52 – Me, Myself, and I

I don't remember when I first heard about the "Round Robin" letters but they started before I was born. I don't know the story of who named them: it probably wasn't after a corpulent bird though the envelope was always quite thick, but one that got "around" as it did among my mother and her siblings and parents. One of Merriam-Webster's definitions:

Something (such as a letter) sent in turn to the members of a group each of whom signs and forwards it sometimes after adding a comment.

Mom always looked forward to receiving the bulky envelope containing letters from maybe 6 or 7 family members as well as her previous one. Sometimes she would get impatient to receive it only to find that she had failed to send the last one on, which she would then do with copious apology. She would remove her previous letter, and add a newly written one with the latest news from our family and comments on the other letters. 

She saved all her old letters, and they are probably the best record I have of my early life. The first letter we have is dated a month before I was born; my parents had recently moved from South Carolina to Wisconsin – my father would frequently change jobs as he moved his way up the municipal engineering ladder, entailing a move to a new city:

Hello Everybody – Trust all you pregnant people are feeling strictly 1-A. I seem to be a hopeless cripple but other than that am fine. I strained my back in the packing process and can't seem to recover... We left Aiken [S.C.] on the last day of June, bag and baggage on a rented trailer.

July 1952 Round Robin letter...

All three of Mom's sisters and one sister-in-law were pregnant at the same time, and I would be the first of 5 cousins born that year, from August through December. Mom goes on for a couple pages about their trip including a purchase of a new car as theirs had a complete breakdown in Charlotte. They were accompanied by my older sister who had been born the previous August shortly after their move from Denver to Aiken, "moving homes while pregnant" being a theme which probably affected all six of us siblings.

"The Bug" is agitating for attention. She plays beautifully all by herself until I come into the room, and then she starts showing off, bothering the radio, etc. She's still a good girl though about most things...

Being the younger of the first two children has helped shape who I am, affording me a bit more leeway to experiment as I wasn't as much in the spotlight had I been first-born. The six-page letter is full of news and questions. The next letter, 4 pages, is from October, after I was born. I picture Mom with a newborn and a 1-year-old – my sister and I came 1 year and 13 days apart, in a new house and neighborhood. She didn't know it when she wrote, but the second of us 5 cousins had been born the day before.

Our picture-taking has really deteriorated lately – haven't even got one of "Joe" yet (I think he'll always be Joe to me as I just can't seem to think of him as Larry).

And so I was "Joe" from the start even though I was named after my father; there was a bit of a disagreement over my naming apparently, my father wanting to name me after himself, and my mother lobbying for "Joe" and so the solution I guess was to use my father's name but to call me "Joe." And so "Joe" I am to this very day with my siblings and other relatives, but "Larry" to my wife, friends, and colleagues. It would be just as weird to me to have my wife call me "Joe" as it would be for one of my siblings to call me "Larry." I think this is similar to growing up bilingual, though many people find it strange!

The Kenyons are driving up to spend the weekend with us so we're sitting around expecting them any minute. We entertained a couple in our bridge tournament last night so the house is cleaner than it has been in ages. 

My father and mother, with my dad's father and mother (holding me)

Two things here: first, we now lived in Wisconsin, just a couple hour drive from where my father grew up. Second, my parents would join clubs when they moved to a new town, and learned how to quickly assimilate. This was not a skill I picked up and so I suffered a bit from a couple of our moves, which probably resulted in somewhat less confidence and more introversion. 

Mom continues:

Joe slept last night from 8:00 until 6:15 a.m. Sure hope he keeps it up. I'll think my troubles are almost over then. Wish all of you had 6-week old babies instead of still being ladies-in-waiting. – What a phrase! I weighed him at 7 weeks (after he'd eaten his cereal) to discover I have quite a big boy – 11 pounds 14 ounces. Looks like he'll really be a clunker. He's so strong it amazes me. Last week he went to sleep lying on his stomach on the foot of our bed; after he'd been awake about 5 or 10 minutes, I walked in and found that he'd inched his way clear up to the pillows. Lucky I had him headed in the right direction, huh? He holds his head so erect and has a terrific grip. I think he's so different from Daphne as she was ways such a placid little thing.

Well, I really didn't turn out to be a clunker, and Daphne isn't so placid. The episode on the bed is indicative of the "free-range" style of parenting my mom practiced, as did most of the parents in that era. 

My mother, me (clunky?), and my nemesis

I won't go into the episodes where Daphne tried to get rid of me, or crushed my finger in a door; I don't think those episodes affected me much. But as I read through these letters from my early life, it reminds me of how our early lives reflect onto the "me, myself, and I" of our later lives.

51 – Cousins

On September 5, 2018 my wife Patti and I joined a small pre-talk reception for a book talk by Steven Pinker hosted by the Commonwealth Club at Marines' Memorial Theatre in San Francisco. We grabbed a glass of wine, and I engaged a gray-haired lady who was standing a bit off by herself; seeing her name "Fran Dependahl" on her name tag, I asked if "Dependahl" was German – oddly the first thing that came to my mind, but not surprising given my genealogy obsession. She responded in German, saying that she actually had Swiss ancestry. Taking that in stride, I responded, also in German. As I remember it, our conversation went something like this (translated from German):

Me: Where in Switzerland?

Fran: Canton Bern.

Me: Which town? 

Fran: A small town that you've probably never heard of, Koppigen. 

Me: Koppigen! I have ancestry from that town. What was their surname? 

Fran: Baumberger.

Me:  I also have Baumberger ancestry from Koppigen. Where did they settle? 

Fran: Greenville, Illinois. 

Me: Oh, the Illinois Baumbergers! 

My 4th great-grandmother Elizabeth Baumberger Affolter is the first entry in the 735-page book Colorado Families: A Territorial Heritage: 

Elizabeth Affolter was born Elizabeth Baumberger 27 Jun 1794 in Koppigen, Canton of Bern, Switzerland... [she] came to New Orleans, La in 1852; the ocean voyage took forty days. She, with her daughter, Elisabeth, son-in-law, Rudolph Greub and two granddaughter, went up the river to Illinois where her relatives, the Baumbergers, lived. From there Elizabeth and the Greubs stopped in Easton, Buchanan Co, Mo, before making one more move in 1864 to Colo to join her sons Jacob and Frederick who had arrived earlier. Once there, she kept house for them at their cabin by Haystack Mtn at what was known as Left Hand Cr. [See "Should be a Movie" for a photo of the cabin as it stands today in Old Mill Park in Longmont, and more about Elizabeth's trip.]

Elizabeth Baumberger Affolter 1794-1867, Burlington Cemetery, Longmont

Entry 4 in Colorado Families, for Elizabeth's son Frederick Affolter, mentions the relatives in Illinois again:

Frederick purchased 80 acres near the village of Burlington from Clayborne Adams 1 Dec 1865 for $1,100. He then started to Switz to learn cheese-making, but in Greenville, Ill while visiting a cousin he met his bride-to-be; they tied the knot and took the train back to Julesburg. 

I had read these paragraphs multiple times, and mentally noted that some Baumberger relatives had lived in Greenville back then, but never made the exact connection. We switched to our native English, and Fran seemed skeptical at first, but a bit more conversation persuaded her that I was in fact a relative. We exchanged emails, and she put me in touch with a couple relatives who had worked on their genealogy.

When I got back home I did figure out the exact connection, and determined we were 5th cousins, sharing 4th-great-grandparents Niklaus Baumberger, born 1770, and Elisabeth Knuchel, born 1767, who married and raised a family in Koppigen (for more on Koppigen, see "This ancestor went to market").

Relationship chart: Kenyon to Dependahl

The coincidence of running into a 5th cousin is partly due to the large families descendants of these ancient Baumbergers; Eliza Greub, halfway down the relationship chart and my great-grandmother, probably has over a thousand descendants living today. Exponentially ratcheting that estimate up for the three generations ahead of her, there may be a hundred-thousand descendants of Niklaus and Elizabeth Baumberger. Nonetheless, being able to make that connection with a random stranger in five minutes was a bit of magic.

I saw Frances one more time, at another Commonwealth Club event, before the pandemic put a hold on our trips to the Commonwealth Club. Writing this story, I wondered about this cousin again, and Googled her name. Sadly, I found an obituary for Frances Dependahl, who passed away just a few months ago in San Francisco (the San Francisco Chronicle has her name misspelled "Francis" rather than "Frances" as it is in the 1950 Census and her LinkedIn profile). She was a patron of the arts, and apparently an all around good person, but left no children or descendants herself. Rest in peace cousin.

Frances Dependahl obituary, Legacy.com

Sources

Colorado Families: A Territorial Heritage. 1981. Denver, Colorado: The Colorado Genealogical Society.

50 – "You Wouldn't Believe It"

1969 news clipping from Lillian Knaus scrapbook

On the 13th of December, 1871, the Rocky Mountain News carried a short paragraph on its front page in a small section titled "Territorial News":

Mrs. Fredricka Baun of Left Hand, died suddenly on Tuesday last, under suspicious circumstances. Coroner Allen made an investigation on Wednesday. The post mortem examination showed that her death had been caused by an abortion, and the testimony given by a man named Clemens Knaus, of Left Hand, corroborated this fact. Mrs. Baun was a married woman who had separated from her husband. The testimony of Knaus, was, in fact, a confession for he admitted criminal intimacy with Mrs. Baun, and testified that he secured the services of Mrs. Dr. Solander, of Boulder, to procure the abortion. Knaus and Mrs. Solander were arrested, and held for examination before Justice Allen, of Valmont. 

Other news articles continued to cover the saga. A first trial of Dr. Solander ended in a hung jury with only one juror holding out for conviction; a retrial found her guilty, and she was sentenced to 3 years in the new prison in the Colorado territory, in Canon City. The Rocky Mountain News, January 30, 1873:

Last Monday Judge Wells sentenced Mrs. Mary Solander, the Boulder abortionist, to three years confinement in the penitentiary.

An appeal to the Colorado supreme court alleging a biased judge and jurors failed, and Dr. Solander began her sentence at the prison, the first female inmate of that institution. The March 12, 1873 Rocky Mountain News noted:

The supreme court yesterday rendered an opinion in the case of Mary Solander vs. The People, affirming the judgment of the district court. This woman had been sentenced to three years imprisonment for manslaughter in having produced an abortion.

Upon popular request, the full decision of the court was published in the same newspaper the following day. A number of Boulder County residents signed a petition asking for her release, as noted in the Denver Daily Times, July 26, 1873:

A petition signed by eight hundred citizens of Boulder county, and praying for the pardon of Mrs. Solander, who was convicted of manslaughter, by having procured an abortion for another woman; was presented to the Governor and is now under consideration.

Governor Elbert granted the pardon a couple weeks later. The Denver Daily Times mentioned the pardon in the August 9, 1873 edition:

The Governor has granted a pardon to Mrs. Mary Solander, convicted of manslaughter, in Boulder county. The petition for executive clemency was signed by over eight hundred persons, in which number were the names of the majority of the best citizens of the county mentioned.

The Colorado Miner reported on August 14, 1873 under "Local Matters":

The Governor has pardoned Mrs. Solander from the penitentiary, where she was serving out a sentence for the crime of having produced an abortion. We know that the woman’s husband had a large petition from Boulder county people asking for her pardon. Mr. S. was left with several young children in his care, and had a hard time of it. The woman has received a lesson that she perhaps will never forget, and her release now is an act of clemency that, under the circumstances, will not be condemned by any.

And so the governor pardoned Dr. Solander, thanks to the support of the Boulder County citizenry. I tracked down Mary Solander in a couple public family trees posted by  descendants of hers: aged 39 in the 1870 census, apparently living in Boulder with her carpenter husband and four sons ages seven to 16. According to the tree sources, she was born Mary Jane McIver in 1831 in Pennsylvania; married Daniel Solander in Putnam, Illinois in 1849; had one daughter who only lived a few months, and then had 4 sons, all in Illinois; was living in Boulder in 1870; in 1880 was living as a boarder in Salem, Oregon, occupation physician; moved to California by 1910 where she was living with her divorced son, granddaughter, and former husband in Inyo; and died in 1921 in Los Angeles. These trees have no mention of her Colorado past, but they do include a very nice photo of Mary in her later years:

Mary Solander circa 1890?

I haven't found anything on Fredricka Baun, except a FindAGrave.com entry showing her death on 5 December 1871, and burial in plot A62 NW in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery, owned by the city of Boulder, and which has a first burial on 16 May 1870, the year previous to Fredricka's death. 

My great-grandfather Clemens Knaus had been initially arrested and charged, but never tried, perhaps because he was a key witness for the prosecution. At that time he was an immigrant who had arrived in America just six years prior, and who had settled in the Colorado Territory a year or two before this tragedy: the 1870 census shows him employed on the farm of Nicolas and Eliza Bader. Nicholas Bader would die of appendicitis in December of 1873 and his widow Eliza would remarry in November 1874, to our Clemens Knaus. I assume she knew of Clemens' involvement in this high-profile case of the "Boulder abortionist." 

Clemens Knaus as a young man

Nearly a century later, a 3-page feature article concerning the Solander case appeared in the Sunday Focus section of the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper on August 10, 1969: "Lady Doctor Now History." The focus was on Mary Solander: "Whatever injustice she met with in the manslaughter case, Mrs. Solander's stay at Canon City was the very first imprisonment of a woman there." The article was published four years after my mom's mother had passed away, and as my mother later wrote in a chapter of "Knaus Family Stories,"   

If Mother had still been alive when this skeleton slipped out of the closet of the past, I'm positive the news article would never have been preserved. After Dad's death, however, it was discovered tucked away in the old family safe. From there it found its way into Mother's scrapbook. Perhaps Dad hadn't the heart to blot out history even though it portrayed his own father in a very painful light. The incident had occurred three years prior to the marriage of Clemens and Eliza.

What we want to remember our old pioneer ancestors for is their awesome courage, strength and imagination for facing the unknown dangers and trials when they left their European homes, all the while knowing that they would never be able to return or see the family members they left behind. Also, as human beings, they undoubtedly had a darker side, as we all have.

I think this is well put. And so my mom saved this history for future generations in her book of family stories.  

Sources

Kenyon, Shirley Knaus. n.d. “Clemens Knaus.” In Knaus Family Stories: A Compilation of Stories Told by the Offspring of Dan and Lillian Knaus, 166.

Gater, Pete. "Lady Doctor Now History." The Boulder Daily Camera, FOCUS section, Sunday, August 10, 1969. Private holdings, Lillian Knaus scrapbook.

Ancestry Family Trees (Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members.), Ancestry.com, Ancestry Family Tree.

All the following from the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection:

"Territorial News," The Rocky Mountain News, Volume 12, Dec 13, 1871, page 1. "Mrs. Fredricka Baun of Left Hand, died suddenly on Tuesday...".

"Territorial Gossip." The Rocky Mountain News, Volume 14, January 30, 1873. "Last Monday Judge Wells sentenced..."

"Local Briefs." The Rocky Mountain News, Volume 14 March 12, 1873. "The supreme court yesterday rendered..."

"Pardon Solicited." Denver Daily Times, July 26, 1873: "A petition signed by eight hundred citizens..."

"Pardoned." Denver Daily Times, August 9, 1873. "The governor has granted a pardon..."

"Local Matters." The Colorado Miner (Weekly), Volume VII, Number 14, August 14, 1873. " The Governor has pardoned Mrs. Solander..."

49 – Family Recipe

Mom introduced us to and engaged us in cooking at a young age; mostly this was for desserts, but also included some simple main dishes, bread from scratch, etc. We always referred to recipes made from basic ingredients as "from scratch" versus "from a mix," which we generally avoided as being too costly and inferior.

I think Mom's go-to cookbook was a Better Homes and Garden one that came in a three-ring hard cover binder, with some sections and pages definitely more used than others. One section in the back covered "common substitutions" which always came in handy as we weren't about to travel to a grocery store for one missed ingredient.

We had standard meals and a diet which would change when visiting our paternal grandparents in Wisconsin (definitely more German-influenced) or our maternal grandparents on their farm in Colorado where food was often home-canned and milk came from the farm cows. Some of those meals were special: we simply couldn't get the German bakery rolls and strings of Johnsonville hot dogs in our Chicago suburban town. Other meals contained novelty items we shunned, such as pickled beets.

After leaving home for other parts of the country, my siblings and I would occasionally solicit Mom for a copy of a recipe we missed and wanted to make ourselves. In 2005 my youngest sister, Pat, compiled a book of recipes from siblings and other relatives, as well as some that Mom had typed or written up on index cards. This week I rediscovered that book buried among other cookbooks, and spent some time reminiscing as I leafed though its colorful pages.

Family recipes compiled by Pat Rittenhouse

Some of the recipes are new ones to our generation, found and adopted from friends, newspapers, etc., but many are labeled with the name of one of our grandmothers, aunts or great-aunts, parents, and childhood neighbors. Some have short explanations of origin, and popular alterations. The oldest one is for "Suet Pudding," passed down from a Swedish great-great-grandmother – Mom wrote, "In the beginning , the reputation for being good cooks started with your Swedish great-great-grandmothers." 

One of our childhood favorites, and perhaps the one with the best kid name is for "Apple Goodie" from a great aunt and neighbor of my Colorado grandparents, mostly comprised of apples and sugar with a little butter and oatmeal thrown in. 

"Apple Goodie" recipe, good for treating low blood sugar

One recipe, for "Bread and Butter Pickles," is not attributed, but I'm sure it came from Colorado. My 95-year-old Aunt Gladys keeps this recipe alive in Longmont by hosting a yearly 'Pickle Day' in autumn. On this day  cousins come together to can cucumbers, some into these sweet pickles, and others into very tasty dill pickles. Some year I hope to make it to Colorado for Pickle Day.

Family recipe book, table of contents