Stearns County cemetery tour

In the two years Don and Janet have lived in MN, we've made attempts to get together at least every other month. Sometimes it's at our house or theirs, other times dinner in the Twin Cities area, a visit to a museum or art gallery, a play, or some other event. Today's get-together started out with lunch at Granite City Brewery in St. Cloud, followed by a tour of Stearns County church cemeteries. 

My grandparents lived in Rosoe. Grandma Bene grew up there and went to high school in Paynesville. There is a connection somewhere on the Nathe family tree between Ray Nathe (Janet's dad) and Duane Nathe (my mom's cousin). We'll leave that unresolved for now, but it's interesting enough to know that Janet's relatives and mine lived so close together at one time. Janet dad's family (the Nathe, Winter, and Schoenborn families, among others) settled in the area , and her dad lived in Melrose for a short time as a child. 

Dad/Larry/Gpappy is the genealogy researcher for his family and mine, and he's far more interested in the historical context of relatives in past generations than I am. I appreciate his interest, but "recent" relatives like my grandparents --Marcus and Martha Kirsch-- and their parents have more meaning to me.  Every time she visited us in Spring Valley when I was a kid, Grandma Kirsch and my mom caught up on all the news from Stearns County about people with German names like Schmitz, Fuchs (sorry), Mehr, Sauer, Nathe, Muggli, and Backes. There were no Johnsons, Olsons, or Larsons in my family, and there appear to be none buried anywhere in Stearns County, either! I've never seen so many German names, a disproportionate number of them being "Fuchs", by the way. Who knew there were so many?

Okay, I'm including this blog entry for myself, so you can stop reading any time. I want to have a photo record of some of the places we went today in the blog book I'll print at the end of the year. 

Our first stop was St. Agnes Catholic Church in Roscoe. Grandma Bene and Grandpa Charlie were married there at a ceremony with a lot of "Catholic rigmarole", according to my Grandma Reps. I have a letter in her own handwriting that attests to her concern about my dad's conversion.

                       

Marcus Kirsch, my grandfather, died a few months before I was born. 

GK died on the 4th of July in 1993, 20 years ago.

Marcus's parents (my great-grandparents):

Maggie (her nickname)and Michel Kirsch.

My grandfather Marcus owned the grain elevator in Roscoe in the 1940's.

Stearns County baseball has always been a big deal. Roscoe has fewer than 110 residents, but they have a baseball field, as they did when (big) Uncle Mike played in the '50s, and Marcus "Stub" did before him.

The next stop was St. Margaret's Church cemetery in Lake Henry. GK grew up in Lake Henry. Her parents:  Peter Schmitz and Eva Fuchs Schmitz.

 

 GK's Fuchs grandparents: Quirin Fuchs (can you imagine?) 

and Anna Mehr Fuchs.

When were locating Janet's relatives in a beautiful little cemetery in Spring Hill, I took this non-ancestor photo, mostly for Evan.

As we were leaving St. Peter and Paul's Cemetery in Richmond (filled with Backes ancestors), we saw this monument.... no kidding!

On a completely different topic, but one that has special meaning for Teresa and me, Larry/Dad and I drove through Eden Valley on the way home. I sent Teresa a text after taking the photo below...

"We blazed through town trying to get away from the gang of Eden Valley-Watkins English teachers who spotted us as we drove past the lumber yard. I could hear them screaming for our heads." 

If the message made it through cyberspace, I'm sure Teresa was laughing her ass off when she read it. She had I had a near-fatal encounter with the EV-W teaching staff on an unseasonably hot late November day a number of years ago when we were hired to do a day-long staff development workshop on writing. The heat might have been responsible, because our presence didn't sit well with a number of the teachers. Or maybe it was because the district language arts committee failed to tell them that writing was going to be a part of the curriculum. It was ugly. You had to be there, but trust me, we're lucky to have escaped. 

Back to the purpose of visiting Stearns County... Don and Janet, if you read this, thanks for meeting us today and exploring the area.