Sommerer Family Website
Good enough for who it's for
My mom sent these to me and told me to put them on the website. Since you have to do what your mom tells you to do, here they are:
I think Aunt Cleo decoupaged these several decades ago. Were they hanging on the wall in the dining room in grandma’s house? Here’s the PDF document that my mom sent to me if you need a night quality print. Bonus points is anyone wants to translate them for us.
Opening website notes:
Penny Watson typed this up, and I imagine some of you have already read it. My understanding is that they just asked Uncle Mahlon questions and kept track of what he said, but I’m sure someone can give us more details.
I’m going to slice it up into smaller sections like the other “Stories.” The main reason for doing this is that it gives everyone else a chance to comment and post questions as we go along. As with all of the other documents in the “Stories” series, I will post the whole document after all the little bits have been on the website. If I forget to do that, someone should remind me.
I took the liberty of changing this from the third person in the original document to first person. Mostly to make things fit with the other articles from Aunts and Uncles. Special thanks to Penny for getting this to me and I’m sorry it took me two months to start putting them on the website.
Uncle Mahlon’s Story (part 1)
I was born in Jefferson City, Missouri on December 30, 1932 at Realius Beck’s place. The Beck’s place was a log house and I was delivered on a dining room table. This dining room table was the same table we had in my house growing up and ate meals on all the time. Lloyd and I re-visited the Beck’s place in 2011.
My earliest memory of my grandfather, Adolph’s father [this is Johann Mathias Sommerer, Jr] was when he lived with our family for a short time. We lived together in a two-story home located in Shubert, Missouri just south-east of Jefferson City, Missouri off of Highway 50. I can remember my grandfather whittling an ax handle while I wanted to play ring around the rosy. I was three years old and at this time and mother was pregnant with Cleopha. The final earliest memory I have was the time mother looking out the window at a hurst lined up outside because grandfather had passed away. I was awake in the home when he was being loaded up and taken away.
Cleopha and Lolly were born at Schubert. One summer the folks were in town. I was herding cows across the road and Lolly or Cleopha (I don’t remember which one), came out on the road in diapers and had traffic stopped until Margie came out and got her off the road… Ha!
A year or so after we moved to Schubert, Otto Tichelkamp lost their farm and rented a farm near where we lived. We had lived next to them while we lived on Uncle Theodore’s Honey Creek farm. We went to Forest Hill School with Harriet Tichelkamp one year. The barn on the farm was very well made. It had the same kind of floors in it that most houses have, plus electricity. One year we cleaned it up good and had a barn dance. Daddy got the Herbrant boys to play the music. I don’t think I was to a barn dance before or after that.
Mom was always a 4-H club leader. She had girls from Schubert, Taos, and all around in her club. The land on the farm was very poor and not much of it, so we rented land anywhere we could find it. One year we rented land over in the Callaway Bottoms. That was a long way to go with a team of mules. One time Bud was crossing the Missouri River Bridge in Jefferson City and a train went through under the bridge and blew its whistle and Bud nearly lost control of the mules.
They planted pumpkins in the corn over in the Callaway Bottom land and that fall on election eve in 1946, when Roosevelt ran against Landon and Knox, we were out at the barn carrying that load of pumpkins into the barn. We cut them up with a corn knife and fed them to the cows. We were spoiled living with an electric washer, radio, brooder and iron at Schubert, because on our next move back to Honey Creek, we were again without electricity for a long time.
