| Carl and Frances Meet. Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Juhnke and Frances Kaufman,
immigrants from German-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, were married in Yankton,
South Dakota, on November 21, 1876. The groom at this wedding, at 35 years of age, was
more than twice as old as the bride, who was 17. According to family oral tradition, they
first met at the Old Germania Hotel in Yankton where Frances, who came from the Mennonite
community at Freeman, South Dakota, had gotten a job. Carl had spent some time in
Wisconsin before coming to northern Nebraska. Neither Carl nor Frances had living parents.
It must have been a small wedding. The couple began life together on a farmstead in Knox
County, Nebraska, not far south of the Missouri River. Carl Juhnke's Origin and
Family. Carl Juhnke (1841-1918) did not tell much about his family background or his
coming to America. He said that he and his older sister, Fredericka (1836-1902), who also
came to America, were orphans. They left no record of their parents' names. In the absence
of documented information, we are left with unreliable oral tradition. Carl may have left
in order to escape conscription into the Prussian army. Some family members remembered
that he spoke of a tall brother who remained in Europe, and that he sold some pigs in
order to raise money for passage to America.
When did Carl immigrate to America? It was probably in 1869, the year Ulysses S. Grant
was inaugurated president, although there is some evidence for an earlier year. The Carl
Juhnke record on the Federal Census for both the 1900 and 1910 record gives 1869 as the
year of immigration. We must assume that he gave this same date to the two census takers
who gathered their information ten years apart. The year 1869 fits with the story that
Carl left Prussia to avoid military service. The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870.
However, when Carl died in 1918 a notice of his death which appeared in the Christlicher
Bundesbote states that he had come to America in 1861 when he was twenty years old.
Perhaps this is an error. The American Civil War began in 1861 and it does not seem to
make sense for Carl to escape Prussian militarism by going to America which was in a Civil
War. The numbers of European immigrants declined severely during the American Civil War.
More than four times as many German speaking immigrants came to America in 1869 than in
1861. It is likely that Carl Juhnke came with the larger migration, but we will not know
for sure until we find more reliable evidence, such as his name on an immigrant ship list.
Where did Carl and Fredericka come from? According to the obituary published at the
time of his death, Carl was born in "Hinterpommern," which in English is Farther
Pomerania. (Some family accounts mistakenly give this place name as
"Hinterkonnern" or "Hiterkonnern.") Farther Pomerania was a Baltic Sea
Coast province east of the Oder river. During Carl and Fredericka's childhood, Pomerania
was part of the state of Prussia. Today it is a part of Poland. From 1713 to 1861, four
men on the throne as King of Prussia had the name of Frederich Wilhelm (I-IV). Carl's
parents gave him two middle names, Friedrich Wilhelm, after the names of the Prussian
royal line. When Carl went to America, Otto Von Bismarck was the chancellor of Prussia and
was engaging in the wars which unified Germany into a modern nation under Prussia's
leadership.
Fredericka Juhnke married Albert Knopf in 1865 and they had a son, August Friedrich,
the following year. According to family tradition, Albert was drafted into Bismarck's army
and never returned. Fredericka dropped the name Knopf for both herself and her son. In
1870, with her brother Carl's financial assistance, Fredericka and August Juhnke emigrated
to America. Fredericka married Carl Suenram, and lived on a farm near Yankton, not far
from Carl and Frances' farm. Both of these families later moved to Kansas. August Juhnke
whose name was changed to Yuhnke when he became a naturalized citizen, participated in the
Cherokee Run of 1893 and began farming in Oklahoma. In 1901 the August Yuhnke family moved
to Chico, California.
When August Yuhnke died in 1936, the newspaper notice said he had been born in
Schleswig-Holstein, combined provinces which were annexed to Prussia in 1866.
Schleswig-Holstein is just south of Denmark, about two hundred miles west of Farther
Pomerania. How did Fredericka Juhnke get to Schleswig-Holstein? The details about the
origins of the Carl and Fredericka Juhnke family in Europe remain obscure. The family
history by Barbara Beitzel, Heritage of August & Alwina Yuhnke, contains some
interesting information, but also includes some fanciful stories and numerous historical
errors. Further genealogical research will be necessary to get reliable information about
the family origins of Carl Juhnke.
Frances Kaufman's Origin and Family. Frances Kaufman (1859-1899), unlike her
future husband, was born into a strong extended family and community tradition. Her people
were Mennonites who traced their origins to Switzerland. Frances' Swiss identity was so
strong that she told the census taker in 1880 that her father had been born in
Switzerland. In fact, the Kaufman family was several generations removed from Switzerland.
Their Swiss ancestors, who had been part of the Anabaptist reformation, fled persecution
and moved northward in the seventeenth century to the provinces of Alsace and the
Palatinate. The Anabaptists were persecuted because they followed teachings they found in
the New Testament which were not acceptable to the established state churches. They
practiced adult baptism and refused the oath and military service. In the late eighteenth
century Frances' people migrated again, this time to eastern Europe. They eventually
settled in Volhynia, a province on the shifting border of Poland and Russia. They came to
be known as "Swiss Volhynians." When they came to America, most of them traveled
in large groups rather than as individuals.
Frances was the daughter of Jacob Kaufman (1800-1873) and his third wife, Maria Unruh (
-1862). She was her father's eleventh child. She was fifteen years old at the time of the
migration in 1874. Because both her parents had died by that time, she had to learn to be
independent. The dislocations of her early life help account for her lack of education,
her youthful employment in Yankton, and her early marriage to an older man. Frances could
not read or write. On a mortgage of 1884 she signed by making a mark rather than writing
out her name.
Nevertheless Frances was a strong woman who took initiative and who had the support of
an extended family. The family pictures reveal her sitting tall and proud at the center of
the family. She used the name of Frances for herself, rather than the more formal
Francisca, but she was also known informally as Frehnie, Freni, or Fannie. One of the
surviving mementos is a calling card decorated with flowers and with the name, "Mrs.
Frances Juhnke." It is no surprise that her family eventually moved into the heart of
a Mennonite settlement and that all of her children became Mennonites and married
Mennonite partners.
Carl and Frances in Nebraska. On June 4, 1877, Carl Juhnke registered his patent
for 160 acres in Frankfort Township, Knox County, Nebraska, under the Homestead Law of
1862. The farm was about two miles south of the Missouri River, seven miles north of
Crofton, Nebraska, and twelve miles from Yankton, South Dakota.
On their homestead in Knox County, Carl and Frances Juhnke lived not far from friends
and relatives. It is not known, however, how Carl Juhnke was related to other Juhnke
families in northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota. Two of Carl's close friends were
Carl Bartz and Charles Mischke. These three men apparently took out naturalization papers
at the same time in 1875, according to the District Court Journal of Hartington, Nebraska.
Family tradition says that Carl Bartz and Carl Juhnke worked on the Charles Mischke farm.
Carl Bartz was married to Hanna Juhnke.
Life on the Nebraska agricultural frontier was difficult, but the Juhnke family found
ways to survive. In the spring of 1880 a Nebraska census taker recorded that the value of
the farm was $500 and the value of the livestock was $300. They had four horses, five milk
cows, four pigs, and thirty chickens. In 1879 those chickens laid 150 eggs. They harvested
three grain crops: Five acres of Indian Corn produced 200 bushels; eight acres of oats
produced 180 bushels; eighteen acres of wheat produced only 36 bushels. The census records
are not always accurate, but they do give some indication of the diet of the Juhnke
family. They ate a lot of potatoes and bread.
Although the production figures of the Carl Juhnke farm in Nebraska are not impressive
by modern standards, the increase in value of the land was spectacular. In 1883 Carl
Juhnke sold his farm to Hulda Loeber for $3,000 -- not a bad profit for land received free
of charge as a homestead from the United States government.
Frances Juhnke was eighteen years old in 1877 when she gave birth to her first child,
Ida, on October 13, 1877. Three more children were born while they lived at the Knox
County farm: Ernest (b. April 4, 1879), Emma Mary (b. June 6, 1881), and Lydia Clara (b.
November 17, 1883). The children were all baptized as infants in the German Evangelical
Church. |
