Johan Peter Steigerwald (Stierwalt): German Craftsman

  Coming to America Johan Peter Steigerwald, known as Peter, was born in 1730 in the Hesse region of Germany and grew up in Floersbach, about 35 miles east of Frankfurt. In 1749 Peter is named on a Hesse Lutheran Parish registry with his father, Johannes (John), as one of the emigrants who left for Pennsylvania. Much like the Swiss Anabaptist movement, the early 1700’s saw large numbers of German Lutherans moving to the English Colonies in search of religious freedom. Johannes...

School Days: The Ove Sisters

The How do-you-do-bunch Today I stumbled across the Pennington County Historical Society Website and was excited to find some great photos of the Ove sisters while attending high school in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Ida (Ove) Conlin (front row, center) and her sister Nettie Ove (middle row, right) are both part of the “How do-you-do-Bunch”. You may also recognize Nell (Nellie Berg) from my previous Nettie Ove: Milliners Daughter post. I have no idea what the “How do-you-do-Bunch” did, but it sounds...

Nettie Ove: Milliner’s Daughter

Photo of Olga Hulltin, Nellie (Berg) Pellymounter, Nettie Ove and Florence “Flora” (Berg) Glanville of Thief River Falls, Minnesota (taken abt. 1912). millinery and the ove family Beginning in the 1500’s, Italian merchants from Milan, known as “Millaners”, would travel throughout northern Europe selling fine women’s fashions and ornaments. Eventually, the term, milliner, came to be used for the artisans who created women’s bonnets and hats. During the 19th and early 20th century, hats were a staple of every fashionable woman’s...

A May Day Tradition: New York Moving Day

“Never knew the city in such a chaotic state. Every other house seems to be disgorging itself into the street; all the sidewalks are lumbered with bureaus and bedsteads to the utter destruction of their character as thoroughfares, and all the space between the sidewalks is occupied by long processions of carts and wagons and vehicles omnigenous laden with perilous piles of moveables.” -The Diary of Templeton Strong (Cover Photo: May Day in New York, Harper’s Magazine, 1850) Moving Day…packing...

Finding Jacob Ove: Researching Norwegian Ancestors

Jacob Ove (left) with an unidentified person (right) My memories of visiting Great-grandma and Grandpa Conlin while growing up are primarily connected to sweets — namely butterscotch candies and fig newtons. Grandma needed those candies to keep Grandpa sweet…or so she said. When I grew older and began genealogy research there were plenty of stories and information passed down about Grandpa Conlin’s Irish Family and Grandma Conlin’s mother’s Norwegian family, but when it came to her father, I only knew two things:...

John Joseph “JJ” Carroll: Overcoming the Odds

(Illustration above: New York City in 1851)  “What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps?…This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth…See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl...

Amanda (Evans) Stierwalt: Show and Tell

Photo: Amanda (Evans) Stierwalt While researching this week I came across a newspaper article about Hezekiah K. Stierwalt, who was showing off some treasures while visiting relatives in Kansas. These treasures included the button (rattle) of a rattlesnake that his wife, Amanda, killed with a stick of stove wood. I have so much respect for pioneer women and am so glad to live in modern times....