Katharina Gansemer

1850s

Born 6 April 1858 in Rodt, in the Taben-Rodt area of Rhineland Prussia.

1860s

Left for North America with her whole family on 5 November 1862, aged four — a train from Mettlach to Le Havre, then the ship Admiral, which reached New York on 29 December 1862 after a storm that carried away rigging, sails and part of the bow. The family settled in Dubuque County, Iowa.

1870s

Married the farm laborer Michael Leineweber on 29 September 1874 at Sherrill, and began raising a large family on the Gansemer farm, which they bought from her mother in 1882.

1880s–1920s

Ran the farm household near Sherrill's Mound for decades. After Michael's death in 1902 she eventually moved to Portland, Oregon, to be near family.

1930s

Died in Portland on 3 August 1937.

A Child's Crossing

Catharina Gansemer was born on April 6, 1858, in Rodt, part of the Taben-Rodt district of Prussia's Rhine Province, and likely baptized three days later in Taben, with godparents Catharina Kill of Taben and Nikolaus Neises of Rodt. On November 5, 1862, not yet five years old, she left for North America with her parents and siblings — Johann, Matthias, Peter, and another sister also named Catharina. The family took a train from Mettlach to Le Havre and sailed on the ship Admiral, which took forty-six days to reach New York, twice the normal crossing time, after storms tore away its rigging and sails and damaged its prow. They settled among fellow German immigrants in Peru Township, Dubuque County, Iowa.

Farm and Family in Iowa

Catharina married Michael Leineweber, a laborer on her family's farm, at SS. Peter & Paul Church in Sherrill on September 29, 1874 — family tradition holds she was only sixteen or seventeen. The couple bought the Gansemer farm from Catharina's widowed mother in 1882 and raised their family there for the rest of Michael's life and long after his death in 1902. Her grandson Pete remembered that she spoke mostly German at home, with a thick accent when she used English, and went to daily Mass whenever her son John Baptiste brought his family out from Oregon to visit in the late 1920s. Family lore also preserved a lighter memory: her son Peter used to “translate” the newspaper into German for her, inventing outlandish stories that left her clutching her head and exclaiming, “Ach, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” The farm itself stayed resolutely old-fashioned — no electricity and no motorized equipment beyond a 1914 Studebaker that the family used only a handful of times a year — while another son, Peter, kept up a yearly tradition of making 150 gallons of grape wine.

Winding Down the Farm, and Portland

Catharina kept the farm going for more than three decades after Michael's death, and the documents catch her in a burst of land dealings in her final years — granting rights-of-way to neighbors for a dollar apiece in early 1930, inheriting land from her late sister Elizabeth's heirs, and finally, in December 1936, selling the Leineweber farm outright to her niece Josephine Anthony and her husband for a token dollar. By then Catharina had already moved to Portland, Oregon, to be near her son John Baptiste's family, living on Hoyt Street and then on NW Glisan Street. She died in Portland on August 3, 1937, at seventy-nine.