THE BERRY MEADOW ARCHIVE - Mountain Light School

home. Next we tried Clara Litzenberger (formerly Holm), and fortunately she had just come in from the
farm. Karl‟s daughter, Lorraine Cook, lived two doors from her so we went and met her. Shortly
afterwards she saw Yost out walking and got him. Yost went and got Katie. Lorraine called around
several places and finally located her father in another town about 20 miles away. He came in the
meantime, Clara fixed a quick lunch for us, that is our family only, over at her house. It was interesting
meeting them. On the way back over the highway we stopped briefly and met Herman Lust at the Colfax
store where he works. Karl is sort of blue right now over his wife‟s recent [August 1] death. Karl and
Lizzie and Yost all invited us to stay all night, but we had to get on, so went on down into Idaho for the
night.”
Bill, Marian, and their children visited Endicott a second time as part of a family summer
excursion to the 1962 World‟s Fair in Seattle. Who could know we were just weeks away from the Cuban
Missile Crisis that would bring Russia and the United States to the brink of disaster. During that time, Bill
recalled meeting a throng of fifty relatives at a family picnic on August 30 held in Karl‟s back yard in
town. Spot Lust supplied a map of the Volga German colonies and someone else provided “a good
picture” of the ancestral village, Yagodnaya Polyana. Someone else showed Bill a copy of Emma
Schwabenland Haynes‟s informative history, The Volga Relief Society. Emma was a leading international
authority on Russian-German history. Although she was living in Germany at the time and later in
Washington, D. C., Emma had been raised in Eastern Washington communities like Odessa where her
father had been a Congregational pastor. She became an important mentor to many students of of Volga
German history including me following our first meeting at the 1972 AHSGR Convention in Boulder,
Colorado.
Bill recalled that at the 1962 Endicott gathering, “They brought the oldest man in Endicott” who
remembered the wedding of Bill‟s great-grandmother in Russia. This may have been Henry Schmick who
is believed to have been the town‟s oldest immigrant pioneer at that time. Born in July 1874, Henry had
arrived in Endicott in April 1899 with John Hergert, Henry Mohr, Adam Repp, and Peter X. Weitz. Bill
cites his best sources at this time as Mae Geier, Karl Scheuerman, Sarah Bafus, Clara Litzenberger, and
Herman Lust. Bill also met Evelyn Reich for the first time at this gathering, and my family also attended.
I have a vague memory as an eleven-year-old of our tall, lanky cousin with his peculiar Kansas accent
talking as he walked across the lawn toward us. Bill remembered visiting our farm during the 1962 trip
when harvest was in full swing. He brought his sons John and David into the field where we played in the
back of a truck laden with grain. Bill was also in touch that summer with his other cluster of relatives in
the state, those he termed the “Tacoma Scheuermans.” This group also hosted the Kansas Scheirmans
during their trip to the World‟s Fair at a reunion in Tacoma attended by members of Aunt Lizzie Repp‟s
and Aunt Mae Poffenroth Geier‟s families.
Bill and Evelyn‟s considerable correspondence commenced in 1969. In a March 5 letter of that
year to Evelyn, Bill expresses gratitude for receiving word of her interest in family genealogy and solicits
her help in completing the lineage of Endicott‟s H. K. Scheuerman, son of Karl Scheuerman, the brother
of Bill‟s grandfather, Peter, who remained in Russia. He also had good reason to lament the prospects of
tracing our lineages further back through sources in Russia. “I don‟t think there is a possibility of finding
out anything from the Russian end any more. My family corresponded with the relatives in Russia until
World War I. During the Communist revolution they wrote that they were starving (1919, I think). My
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