My father, James R. Leverett Jr., once said that most people have pleasant memories of their maternal grandmothers, but he had no pleasant memories of his. His grandmother, Catherine Mauer, moved in with his mother and father and, according to him, made their lives absolutely miserable. As an example he said that his mother was sick and needed medical advice, but couldn't talk to her brother, my dad's Uncle Roy, because grandmother had a feud with him and wouldn't allow him into the house. I was curious about how somebody could become that angry, that difficult, that unpleasant, so I did research into her life.
Born into a family of Ostfrisians, originally from that northern land between Netherlands and Germany, she was born in Ogle County, Illinois, which had a kind of Ostfrisian community. It's not clear to me whether her father, John Singelmann, served in the Civil War or not, but she was born right after that, the third of four daughters all born in Illinois. Her mother, Katharine, may have used the German spelling but named her Elizabeth Catherine with her middle name clearly being the same as her mother's. The family moved to Hancock, Iowa, on the Nishnibotna River, in Pottawattomie County, not too far from Council Bluffs.
As far as I can tell life was difficult out there; it was isolated. I am not sure whether the girls were able to help John with the farming, or whether they were able to hire anyone, but the best I can figure, no, no. The second daughter married a prominent local farmer in the Minden area; Charles and the Mauer clan were from York township, near Minden.
Minden was a German town with lots of Ostfrisians and even a Dutch Reformed Church, which is no doubt where Catherine met Charles. They married in 1893. But John, her father, died that same year. I may have to get the exact dates nailed down here but this is my understanding.
She went with Charles to live at his family's farmhouse in York Township. The house was large but his older brother was already married (to another Kate or Catherine Mauer) and also had several children. She soon had her three children, Leona, Roy, and Verna, while still in that farmhouse. It would be crowded.
If Charles wanted to farm, he'd have several choices. His parents Henry and Anna would surely split their farm into two and let him build on the empty half, given that his older brother wanted the farm and, as oldest, was in line to get it. They could also save money and buy a nearby farm, though cash was hard to come by and this appears that it would be more difficult.
But the last option would be for him to take that Hancock farm once the father died. She may have even hoped or expected him to, since they were family. With her father dead, her mother and two sisters were in trouble. The first sister married and moved out, now leaving her mom with a young teenage girl, her young sister.
Charles would take his share of the farm (I presume) and buy into a hardware store in Council Bluffs, and work there through the early years of the 1900s. He would take Catherine and the three children and move to Council Bluffs where they would live on Harrison St. I am still trying to work out whether this is what he wanted, or whether it was his only choice, given that his brother would inherit the main farm that he grew up on.
Not all people are made for farming; in that era it was mostly running horses, and attaching plows to them, or figuring out how to bring in crops somehow and get them to market. Hancock being isolated, it would take more work, with less reward, than the Mauers were used to, but the Mauers had a fairly successful farm in Minden, and Charles could see what farming would be like in the area. It's a little competitive, brothers on farms isolated day after day, and maybe he couldn't handle that. But also it requires a lot of skills and hard work. Maybe he thought it was too much work.
But here's the tragedy: a couple years later, in early January, the teenage girl, the youngest sister, died. There is no record of what she died of. She is buried at the Dutch Reformed Church near Minden, next to her father. The mother moved out soon after, to move in with the second sister, and died in her sixties soon after (the father died in his fifties). The family was gone.
Charles, after many years running the Swaine-Mauer Hardware store with his partner, Mr. Swaine, decided to open a store where customers checked themselves out, like an Aldi's setup. It was quite revolutionary at the time and I believe he did it with groceries, not hardware. We are talking Council Bluffs here, early twenties, the Roaring Twenties. It failed. He gave up, got a traveling salesman job, and died in Watertown South Dakota (on the road) in the late twenties. My dad's grandmother Julia said she always suspected that Catherine had driven him into the grave.
When he died, she had no place to go except in with her youngest daughter Verna, my grandmother. She wasn't talking to her son. Her older daughter was out in California in a small apartment. Verna took her in because she could. She made Verna's life miserable and Verna died early; my dad said he suspected dying was the only way she could get out of it. By this time there was nothing pleasant or loving of her at all.
How could she be this way? I finally concluded that the answer lies out in that Hancock farm, or in the story of what happened to it. By the way I'm not exactly sure what happened to it, so I could be wrong here, but the lack of records or clear testimony suggests that they just sold it out and left it; if nobody could or would farm it, it would go to someone who could. Could she be mad at him for not doing that? Could she have deep down expected him to take and run a farm and take care of her mother and little sister? The bitterness of her sister's death must have eaten away at her, I figure.
There may be more to the story that I haven't uncovered, given that records are scarce and not enough to go by anyway. I keep wondering what I'm missing, or if what I've found is really enough to justify the turn in her life. My father didn't know her until the thirties when it was the Depression and everybody was miserable. Apparently the fight with her son was over handling of Union Pacific stock, the family fortune, and would have been right around then. I have yet to really look into that. Maybe being hungry during the Depression was enough whether her son-in-law, my grandfather, provided for her or not.
