The website serving up all the great church records and other information relevant to the Ortman family is called Porta Fontium and provides digital historical source material for Bavarian-Czech research. In addition to church records for Planá, they also have some historical photographs that would show what the town looked like back in the days when the […]
Josephine Ortman
It has been a while since I posted about the Kreifels family. Last time, we looked at what little I know about Louis Kreifels’ youth in Otoe County, Nebraska. On May 28, 1889 at the age of 28, he married Josephine Ortman. This is a fascinating branch of Dale’s family tree that I am anxious […]
Louis Kreifels, early years
Herman and Anna Margaretha Kreifels had ten children altogether. The oldest two, both girls, were born while the family lived in Missouri. The next seven, two girls and five boys, were born in Minnesota. The youngest, a boy, was born in Nebraska City. To the genealogist, this means a lot of different records in a […]
Book review: “Giants in the Earth” by Rölvaag, 1927
I can’t believe I’d never heard of this book before, “Giants in the Earth“. It was written in 1927 by Ole Edvard Rölvaag, a Norwegian immigrant and a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. The book is a fictionalized account of original homesteaders on the South Dakota prairie, and goes into quite a […]
Meanwhile, back in Minnesota
We have traced the long arc of the Blommer family as they left Germany in 1840, settled in Loose Creek Missouri, moved to Minnesota in 1855, and then looked at the two sons-in-law, Herman and Sebastian Kreifels, as they left Missouri for Nebraska in 1869. We’ve examined the difficult early years for Herman and Sebastian – […]
