Family Stories taken from
"LOOKING BACK"We have asked for information from descendants of first homesteaders and early day settlers with mediocre response.
Sometime when inquiry was made by sending a written questionnaire to a relative of a family we were trying to trace, the lines would run something like this:
Question: When did Grandpa come to Nebraska?
Answer: Grandpa who?
Question: Did you live with Grandpa a few years?
Answer: If you mean Uncle _______ and Aunt ______, yes.
Question: Was Grandmother's maiden name Mary ________?
Answer: No, Aunt Polly.
Question continued: Gravestone says Mary.
Answer: I don't know.
Therefore we often had to relay on information we could piece together from records afforded us by others than the family; records at the court house or at the grave yards; old newspaper accounts and finally from our own or someone's memory.
We fear there are errors by commission, but fear even more that there are errors by omission.
Following are stories about individual families, asked for repeatedly, and furnished by only a few.
THE WIENCK FAMILY
John Hartwig Wienck was born in 1838 in Mecklenburg, Germany. At the age of 21 years, he came to America and settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he took up the trade of carpentry. Because of illness he moved to Nebraska in 1886.
Augusta Vormelker came to America at the age of 19 with her parents and brothers and sisters, Gustave, Wilhemenia, Bertha, Ida, Conrad, Julius and Carolyn. She was married to John Hartwig Wienck and to them the following children were born: Anna in 1875, died at the age of 21 of quick consumption; Ottilia (Mrs. W. August Volk), in 1882; Pauline (Mrs. Theo. Eckman), 1880; Malvina, 1885, died at the age of 3 years of diphtheria; Louise (Mrs. Gustave Scherer), 1888; Agnes (Mrs. Geo. Bartholme), 1894.
The children attended parochial school with Mr. M. G. Doering as their teacher. Ottilia was attending school at the time the church was being built in 1889. She used to be one among others who would climb to the top of the church and walk on the cat walks. Of course, this they were not supposed to do and were
115