THE BERRY MEADOW ARCHIVE - Mountain Light School

father‟s family collected money and sent it to them. It was returned and the letter was marked „Deceased‟,
so our family (and yours in Endicott) have been out of contact with the Russian relatives for 50 years….”
The August 1962 reunion in Endicott where Bill Scheirman met his Northwest
relatives. At the table (facing l to r) are mae Poffenroth Geier, H. H. and Mary
(Stong) Scheuerman, and Clara (Schmick) and Ed Litzenberger. Above the
LItzenbergers are Margaret Low and Bill Scheirman‟s wife, Marian.
Bill and Evelyn soon understood that they were kindred spirits in their peculiar quest to track
down family members all over the planet. They would forever generously share the fruits of their labors
with anyone who asked, and I was one of the early beneficiaries of their extensive knowledge and
kindness. Evelyn‟s research, however, was from a different perspective. Whereas Bill had not known his
Scheuerman grandfather and drilled deeply into family history as if one of his oilfields to learn primarily
about them, Evelyn was interested in exploring widely our associations with other Volga German clans
throughout the Northwest and beyond. She had been born in 1920 in Endicott and raised in the milieu of
local Yagada culture so had a good understanding of her elders‟ dialect and extended family relationships
long before she and Bill began their research collaborations. (A memoir written by schoolteacher Vera
Longwell who boarded with the Scheuermans on their farm north of Endicott in the 1920s reveals that the
Scheuerman children spoke virtually no English before attending the Litzenberger School and that Karl
served as her interpreter in the home.)
Evelyn was an outstanding student in school, and Miss Longwell and her Depression-era
successors at the Litzenberger country school remembered that even as a girl Evelyn was often asked to
assist older students. She eventually married a gregarious high school classmate Ray Reich, who farmed
with his father, Alec—a native of Yagada, southwest of Endicott. In the early 1950s the young couple
relocated to the community of Sunset north of St. John. In these ways, Evelyn came to know from her
earliest youth the complex relationships among the Volga German families who had begun settling in the
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