Chapter 3 My Mother's Family

                            

Edward and Hilda Assink

MY HERITAGE: MOTHER'S FAMILY

Ed and Hilda Assink

 My mother, Hilda Eekhoff, was born on June 27, 1896 in northern Wright County in north central Iowa about seven miles southwest of what in two years would become the town of Kanawha.  Her recent ancestry is much better documented than my father's, especially from her mother's side, part of which can be traced back to Jan Bode, my great, great grandfather.

            

That most ancient member of my mother's family that we have record of, Jan Cornelius Bode, was born in 1804 in the province of Oostfriesland (East Friesland) in western Germany.  He emigrated to America with his wife and family in 1854 and settled near German Valley, a small town about five miles southeast of Freeport in northern Illinois.  They became members of the Silver Creek Reformed Church in that community, and Jan and his wife's graves remain to this day in the cemetery adjacent to that church.    

            

Jan Bode became the father of at least two sons, Cornelius and Hendrik (Henry), both of whom became ministers in the Christian Reformed Church, a new denomination that had its origin in 1857 after breaking from the Dutch Reformed Church (today the Reformed Church in America).  Both these men served in helping establish churches in the Midwest for German-speaking people, one of which churches was the Kanawha Christian Reformed Church established under the leadership of Cornelius Bode in 1900.  A son of Henry, Boyd Bode, became a noted philosopher of education and taught at the Universities of Wisconsin and Illinois and for many years at Ohio State University, during which time he also published a number of books and numerous articles in the professional journals of his day.  Boyd Bode was a contemporary of and often interacted with John Dewey, probably the most renowned of all of America's educational philosophers.

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But our concern is with a daughter of Jan Bode, Moederina (or Marina).  Marina was born in Germany on January 1, 1839 and was 15 years old  when the family emigrated to the United States. Marina's future husband, William R. Siemens, was born on July 15, 1822 in Stoppelmauer, East Friesland, Germany.  William had earlier come with his brother to America and to German Valley in 1849, and it was there that he met the 15-year-old Marina.  They were married on November 15, 1854 in German Valley.  This marriage of William Siemens to Marina Bode produced 13 children, of whom six girls and two boys survived childhood.  In 1977 on the occasion of a Siemens family reunion, over 770 direct descendants were counted from this union of William and Marina which had begun 123 years earlier.

The second of those surviving children, Trentje (or Trena), was born on March 21, 1868 and was to become my grandmother.  Trena met and married Harm Peter (H.P.) Eekhoff who was born in Emden, East Friesland, Germany on January 21, 1858.  Harm had come with his parents to America in 1867, settling on a farm near German Valley.  Harm and Trena were married on September 28, 1879 and soon thereafter struck out for the prairies near Hastings, Nebraska where they settled on a Homestead.

            

A year later the rest of the Siemens family also pulled up their stakes, packed their earthly possessions on a train and headed west to join Harm and Trena in this pioneering venture.  Their first home was a sod hut.  While the crops were good in Nebraska, the True Reformed Church which they attended was failing, reportedly because the services were in Dutch while most of the members were German-speaking.  To find a more secure church, the Siemens clan, including Harm and Trena Eekhoff, moved about 200 miles northward, to New Holland near Platte in the South Dakota Territory.  Here there was a thriving Christian Reformed Church, albeit the services were conducted in the Dutch language, the prevailing tongue of most of its members.  Although the Siemens spoke Low-German, it was a dialect which was sufficiently similar to the Dutch to enable them to converse and worship with their new Dutch neighbors.

            

While the community and the church in New Holland were congenial enough, the weather proved to be most hostile.  Six years of drought and near total crop failures had left the families destitute and desperate.  Reverend Henry Bode, Trena's uncle, a former home missionary for the Christian Reformed Church and at that time a pastor in the Wellsburg, Iowa Christian Reformed Church, met with 13  families in New Holland in August of 1890 to discuss and pray about their plight.  Rev. Bode was aware of available land in Wright County in north central Iowa and suggested that a delegation examine the prospects of that area nearly 300 miles to the east.  They did so and were so impressed with the lush, green and well-watered land that they made arrangements for immediate land purchases for all the families.  The following spring of 189I, the families moved by train to Britt, Iowa, and from there by horse and wagons to their new homes.  This group also became the nucleus of the newly formed Wright Christian Reformed Church where William Siemens served as an elder and Grandpa Harm Eekhoff as a deacon on the first Consistory.  Harm would later also serve a number terms as an elder.

William Siemens died in 1909 at the age of 86 years; Marina in 1919 at the age of 80.

Harm and Trena Eekhoff - Kanawha, Ia

Harm and Trena Eekhoff had purchased a farm five miles south and three miles west of where the town of Kanawha is today.  It was here that my mother would be born five years later.   Grandpa and Grandma Eekhoff continued to live on the farm southwest of Kanawha until 1914, at which time they bought a home in the town of Kanawha about a block away from the Christian Reformed Church where they then became members.

            

Grandpa Harm, better known as H.P., died at the age of 72 in August 1930 of what was called "pernicious anemia."  He was, I am told, a voracious reader and was intensely interested in the church and the denomination and its activities.  He served many years as an elder, first in the Wright church, and later in the Kanawha church.  I have no memories of him since I was less than two years old at the time of his death.  Grandma Trena died in January 1936 at the age of 75.  In the last two years of her life she lived for periods of time with her various children including at our home.  She was quite frail during the years I knew her so her personality did not come out very clearly.  I do remember that she did a lot of needle work and dispensed peppermints to us children rather frequently.

            

Mary Peter Jenny - Trena is holding Lilian
Hilda  Harm and Ann

Hilda, Jennie,Lillian, Peter, Mary, Ann, with Harm and Trena

The first of Harm and Trena's children was Jenny, born in South Dakota in 1884.  Jenny married Albert Vander Ploeg who came out of Michigan.  Except for 10 years when Albert ran an implement shop in Kanawha, the family engaged in farming near Kanawha.  They had eight children:  Trena, Sam, Gretchen, Irene, Delia, Anne, Herman and Esther.  Esther died as a five-year old in 1929. 

            

Uncle Albert and Aunt Jenny were both tall and lanky and all their children were too.  Herman was 6'7" and played basketball in high school and later in the United States Army during World War II.  People of that height were rare specimens in those days.  Uncle Albert especially, but Aunt Jenny too, had a wry sense of humor, a humor that most of the Vander Ploeg children inherited.  Most of them too, except Irene, who remained single,  would marry and settle in the Kanawha area or regions nearby.  Gretchen taught school for a while and would become my first grade teacher.  Aunt Jenny died at age 90, 20 years after her husband.

           

Aunt Mary was born probably about 1889 or 1890 and lived to be almost 100.  She was a live-wire, flamboyant, dark-haired, dark-skinned, thin and aggressively sociable.  She married John Roskamp and they lived for a number of years on a farm southwest of Kanawha which they named the Clover Leaf Farm and had those letters placed accross the front of the barn.  This was the farm where I would later spend most of my growing-up years.  John and Mary then moved to Grundy Center and later to Cedar Falls, Iowa.  John being a very a creative person was able to invent and take out a patent on an oat-huller, developing it into a thriving business which his son Harold continues to carry on to this day in Cedar Falls.  John lived to be 95 years of age.

            

John and Mary had five daughters and three sons, most of whom were quite genial and extroverted.  They are: Pearl, Tressa, Cornelia, Hermina, Clarence, Jane, Harold and Cromwell.  Since all of them were considerably older than I and always lived a considerable distance from us, later scattering all over the country, I did not get to know them very well.  I would get to know  Cornelia somewhat better because she lived in Grand Rapids when I went to Calvin and I would visit her and her family occasionally.  Cromwell became a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  To the best of my knowledge all the children are still living at the time of this writing.

            

Uncle Pete was the only boy in my mother's family.  He married Marie Johnson and then, without having had any education beyond grade school, decided that he should enter the ministry.  He attended Dubuque (Iowa) Seminary of the Presbyterian Church and later served Presbyterian congregations in Muscoda, Wisconsin; West Bend and Waterloo, Iowa; and then closed out his ministry in Aplington, Iowa, where he would retire and reside until his death at the age of 72.  Uncle Pete was a real card in his younger years and as children we would always delight in his yearly visits to our home.  Often he would preach in our church in Kanawha when he was on vacation.

            

Peter and Marie had five children.  Two sons, Herman and Pete, became farmers near Kanawha; Wiert, like his father, became a Presbyterian minister, as would Wiert's son following him.  His daughters, Stella and Thelma, married and lived near Applington, Iowa.

            

Aunt Annie was just older than mother and would be my mother's closest sister.  Annie married Bert Roskamp, brother of John who was her sister Mary's husband already described.  Quite early in their married life, Bert and Annie moved to Manhattan, Montana where Bert taught for a while in the Manhattan Christian School.  Later they moved to a farm near Grundy Center, Iowa where I first came to know them in the early 1930's.  This was followed by moves to two different farms near Kanawha; and then, approximately 1947, the whole family moved to Sunnyside, Washington where they continued in farming.

            

Bert and Annie had two boys, Charles and Herman; and two girls, Theressa and Pearl.  The older son, Charles, remained a bachelor, while Herman took over the family farm and immediately proceeded to purchase additional land, eventually to become a millionaire.  Unfortunately, when land prices plummeted in the early 1980's, he went bankrupt and never recovered.  All the children remained in the state of Washington.  Two of Theressa's children, Charles and Robert Uken, have become ministers in the Christian Reformed Church. Both Uncle Bert and Aunt Annie could be quite jovial; but they also had a very religious side which, when they reverted to that side, could make them very serious people--too serious, I thought.  Aunt Annie lived beyond her 95th birthday.

            

Aunt Lillian--"Lil" my mother called her--was three years younger than Mom.  I don't know why, but she moved out to Yakima, Washington and married a Jim Vander Sluis--or did she marry Jim Vander Sluis and move to Yakima?  In either case, we would receive letters from Washington about every so often with pictures of Jim and Lil and their only  daughter, Beth.  Jim suffered from muscular dystrophy--or was it multiple sclerois?--and died at a fairly young age.  Aunt Lil later moved to Denver where she continued to live until her death at approximately 80 years of age.

In many ways, my mother's side of the family was more colorful than father's.  They were more aggressive socially and were, it seemed, with a slight streak of craziness, always actively intent on making a good time.  They were adventuresome too, sometimes to the point of recklessness.  "Let's do it," and they would charge in.  "Nothing risked, nothing gained."  As their histories will attest, most of them moved often and scattered far from their home base.  The Eekhoffs were also more expressive of their faith and more inclined to be active in it, in both their words and deeds.  Involvement in the church and its activities was accepted as a given.

                                                                 NOTES ON THIS CHAPTER

              1.       The whole story of the Siemens family and their pioneering adventures from German Valley to Nebraska, to South Dakota, and finally to Iowa, has been chronicled in a book published in 1977 by Dorothy Primus entitled Dear Ones.  The book is well-written and stands on its own merit apart from the personal interest one might have in

             

               2.       The Bode family has been quite illustrious.  A Banner series written in 1980 entitled "The German Element in the CRC" described something of the settlement in German Valley and highlighted the "amazing Bodes" in one of the articles.

            

                3.       The achievements and philosophy of Boyd Bode, who, alas, appears to have forsaken the faith of his forebears, are the main focal points of a book by Dr. Norman De Jong entitled Christianity and Democracy, published in 1978. Boyd was the son of Rev. Henry Bode and was born in German Valley in 1873.  Boyd went to William Penn College followed by programs at the University of Michigan and then at Cornell University where he got his Ph.D.  It was at the latter school where, much to the dismay of his father, Boyd began to forsake his Calvinistic Christian moorings.  Boyd accepted a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin in 1904, and in 1909 was given a full professorship to the University of Illinois.  By this time he was well-established in philosophical circles and had already begun his interaction with the famed Professor John Dewey. In 1921 Bode accepted a position at Ohio State University where he remained until his retirement in 1944.He died in 1953

           

                4.       The above book also mentions that the Bodes would certainly have witnessed the        famous Lincoln-Douglas debate held in nearby Freeport in 1858. It was in that debate that Lincoln, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, articulated his famous Freeport Doctrine  relative to slavery, and gained for himself the attention needed to later run for the Presidency.

                                 

Chapter 2: My Heritage - Father's Family

  

Edward Diedrich Assink

My father, Edward Diedrich Assink, was born to Hendrick and Christina (Ennen) Assink on March 5, 1889, the fourth of seven children.  Grandfather Hendrick, son of Ben John Assink, was born about 1839 in the Netherlands close to the German border.  We know little about his early life in the Netherlands other than that he supervised a crew of road workers for at least a period of time, and that he was single and 40 years old when he emigrated to America.  After arriving in this country he spent some time near Shell Rock, Iowa, where he met and, in 1883, married Stena Ann Ennen.

  

      
Stena, sometimes referred to as Christena, daughter of Gerhart and Anna Ennen, was born on July 25, 1856, in the Province of Bentheim in western Germany.  At the age of 24 years, she and her sister left her native land and emigrated to the United States, settling near Shell Rock, Iowa.  

 

Hendrick and Stena's Farm          

After their marriage Hendrick and Stena moved to a 160 acre farm in southern Hancock County in northcentral Iowa, approximately 70 miles to the west and north of Shell Rock.  This land had been acquired by a previous owner through the provisions of the Homestead Act enacted by the United States Government in 1862 as a means of encouraging the settlement of vacant land in the states and territorial possessions.  Just how my grandparents acquired the land is unknown to me.  The railroads were being built and were interlacing the prairies of the Midwest, making the transportation of goods and produce possible; consequently, for the first time ever, the virgin prairies were being plowed up and cultivated with crops.

            

Whether Grandpa Assink came to this country with family, I do not know.  I do know that years later in the Cedar Falls, Iowa area, quite near Shell Rock, there were Assinks who had apparently descended from his cousins.  The Assink Brothers construction materials plant was located just north of the river on highway 218 in Cedar Falls.  My Grandma Assink had relatives near Allison and Shell Rock that I recall visiting in my childhood bearing such surnames as Bower, Lubben, and Hartwig.

           

Hendrick, Stena,  names to follow...

Hendrick and Stena brought Gertie, George and Ben into the world before my father was born; and Annie, Albert and Henry after that.  Grandpa Hendrick would die of diphtheria in April 1908 at the age of 69.  Grandma Stena would survive for another 25 years until she succumbed to cancer in February 1933 at the age of 76.  I was just over four years old at her death and remember very little about her except that she was quite heavy, had a big wart on her cheek and usually sat in the same chair.

            

Prior to the formation of the local Christian Reformed Church, the family worshiped with a German-speaking Evangelical Church which met in a nearby country school building.  This church, if I understand correctly, was basically the church of Martin Luther which bore the name of "Evangelical" in Germany, but which became known as Lutheran in America.  The Reverend Cornelius Bode, an uncle of my mother, had been sent to north central Iowa by the Christian Reformed Church to gather in all the German-speaking  people of Reformed background to form a church.  My grandparents had belonged to Reformed churches in Germany and the Netherlands and were, therefore, eager to make the switch.  The resulting congregation, which also enfolded some of the other German-speaking people from the Evangelical Church, was established in the town of Kanawha in the year 1900.  My father's family were among the charter members of that congregation with Grandpa Hendrick being an elder on the first consistory.

The oldest child, Aunt Gertie, married Fred Freerksen and eventually divorced him after bearing six children and enduring considerable spouse abuse.  In my childhood, she was the only divorced person that I knew personally.  Their oldest son, George, became a Baptist minister, serving pastorates mainly in Minnesota.  Henry, Tena, Theoline and Alfred, moved to different parts of the country.  Theoline, who never married, later came back to Kanawha.  Ione remained in Kanawha all his life.  Aunt Gertie was a very mild mannered, kind woman.  She died at approximately 80 years of age in the early 1960's.  All her children have also died, most of them considerably short of the three score and ten years proverbially allotted to us.

            

The second born, Uncle George, left the family farm in approximately 1914, and headed off to Wheaton College near Chicago to study for the ministry.  There he met Ruth Barrow, from near Chicago I believe, and later married her.  Ruth soon acquired certain health problems which necessitated that she move to a warmer climate.  Thus, with intentions of perhaps picking up on a career in evangelism later, George and Ruth in 1919 headed down to Mississippi, bought 160 acres of scraggly-timbered farm land near Brookhaven, set up a farming operation, and didn't return to see his Iowa kin until 30 years later in 1949.  George and Ruth had three children:  Noel, Albert and Dorothy.  Albert died at about age 15.  Noel and Dorothy became high-ranking career officers in the Air Force and eventually retired back in Mississippi, Dorothy on her parents' original farm.  Uncle George died in the early l960's at about age 70; Aunt Ruth survived him by at least a decade.  Noel had five children who have scattered all over the southland; whereas, Dorothy married late in life and remained childless.  My first visit with them in Mississippi in the spring of 1986 gave me the chance to meet Dorothy, Noel and most of Noel's family.  Noel has since become deceased.

           

Ben, Henry, Ed, Gertie, Annie

Uncle Ben married Annie Smidt.  Not long after their marriage they headed off to Columbus, Montana where they engaged in farming and brought six children into the world. Apparently there had been some question about whether Uncle Ben or my father should take over the homestead.  It appears that my grandmother favored the younger of the two.  When  my father married in January 1916, Aunt Annie is reported to have said with some decisiveness: "We're going to Montana!"  And they did.  When Grandma Assink died in 1933, something was worked out so that Ben's family could return and take over the homestead, while my parents availed themselves of the opportunity to move to a farm south of  Kanawha belonging to my mother's family.  Uncle Ben continued on the old Assink homestead until about 1946 when the farm was sold by the family, and Ben moved to a farm a mile north of there.  Two of Uncle Ben's family, George and Alfred, would stay in the Kanawha area, while Henry and Alvin settled in southern California.  Helen married and made her home in Pella, Iowa; and Harlan became a commercial air line pilot and lived in Virginia.  Harlan would die in a tragic white water rafting accident in Alaska in the late 1980's.  Uncle Ben died in his 70's while living in retirment in Kanawha.  Aunt Annie survived him by about 15 years.

            

My father was the next in the family, being born in 1889.  He would live on the homestead until 1934.  After the death of his father in 1908, he and his brothers, along with Grandma, ran the farm until Grandma moved to Kanawha in 1915.  My father had just previously met Hilda Eekhoff whose family had moved from a farm in Wright County into the town of Kanawha and had begun attending the Kanawha Christian Reformed Church.  Hilda, I am told, served on occasion as the organist for the Kanawha church.  Since it was a pump organ requiring someone to keep air pumped into it, my father enlisted in that yeoman's role, a factor which may have incited or enflamed his attraction for her and led him at age 26 to marry the 19-year old blond who would become my mother.  My parents were married on January 20, 1916, nearly 13 years before I would come on the scene.

            

Aunt Annie was just younger than my father and was probably his favorite sibling.  She married Bill Alke, a German Lutheran, and moved with him 30 miles away to Titonka where they set up farming and raised a family of eight children.  Their oldest son, Henry, would die of spinal meningitis while in the Army during World War II.  A daughter, Mary, would marry a Lutheran minister.  The others, Christina, John, George, Volina, Anna, Ida and Bill, all settled in various locations throughout northern Iowa.  As of this writing these cousins all continue to maintain fairly close contact with my brothers and the other Assink cousins in Iowa.  Uncle Albert died a short time before or after Grandpa Assink in 1908 at about the age of 15. He was slender and a blond.  My father remarked on occasion that I resembled him somewhat.

            

Uncle Henry, the youngest in Father's family, went off to the Army in World War I from 1917 to 1918 and served as a medic.  He saw frontline action in France and was seriously wounded by a mortar shrapnel.  A telegram came to Grandma Assink notifying her that her son had been killed in action.  Some time later, however, she received a letter from Henry in which he mentioned that he had been wounded and was in the hospital.  Hope was greatly aroused when the date indicated on the letter was later than the presumed date of his death.  A second letter, shortly after that, verified his continued life.  Uncle Henry was partially disabled as a result of that experience and later acquired diabetes. He never married, lived with his mother until her death in 1933, and then lived alone until his own death in the early 1960's.  I got to know Uncle Henry quite well.  He would often come to the farm where I first lived and repair things or help out wherever he could.  Later, while my parents would visit him after church on Sundays, I would drink many a cup of coffee at his house, sweetened with saccharine and lightened with carnation condensed milk.  He was a very kind, gentle and pliable person, not above bending an ear to a young lad.  He was devout, and often served as an elder in the Kanawha Christian Reformed Church.  I wish now that I had asked him more about his experiences in the first World War.

As I look back on my father's family, I see them as generally placid, kind, hard-working and steady people, seldom afflicted with the vice of excessive aggressiveness or guilty of reckless adventure.  They seemed to be contented and free of bitterness and resentment. They talked freely, but were certainly not characterized by joviality or boisterousness.  In keeping with their temperament, they tended to be physically rather heavy, my father and Uncle Henry being exceptions to that rule.  None of them were very expressive of the intimacies of their Christian faith, but all of them were faithful church-goers and concerned about being good Christian people.  Uncle Ben, who had lived a couple of decades in Montana, seemed somewhat less devoted to the faith, a judgment based, perhaps too much, on his tendency to be a "oncer" in his attendance at services on Sunday.  While I never really got to know Uncle George in Mississippi, the fact that he sought to enter the ministry suggested something about his commitment to the faith.  I was pleased to discover later in my visit to Mississippi in 1986 that his children and grandchildren would continue to be firmly established in that faith, most of them associated with Methodist churches in the South.