Katharina Gansemer

1850s

Born 6 April 1858 in Rodt, in the Taben-Rodt area of Prussia's Rhine Province, to Johann Gansemer and Katharina Dühr. Four older siblings had died in infancy or childhood.

1860s

Left for North America with her parents and two younger sisters on 5 November 1862, aged four. The ship Admiral took forty-six days to reach New York, arriving 29 December 1862 after storms tore away rigging and sails. The family settled in Dubuque County, Iowa.

1870s

Married Michael Leineweber at Sherrill on 29 September 1874, at sixteen. Children Catharine (1875), Peter (1877), and John Baptiste (1879) were born.

1880s–1920s

Lived on the family farm near Sherrill's Mound, which Michael bought from her mother in 1882. Widowed in 1902, she kept the farm with her son Peter. Visited Portland in 1912–13.

1930s

Moved to Portland, Oregon, around 1931 to live with her son John Baptiste's family. Sold the Iowa farm in 1936 and died in Portland on 3 August 1937.

A Child's Crossing

Catharina Gansemer was born on April 6, 1858, in Rodt, in the Taben-Rodt district of Prussia's Rhine Province, the daughter of Johann Gansemer and Katharina Dühr. She was probably baptized three days later in Taben, with Catharina Kill of Taben and Nikolaus Neises of Rodt as godparents. Her parents had already buried four children: Johann, Matthias, Peter, and an older Catharina, whose name she was given, all died before she was born. Two sisters followed her, Elizabeth in 1860 and Margaretha in 1861.

On November 5, 1862, when Catharina was four, the family set out for America. They took the train from Mettlach to Le Havre and sailed on the Admiral, which ran into such fierce weather that it lost rigging, sails, and part of its prow, and took forty-six days, half again the usual time, to reach New York on December 29, 1862. The Gansemers settled in Peru Township, Dubuque County, Iowa, where a brother, John, was born in 1864. He died in August 1874, a few weeks before Catharina's wedding. Her sister Margaret became a nun, Sister Mary Benvenuta.

Farm and Family in Iowa

On September 29, 1874, at sixteen, Catharina married Michael Leineweber, a Prussian-born farmhand twenty-one years her senior who had worked on her family's farm, at SS. Peter & Paul Church in Sherrill. Their children were Catharine, born in 1875, Peter in 1877, and John Baptiste (Meghan's great-grandfather) in 1879; a fourth baby, born in 1880, died the next spring. They lived on her mother's farm, and in 1882 Michael bought it from her. In 1880 her sister Elizabeth married Peter Naumann, and settled nearby in Sherrill.

Catharina's grandson Pete remembered her as "very small, about 5' tall, and very bent over at the shoulders," and neatly dressed, "much like country folk in Germany might dress, dark clothes, a perky little hat and high button shoes." She spoke German to her children all her life and English only with a very thick accent. Her son Peter liked to "translate" the newspaper into German for her, making up terrible stories until she clutched her head and cried, "Ach, Jesus Jesus Jesus!" The farm stayed old-fashioned, with no electricity and no motorized equipment except a 1914 Studebaker that came out about six times a year, and Peter made 150 gallons of grape wine every year.

Widowhood and Portland

Michael died in 1902, and Catharina stayed on the farm with Peter and her daughter Catharine. In December 1912 she and Peter traveled west to visit John Baptiste's family in Portland, Oregon, and the neighbors gave a welcome-home dinner for them in February 1913. Her daughter Catharine died in 1919. In 1927 John Baptiste drove his family out from Portland and stayed a month, and Catharina, very religious, went to Mass every day of their visit. The next year Peter fell ill, and he died in April 1929.

Around 1931, now in her seventies, Catharina moved to Portland to live with John Baptiste's family. There was no room for her in the Glisan Street house, so a cousin of John Baptiste's wife, Mary McFeely, put them all up in a rental on NW Hoyt Street until the Glisan house was ready in 1932. She tidied up her affairs in Iowa: in 1930 she secured rights-of-way from three neighbors for a dollar each and took over land from the heirs of her sister Elizabeth, and in December 1936 she sold the Leineweber farm to her niece Josephine Anthony and her husband for a dollar. Catharina died at the house on NW Glisan Street on August 3, 1937, at seventy-nine, and was buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Portland. Her son John Baptiste died two years later.