My Visit with the Sisters of St. Agnes

I just returned from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin where I visited the Sisters of St. Agnes, who ran the school in Catherine, Kansas starting in 1899.  I interviewed eight sisters.  Some of them were originally from Catherine  and a few just worked in the school (1st-8th grade) between 1946-1951.  While I still need to conduct a few more interviews and compare it with my primary and secondary source research, there are  few conclusions that are important:

1. Why the women joined the Sisters of St. Agnes from Catherine?:  There are a few answers to this question.  First, the women felt a legitimate call from God to join the order.  Second, most of them wanted to be teachers or nurses, which was the primary goal of the order.  Third, joining the sisters offered upward mobility for those who joined.  Almost all of them attended high school and received either college or graduate degree.  In the secular world, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, that was much harder for women to do.

2. Overall, the sisters liked working in Catherine:  Out of the 3 sisters I interviewed who came to Catherine to work (between 1946-1951), only one felt see did not feel completely welcome in the community.  All the sisters I interviewed did not speak German, which was difficult when the whole town spoke that language, and did not interact much with the community due to rules by the order.  The sisters felt the young Catherine students liked learning, were engaging students, and the parents fostered an environment that supported education.

3. When the younger generation stopped speaking German?:  I'm still working on this question.  I think it really determines the shape of the community.  The sisters who arrived in 1946 indicate that the students spoke German and one sister who grew up in Catherine and professed to the order in 1955 claims she did not learn German (the latter sister would be 78).  This means that starting in the early 1950s, parents stopped teaching their children German and the children started to assimilate.  This was most likely an after affect of World War II.

The trip produced some great insights for this project and I want to thank all the sisters at Fond du Lac who helped with the project!

Recommended Reading

For this post, I decided to give a few books that talk about Volga-German immigration and Ellis County, Kansas.  I linked to them on Amazon and the Ellis County Historical Society in case you get the urge to buy them:

History of the Volga-Germans in Russia: From Catherine toKhruschev: The Story of Russia’s Germans by Adam Giesinger. 

This book gives you an inside account of the German migration to the Volga in 1764-1767, some of their immigration to the United States, and what happened to that group when Stalin came to power. 

Volga-German immigration to the United States and social customs: Conquering the Wind:An Epic Migration from the Rhine to the Volga to the Great Plains by Amy Brungardt -Toepfer and Agnes Dreiling. (scroll down on the website to find it!)

This book is very famous in Kansas.  It recounts the the journey of these immigrants to Kansas and talks about some of their social customs and how they adapted to life on the great plains.

Ellis County Life: In UnsereLeute; The Volga Germans of West Central Kansas: Aspects of Their History,Politics, Culture and Language.  Edited by William D. Keel et al. (scroll down on the website to find it!)

This book is a collection of essays that by local authors in Kansas who discuss various topics on Volga-German life in Ellis County including: folk medicine, settlement patters, religious services, etc.  It was produced by the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies at the University of Kansas, which does excellent work in this field. 

Those are some of my picks.  These books are very easy to understand, short, and give you a taste of Volga-German life. 

Steel Crosses: A Modern Invention

When I initially proposed this project, I had the title: "Field of Iron Crosses: A Social History of Volga-German Immigrants, 1876-1900."[1]  I had always seen these crosses as part of the social fabric of Volga-German communities in Ellis County, Kansas.  In most cemeteries, especially Catherine, many of the older graves are marked with these distinctive designs.  I always thought this was a major tradition brought over from Russia. 

That turns out not to be the case.  The steel crosses first appeared in Catherine in 1902 when local blacksmith, Jacob J. Schmidt, wanted to design a special grave to memorialize his mother who passed away in 1885.[2]  Schmidt saw one of these crosses in a Salina cemetery and decided to recreate it.  The first cross took three days to make and most of the steel was imported from Philadelphia.  Eventually, Schmidt started making more of them for others in the town and it became an landmark ensignia for Volga-German communities in Ellis County.

One job of a historian is to put all the facts on the table.  Sometimes those facts do not align with popular memory.  The tradition of these steel crosses has sentimental value to the citizens of Catherine, and I never want to take that away from them.  However, making sure that there is a separation between popular rememberance and the historical record is one that a historian should take seriously. 

Notes:

[1] I will use the term "steel cross" because "iron cross" has an association with Nazi Germany.  I have seen both terms used in the literature. 

[2] Samuel J. Sackett, “Steel Crosses in Volga-German Catholic Cemeteries in Ellis, Rush, and Russell Counties, Kansas," in American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (1975).

Ask Me About My Research, Part II!

Questions:

How long did it take them to get to the U.S.?

How long did it take these immigrants to get citizenship?

Have a question you want answered about Volga-Germans?  Leave it in the comments section!

Ask me Anything!

I'm going to do another edition of "Ask Me About My Research This Weekend!"  I need questions.  Submit them in the comments section, I'll tell you the answer!  Look forward to some good questions!

Happy 4th of July

Today, we celebrate our nation's independence.  We also remember those who built this nation.  I have mixed feelings about the "American exceptionalism" narrative, mainly because it obscures historical facts and there are certainly parts of our history that are not as exceptional.  What I want people who read this blog to think about during your fireworks displays and backyard barbecues is that imperfection and continuity of change that makes Volga-German immigration history so fascinating.  

These men and women left Russia in 1875, after already having a history of migrating to the Volga a century earlier, to come to the United States in search of better farm land, religious freedom, avoiding service in the Russian army, and a chance to make a living.  They gave up their belongings in Russia and left behind family members for an experiment.  It was not predestined that living on Kansas plains would work, nor did they even have settlement picked out.  They could just have easily left after experiencing a few years of drought and economic hardships.  Building these settlements was slow and painstaking.  They also knew their lives would basically be the same as it was in Russia; they continued to be farmers.  It was that risk all these settlers took that I admire most.  U.S. immigration history rests on this principle and many groups did not succeed in living the "American dream."  For those that did make it through hardship, remembering their sacrifice is the very important today.  

The Village Breakup

History Professor at Delta College, Jeremy Kilar writes this about the break-up of Volga-German communities, and rural German communities, in Michigan:

Rural Germans, like those from Russia and others who lived in small towns remained isolated in closed communities until World War I.

In most studies, of rural town disintegration, this is as far as it goes.  Usually, the scholar just speculates when the town broke up and why.  For cities, it is easy to detect individual immigrant neighborhoods breaking up because of assimilation due to jobs, anti-immigrant sentiment, or even upward mobility causing a particular group to move to the suburbs.

What this project hopes to uncover, by studying the specific town of Catharine, is to better understand why these Volga-German communities start to break-up as ethnic communities.  This will hapen through census numbers and oral interviews with older generations finding out why they moved away or stayed in Catharine. 

I've been reviewing the census data for the last few days and noticeably, there is a huge drop in population in Catharine.  The population in 1940 is 775 people.  Then, it drops to 537 by 1950, and to 381 by 1960.  In the span of twenty years, Catharine loses 400 people.  Unfortunately, the statistics only provide numbers and not reasons.  My job now is find out why that drop occurred.  I have inital hunches: World War II ended and the GI bill gave veterans an opportunity to build a life elsewhere, spikes in religious vocations, and farms lost profit.  We will see if I'm right soon enough.