"Aged Erie Pioneer Woman" is a hell of a headline
Though I'd personally prefer "Ageless Very Cool Five-Star-Hotel-Loving Woman" for mine
In the last chapter we started diving into the lives and ancestry of Great-Great-Grandparents John and Theresa Eidenschink and covered how and when John decided to leave his (and Theresa’s) hometown of Oberpfalz in the Upper Palatinate of eastern Bavaria, Germany, for the town of Detroit Lakes (Ojibwe name is Gaiajawangag, meaning a lake with a crossing in a sandy place) in Becker County, an area in Minnesota situated in the glacial moraine/prairie region that sits between the hardwood forests to the east and the flat Red River Valley floodplain to the west.
Betcha didn’t know that, huh?
Anyway, since we spent the last chapter covering a lot about John, let’s talk about Great-Great Grandmother Theresa, shall we? Because she was more than just a GIRLFRIEND, or a WIFE, or a MOTHER, or even a GREAT-GREAT GRANDMOTHER, okay?! She was a WHOLE PERSON!
A whole person that I still only happen to know very little about!!!
Theresa Ann Winzerl was born December 31 (!) in 1862 in Oberpfalz, the same sweet Bavarian village as John.
And that’s it! Aside from when she died and her obit below, that’s about as much as I know about her so far. There’s a set of parents that keep showing up on Ancestry.com, but those are Weinzierls, and a cousin did a bunch of research and proved that those are not our ancestor Theresa’s parents. And so once again, the path stops here until we can uncover records from Germany or a distant relative appears with more information.
Though obituaries below note that John and Theresa got married in a hurry after Theresa arrived in America, records show that their marriage date is October 15, 1884, with the wedding taking place in Frazee, Minnesota.
HOWEVER, I am inclined to think that October marriage date is rather an official record of when they moved to their farm and set up house in Erie township, especially since I can’t find or track down a record of their marriage certificate.
Anyway: So John and Theresa got married, set up a farm in Erie Township, and then got to makin’ babies. TEN of them, in fact. Though, sadly (and I acknowledge that this jarring after having just made a joke about them doin’ it), little Rose, Sophie, and William died when they were still babies and Frank died when he was 12 (also it looks like Frank and Rose were either twins or Irish twins??).
I think that, because it seems like it used to be so common to lose a child either in childbirth or shortly thereafter, we assume that women just brushed it off and went on to having the next one, but losing three babies and then a son just when he was leaving childhood had to have been so heartbreaking.
I also think about the scope of John and Theresa’s life…of growing up in Germany, and then emigrating to a country all by yourself, where you maybe knew one or two people (and that’s if you were lucky). Then you had to learn a new language, get a farm going on foreign soil, set up house and navigate living with someone you often barely even knew, gestate and birth a brood of babies only to watch some of those precious darlings slip away, and keep it ALL going against natural disasters, harsh weather, the unpredictable financial future that always comes with farming, and just the general, ever-constant feeling of loneliness and homesickness for your family, friends, and lifelong social mores and cultural homeland.
And I know this sounds simplistic, but you also had to do ALL of that without the guidance or informational tools we’ve all come to rely on (sometimes to our detriment). Some of these pioneers couldn’t even READ! They just had to ask someone and then trust that that person wasn’t a fuckin’ doofus who didn’t even know what the hell they were talking about!
Anyway. I think that, just like with the childbirth thing, we’re so used to the stories about hardy pioneers that we’ve lost our astonishment for just how courageous it was to even make a go of it.
However, I admittedly also hold myself away from waxing too poetically about it because I am a product of ancestors who were pilgrims and pioneers AND a product of Indigenous ancestors who suffered severely under that white European ideal of manifest destiny.
But and so: Great-Great Grandparents John and Theresa lived a good, long life by all accounts, becoming treasured members of the Erie township and Detroit Lakes community. John would later pass away at the age of 83 on December 4, 1940, and is remembered as a pioneer of Detroit Lakes and Becker County:
Theresa Ann Winzerl outlived him by 3 years, passing away at the age of 80 on July 29th in 1943.
By the time John and Theresa passed away, they had become grandparents to FORTY GRANDCHILDREN. That means their five surviving children had, on average, EIGHT KIDS EACH.
Both John & Theresa (note the different spelling on the gravestone??) are buried at the Holy Rosary Cemetery in Detroit Lakes, MN
Maybe the real gift they left to their descendants is an extremely high libido? And incredibly fertile loins? Because my god. How did any of those kids possibly get anything DONE?! How did JOHN and THERESA get anything done??
I mean, we know what they got done…they done got the business of doin’ it done.
Anyway, enough sex jokes about my great-great grandparents - instead, it’s time to tell the sort of spooky story about them that I promised y’all a couple chapters back!
So - when I started to put together my research last summer/fall in preparation for launching this project, I decided to print and frame a bunch of photos of my ancestors as a way to provide some inspiration and connection as I embarked on this massive endeavor.
I also wanted to put a collection of these photos on a little table I have where I keep my crystals and candles and other spiritual objects. This table is made out of the wood from my maternal grandmother’s piano, so it’s quite special to me and I’m pretty particular about what I place on it. I keep trying to say this without sounding too woo-woo, but that’s just going to end up being a huge waste of time, so: I knew for sure that I wanted to have a photo of my maternal grandmother Ardith and a photo of my great-aunt Bernelda on that alter, and then I let my intuition guide me on the rest. That intuition surprised me…it was mostly neutral with some of the photographs I felt I should have on there, like a photo of my paternal grandmother or my maternal grandfather, but it lit up when I placed a photo of paternal great-grandmother on the table and also when I put a photo of her parents on the table. There’s a smiling photo that I love of my great-great-great grandparents that also felt good going on the table, as well as a photo featuring four generations on my maternal side.
But the biggest surprise was when I kept looking at the photo of John and Theresa Eidenschink again and again while feeling pulled to put that framed photo on the table. I ignored it at first, because at point I still didn’t really feel any connection to those great-great grandparents…I could barely even remember their names half the time or whether or not they landed on my paternal or maternal side.
But when I finally took that framed photograph and placed it in the center of the table…it was like every single cell in my entire body lit up with the warmest, most loving sensation. It was so overwhelming that I literally whispered, “Oh my god” and took a full step back. I have felt a lot of different sensations in regards to spirit - I get really warm on my right arm when a spirit guide wants to connect or provide reassurance; tears will spring to my eyes when I’m in deep mediumship or channeling; I’ll feel a deeeeep punch in the gut when I look at a photograph of, pass by, or walk into a house that’s haunted; and waves of buzzy chills will repeatedly flow through and around my body when an unrelated-or-unknown-to-me presence is near and/or encroaching on my boundaries.
But this was something I honestly had never experienced before. It was so immediate and powerful and it felt SO protective and loving.
A few days later, I got a hit to place a little cup of wild rice on the altar. Using a cup from my maternal grandmother’s tea collection, I filled it with wild rice from the White Earth reservation (one of my ancestral tribes is the White Earth band), placed it on the table, and I got the same flood of warm, protective, loving energy again, albeit a little less intense this time.
Now, here’s where things get really spooky, so you’re just gonna have to hang with me here and then we’ll end this chapter and go back to our regular lives until the next one:
One day, I was sitting on the floor with Ainsley - she was laying in her favorite spot, which is next the couch and in front of that table (…and yes, I literally JUST made that connection right now as I’m writing this). I watched her as she watched something behind and over me, her eyes calmly tracking the slow but steady movement. I didn’t know if it was all the new ancestral photographs or what, but at that particular time, there had definitely been a huge uptick in activity in our home - voices, little bumps in the night, something tugging gently on the comforter until I told it to knock it off, etc. I’m used to a lot of that stuff by now, and so the only time that it tends to freak me out is when I can tell that Ainsley is seeing or hearing it, too…because that tends to just make it feel more real, I guess?
Anyway - so I’m sitting there, watching Ainsley watch…something, and I keep getting this hit over and over and over to use a voice box to try and communicate with whatever is in my home. I’ve never used a voice box before and I’ve never WANTED to use a voice box before. Much like the sensations notes above, I’ve gotten comfortable with the ways I’m used to communicating with spirits and ghosts - seeing them in my mind’s eyes, the scent puddles, channeled memories or emotions, occasionally hearing a muffled voice etc. However, I still do not like to SEE anything and I do not like to HEAR anything. When I watch ghost exploration shows - which I rarely do, because why go out for hamburgers when you have steak at home - it’s always the voices coming through on the voice boxes that freak me out the most. I DON’T LIKE IT.
And yet.
And YET.
The hit just kept coming - use a voice box, use a voice box, use a voice box. So I got up from the floor, sat on my couch, downloaded a voice box app, and then did a series of protections and prayers (because if you’re like, “Don’t use a Oujia Board if you don’t know what you’re doing because you never know what’s going to come through”, then THE SAME for this stuff) before I turned it on.
And the very first thing I heard was an older male voice say, “Amber” and then an older female voice ask, “Did she turn it on yet?”
Whenever stuff happens right in front of me - when I actually DO see a ghost or I hear an unmistakable diembodied voice, etc - I tend to react as if this is all business as usual. It’s only when I get a little space and time per after the fact that I freak the fuck out. Thus, too, with this - telling myself to remember all of this for later, I simply sat there and was like, “yep, I’m here. Tell me what you want to tell me.”
There were a handful of voices that came through - it felt kind of chaotic, to be honest. At one point, I asked for some names of who was “here” (meaning in my home), and after a slight pause, I got what sounded like a very friendly, kind voice say, “John.” I immediately thought the “John” was John O. French, my g-g-granddad that I was researching at the time. So I asked if it was him, and I didn’t get a response, and then another voice picked up and I lost the thread.
It was only when I was replaying the experience to my also-intuitive friend Lacey that I suddenly realized that “John” was likely John Eidenschink…I didn’t connect those dots when I was using the voice box, though, because I actually always think of him as more of a Peter, per all of his research being labeled as “John Peter.”
Anyway…given the crazy sensation I experienced when I placed his and Theresa’s photograph on my altar, I at least like to think that it was him trying to come through. But who knows for sure! Who knows ANYTHING for sure! All of this could be a simulation! This whole world could just be a figment of the imagination! If time is just a construct then it stands to reason that everything else could also be a construct!
The only thing real is love 🥰
(J/K, that’s fake, too)
Anyway - in the next chapter we’ll return back to the fork in the road of Carl and Clara Eidenschink and start following the path of Clara Nellie’s ancestry.
Friends?
We are about to go on a W I L D ride.
See you in the next chapter!
-Amber