My visual piece shows myself with my parents on each side. Above each of my parents are my Grandparents smaller as the distance of time diminishes the memories are pictures of my great Grandparents. One set belonging to my Grandmother, and the other set belonging to my Grandfather.  The assemblage sculpture was done with this project in mind. The facial features were retrieved from my great Grandmother Leanah Adams Strahn’s button box that has been passed down through the women in my family and now resides with me. All stories have been told to me by my mother with an accumulation of genealogy materials in a box that someday will be sorted through.

 

The story begins in 1853 when my father’s family left the Provence of Alsace Lorraine to journey to the United States. I learned that the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870 between France and Germany disputing this territory. I suspect my relatives saw the inevitable and decided to leave this area of conflict before it escalated, moving to the United States. I have been told that the Schlotter family had a long history as priests and nuns. Since education was important in my father’s family, without wealth, this was a means of pursuing this endeavor. There was one member who decided to become a pirate but was unsuccessful as he was hung. So the family made the journey coming up the Mississippi River through New Orleans. They stopped in St. Louis where one of the girls married into the Busch family (Anheuser-Busch). I haven’t substantiated this story, but this has been told to me since I was a child. The family continued their journey to settle in Keokuk, Iowa. I am fifth generation and the first generation to have left Keokuk.

 

In the late 1800s the five sons of the Schlotter family were getting into scrapes hanging out at bars. Their mother bought some land and put five green houses on it opening a florist business thereby putting them to work and out of trouble. Schlotter’s florist business was in business a hundred years until there were no family members willing to go into the business. It closed in the late 1970s.

 

The stories about my Great Grandfather were that he was a towering and ornery man. However, my Great Grandmother was a tenacious lady, story goes, when he came home drunk she tore a picket off the fence beating him into the house. Their son, Frederick B. Schlotter worked in Washington, D.C. at the Washington Post where he was introduced (because both were from Keokuk) to my Grandmother Wilhelmina Immegart who worked at the United States Treasury. They married and honeymooned for a year in San Francisco. They settled in Keokuk, IA and proceeded to have a family of four children, two boys and two girls. Unfortunately when my father was two my Grandmother died from an ear infection. Five years later my Grandfather was to die from pneumonia, leaving the four children orphaned. My Grandmother’s family was large but her brothers and sisters were all priests and nuns. Therefore my Grandfather’s cousins split the children up to raise them and ended up rotating them among family members.

 

My father ended up growing up working in the greenhouses until joining the Marines, serving on the USS Mississippi. During the war my mother and father wrote to each other having been in high school together. At age nineteen she married him in Seattle when he was on leave. After the war he went to school in Ames, Iowa getting a degree in Forestry while my mother worked as a secretary for the President of the college. On her lunch hour she learned to sew from another secretary in the office. This was to become a life long passion of hers. They settled in Keokuk where my brother and I were born. My father was to work in the corrugated box industry. The company in Keokuk, Horner’s Box Industry was to merge with Waldorf causing us to end up moving to Minneapolis, MN. They then merged with Champion and the trek this time took us to Springfield, MO. My parents divorced and I went off to college in Columbia, MO where my mother was to follow. Eventually we were both to end up working at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I was to marry an officer in the Navy which furthered my journey to a brief stay in Monterey, CA then Lexington Park, MD ending up in Orange Park, FL now Fleming Island, FL. Now divorced, I am making this area my home.

 

Highlights of my mother’s family are that a Prunty girl married into the family of Daniel Boone. The Boone family is a large family and the names do show up in records. The other major branch of the family is that of Adams, reportedly we are related to John Adams. Genealogists have been pursuing this avenue for years. We have familial characteristics as we age such as snow-white hair, dark eyebrows with a tremor in the right hand. The family was coming from the east through Ohio when Indians attacked the wagon train killing the parents and orphaned a boy who only knew his name of Adams. He was taken in by a blacksmith and raised. His son was to become one of the earliest teachers in the area. This son was to journey to Iowa, with his children eventually settling in Keokuk, IA. An interesting side note to this son, Frederich Adams was that his sister, Rebecah Adams married in 1850 and went west or southwest never to be heard from again. I wonder how many families endured this legacy, in the settling of the west, as families were never heard from again.

 

My grandmother was one of eight children with only five surviving to adulthood. She was a very gifted pianist that practiced four hours a day for the rest of her life. She was taken out of school in eighth grade and put to work to survive the depression. The impact of the depression created such an impression that the only child she ever had was my mother. Shortly after I married my mother past away.

 

This disconnect from my birth area is due to numerous reasons, a lack of economic opportunity, a lack familial ties, and the havoc of divorce. I wonder how many families disappear under similar circumstances. While growing up, family was everything because everyone knew whom you were going back to Grandparents and Great Grandparents these generational ties defined your family. We moved away and no one knows who you are. Consequently, I feel the great disconnect with family and identity. I believe that with the loss of small towns we are losing individual history and community ties. This is my story and how I came to be where I am.