irish, Virginia was nearby if his Sherrards entered the US through the port in Baltimore, as port cities, not national policy, were the deciders on early immigration, pre-Ellis Island
This uniqueness, ethnically Irish parents born in Virginia, made him trackable by censuses when they moved. The years that censuses asked for his parents' birthplaces.(Virginia) were the easiest to find. He was apparently surprised the first time an interviewer asked for his own birthplace. Virginia "popped into his head", even though his parents said it was Indiana when he still lived with them. By the time the next census-taker asked, he had had a chance to check with relatives. Thereafter, he repeatedly named Indiana. (One record specifically said Logansport, Indiana. An Isaac Sherrard was found in an old Logansport directory, a carpenter, related in some way, not yet determined, to his father, the Robert Baker Sherrard who often went by "Baker Sherrard".
It seems Anna and William never had children? This made their many moves easier, no one to pull out of school, no one repeatedly faced with making new friends at a new school.
He would remarry after her death. It appears he did not have children by the three women he out-lived. His first wife was another Iowa woman who also left him a widower (May Hanon? was may a nickname for Mary, in common use then?). Their era being before childhood vaccinations and other modern medical care, did he suffer sterility from mumps? Or, were his wives May and Anna too sick, although young?
Their freedom to move eventually took them over international borders, not just state lines. Border-crossing records back into the States in 1924 say they originally left for Canada in 1913 (in April of that year, then had become Canadian nationals).
Anna Barbara and William D. Sherrard were thus found on both sides of the US-Canada border. (They spent 10-11 years in Canada, in the Regina, Alberts area. His family's pattern in the US was to move around inside the upper states, those that ran Midwest to Northwest, beginning with Indiana and then Iowa. He and Anna went to SD before leaving the States. They then crossed back into the States via Montana, mere months before what would have been a very ill Anna was taken back to his home state of Indiana, maybe looking for better hospitals or for family assistance with his ill wife.
Her death place and date are given in a family tree, the timing making sense. After Anna's death, he would be found, remarried, in the 1930 US Census, in Washington state, occupation poultry rancher, the timing meaning an inflated mortgage, with balloon payments destructive but common then, a burden hard to handle, in the coming Great Depression. We are not surprised that he had to move again, to die in mid-America, in Nebraska. Handwritten, his 1930 census record is online, viewing free, but login required. The image is archived at:
Familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9RCD-WN3.
Also present in 1930 was Ohio-born third wife Verda Mae. The state of Ohio was next-door to Indiana, with many Ohioans migrating westward into Indiana. He did not to go southward to Nebraska until nearer the end of his life. Dying in Phelps County, Nebraska, Keith was given as the specific death place. Not studied by this writer, was it maybe a hamlet or rural township remembered with unknown accuracy in a family tree? a different county? Several trees are viewable for him at FamilySearch.org, none as of 2018 listing more than one of his three spouses.
Again, he died at 80, almost thirty years after Anna, eventually too old to travel and check on her grave. Having outlived too many, he was the only Sherrard buried in his cemetery.
LAST NOTES. Her last Canada border crossing record, archived at FamilySearch.org, in October of 1924, was before the first snowfalls might be expected. They said they were coming back to the US, having left it in 1913. Whether headed back to relatives or to a new employer was not clear. Their destination was in the vicinity of Lewiston, Montana. Did no precise address being given indicate a sudden decision to move? Before receiving a full reply to whatever letters they suddenly sent south?
They were going by wagon, not train. A wagon let them carry more with them, presumably as they knew the move was permanent. Pending snowfalls forced their move before November, maybe not enough time to wait for reply letters and otherwise scout out the new location? Travel by wagon, not by an easier train, was maybe painful for her. Not being rich, they desperately needed to bring household goods and farming equipment and tools?
They had no children. There were no great-grandchildren to track them, only this writer and other ultra-nieces and ultra-nephews and ultra-cousins trying to "fill in the blanks", many decades after they died.
No children meant no one made sure her stone remained erect and easily found and read. The makers of family trees instead only had whatever remembrances were kept on scraps of paper, discovered decades too late, in some deceased ancestor's "box of things", removed from an "overflowing drawer", saved in some basement or attic.
They had first, names with parents and siblings and ethnicities. Their ethnicities typically loved big family feasts and parties. "The box" usually had dates of celebrations and gatherings, via jottings and news clippings.
Such different dates for their wedding imply a re-taking of vows.. Was a wedding celebration held in their honor, when returning to Iowa to visit family? April of 1911 was given by one source, not confirmed. That would have been before the spring plantings, after the winter birthing season for livestock. As such, April would be a "best guess" for either a re-marriage date or any trip back home.
There would be saved, postmarked envelopes with "thank yous". There would be the decorative church funeral cards with a prayer for the departed, funeral date and location beside the deceased's name. In places where cooler weather preserved bodies, the funerals were typically a few days later. The year of 1926 would be right for both death and funeral, given the return from Canada was late in 1924.
WARNING.-- UNCERTAIN BURIAL Put her in a virtual cemetery if it is important to always find this page.
Why the uncertainty about her burial? Being unincorporated, Alta was not an official address, often seen mis-spelled, even by other Indianans. Examples: "Alter" was seen, perhaps written by people who pronounced "car" as "cah", Boston-style, so guessed the ending vowel and then assumed an R was neeed at the very end.
"Alto" was also seen. Northwestern Iowans of the Irish sort knew about Iowa's heavily Irish Palo Alto County, just beyond of Kossuth, both north of Fort Dodge, on the way to Minnesota, both on tthe way west to SD. The original place of Palo Alto was a battleground, well-remembered by locals who served in or reported on the Mexican-American War. We can imagine their brains tricking them into writing down "Alto", whenever they should have written "Alta".
Finally, some of the unincorporated places in Helt Twp. have become extinct, but had a cemetery. That nearest to Alta was the hamlet or "four corners" called Toronto, which did have a cemetery, also called Bono. Had Bono's sister hamlet of Toronto been settled by Canadians? She could have been buried at their shared cemetery, her stone long hidden by a farmer's plow or weeds or town rubble, if not by the more usual tossed grave dirt. That would be even more true of Dinsmore, its cemetery photo at Findagrave showing two old wagon ruts leading into the woods.
And so on.
Church records might clear a lot up on her burial. Early ones have helped to clarify what happened to her siblings, but they stayed where records were good.
Cousins among these Germans often had matching first and middle names honoring the same grandparents. There was apparently another Anna Barbara Arndorfer, born a tad later, to different parents. How many of the records of the two Anna B's had been confused, by thinking they were the same person?
There were also spelling variations, the original Germanic, Italianized or Frenchish. with lovely sounds for women, but with not-as-sweet British variations. She had a half-sister called both Francesca and Frances. We are still exploring relatives called Michel/Michael. A list of her siblings has been aed (post-2018), with her parents' verified names. We have not verified her gravesite with news clippings, but are still looking for them.
"Ater" Cemetery seems unlikely, as it is the graveyard of the Ater family.
Was there a Catholic cemetery for her? Did they take her body back home, or was the Anna Barbara Arndorfer buried in Kossuth not her, birth year and other things different?
Research by JB, Findagrave member. She was lucky, had some wonderful college classes on group migrations, ethnicity, and religion, how to "read" a cemetery for the area's social history, how to look or events in history that pushed people in new geographic directions.
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