Ziebarth side family photo

While scanning more pictures today I found this one of the entire Ziebarth side of the family as listed in the previous posting.

This was taken in Beach on the occasion of Adolph and Addie’s 50 wedding anniversary.  I haven’t yet found clear documentation but I believe this to have been the summer of 1957.

We are/were:

Back row:  Milton, Margaret, Bob, Ken

Middle row:  Cora, Bob Jr., Adolph, Addie, Annanelle, Harold

Front row:  Jimmy, Robin, Gary, Karen, Tim

I am very sure that we were never all together at any other time, so this is a unique document.

And I am also sure that no such picture exists of the entire Nunn side of the family.

The Families

As I said in the introduction, these memories will mainly be from or about members of the Nunn and Ziebarth families, from my and the preceding generation, that I knew while growing up.  For clarity here is a list of those people in my past:

On the Nunn side, my grandparents were Audman (Aud) and Hattie Nunn.  Aud passed away when I was in grade school so I have few memories of him.  Hattie attended our wedding in 1964 and died later that year at age 80.  She lived in Miles City, a block from our house when I was in high school and junior high, so I knew her well.  There were 6 surviving children in the family. 

Leighton Nunn was the oldest, a few years older than my father.  He married a neighbor, Mildred Johnson.  They lived at Fort Keogh near Miles City when I was in school and we visited them often.  They had 4 children, Larry and Gene are older than I so did not have much interaction as a child.  Irmalyn (Irma) is slightly older than I, but was in high school with me.  Joan(ie) is the same age as my brother Tim.

Donald Nunn was approximately the same age as my father Harold.  He married a neighbor, Viola Wilson.  They lived near us in North Dakota, but moved to Idaho and Washington where we visited occasionally.   Their son Roy was born 10 days after me.  They had two later children, younger than Tim or I.  Jimmy died in a high school football accident.  Their daughter is Kathy.

Annanelle Nunn Ziebarth, my mother, was next.  She married a neighbor, my father Harold.  My brother Tim and I are the rest of their family.

Ruth Nunn Andrews was three years younger than Annanelle.  She married Robert (Bob) Andrews from Power, Montana.  I believe she met him while teaching in that area.  They lived near Fairfield, Montana and we saw them on holidays, often Thanksgiving or when they visited Hattie in Miles City.  They had 4 children, Russell is the same age as Tim.  Deborah (Debbie) is a little younger but I remember her as a child.  Mark and Craig are younger and I did not know them, but met Craig later when he was married in Boulder.

John Nunn was next.  He married another neighbor, LaDelphia Barnhart from Medora.  They lived in Idaho where we visited occasionally, then moved to North Dakota and Canada.  John was in the Air Corps during WWII and flew ‘over the hump’ from Burma to China.  He was killed in a ranch accident.  They had 4 children, Michael (Buck(y)) is between my and Tim’s age.  Twins Lee and Lynn are just younger than Tim, and Susanne slightly younger again.  Susanne (King) is a teacher and lives in Miles City.

Bub (Gerald) Nunn is the youngest.  He married a woman we knew as ‘Pat’.  She had a previous daughter Judy who is my age.  We were in grade school together before they moved to the Winnett, Montana area after about grade 4.  Bub and Pat had 4 sons, Jess, Jerry, Jay, and Joel.  All are enough younger that I did not know them as children.  After Pat’s death, Bub married Winona (Nona).  They later moved to a ranch outside Miles City.  He is now in an assisted living center near Miles City. 

On the Ziebarth side, my grandparents were Adolph and Addie Ziebarth.  They remained on the farm near Beach, North Dakota until I was in high school.  I had a lot of interaction visiting them and remember them well then and after they moved to Beach.  There were 3 surviving children in this family.

Milton Ziebarth was the oldest.  He married Cora Davis from Sidney, Montana who lived with Adolph and Addie as a teacher in the nearby country school.  He was in the WWII military when I was born and they moved to southern California after his discharge.  We visited them several times and they frequently returned to visit.  There are two adopted children Gary and Robin.  Both are younger than Tim or I, so I only knew them then as visiting children.  I have made re-connection with Robin and Gary as adults.  Cora is now in assisted living in the California Bay Area.

Harold Ziebarth, my father, and a twin brother Harvey were the next.  Harvey died in infancy.  Harold married a neighbor, my mother Annanelle Nunn.  My brother Tim and I are the rest of their family.

Margaret Ziebarth Hammar was the youngest.  She married Robert (Bob) Hammar from Nebraska, I believe when she was attending York College.  They moved to Oregon and then southern California.  We visited them several times and they frequently returned to visit.  They had 3 children.  Bob(by)  (Robert Jr,) is a year older than I.  He visited our grandparents during the summer for several years.  Tim and I frequently joined him (separately) in those visits for farm adventures.  Jim(my) was approximately Tim’s age.  He was killed in Viet Nam.  Karen was the youngest.  All three of them lived with us in Miles City for one school year, (possibly grade 2?) while Margaret recovered from difficulty adapting to Bob’s polio and resulting paralysis.

There will be pictures and more details about many of these people as the blog proceeds.

My First Home

I was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, the state capitol, for reasons not clear to me.  I have asked my aunt Cora Ziebarth, who was living with my grandparents AJ and Addie at that time while her husband, Milton, Harold’s brother, was in the WWII Armed Forces.  Unfortunately Cora’s memory does not include the reason for Mother’s being in Bismarck for my birth.  I do know that there had been an earlier pregnancy which ended in miscarriage, possibly in connection with some incident involving a sleigh ride.  It seems likely that her doctor advised hospitalization prior to delivery.  But why this was as far away as Bismarck instead of closer, possibly Dickinson or Glendive where my brother Tim was born a few years later, I probably will never be able to find out.

After my birth, April 20, 1943, we lived on a farm/ranch near Harold’s parents, AJ and Addie, south of Sentinel Butte, North Dakota in the house shown in this picture taken a few years  later in the 1940s. 

This house is on 320 acre property originally homesteaded by Michael Jesok in 1915, later sold to Robert Sonnek, then apparently foreclosed on so that Harold purchased it from the State of North Dakota in 1947.  How they could have lived there before the purchase is not clear, but perhaps the property was leased from the state, or purchased on a contract allowing occupancy during its term.  Harold also owned an adjacent 160 acre property purchased from Andrew and Bridget Gamrath in 1939.  I remember outbuildings, including the warehouse/granary shown in this picture,

on that property, but no house.  And Harold had also purchased a nearby 640 acre property from Gust Burke in 1943, shortly after my birth.  There was a house on that property that I’ll write about later, but we never lived there that I remember.  And Harold purchased one other property, an adjacent 160 acres from First Minneapolis Company in 1944, making his total holding 1120 acres.

In the early 1990s, on the way back from picking up our daughter Jennifer from college, we visited the North Dakota area where her grandparents had lived.  This first house is still there, still occupied, and still as isolated as before.  No one was at home so we could not investigate further.  I may have taken a photo that I will find later in my project.  Jennifer could not conceive that her prim and fastidious grandmother could ever have lived in such a location.

Introducing "Things I Am Rembering"

Since the death of my mother a year ago, and while going through photographs and other extended family memorabilia from her house, I have again realized that she was one of the last of her generation in our families.  Only her brother Bub Nunn and sister-in-law Cora Ziebarth remain.  And neither of them is a reliable and accessible source of memories and information.  Therefore I have decided to use this format to write down the ‘things I am remembering’ while reviewing these materials and thinking about the stories and memories that were passed to me so that if anyone in the generations after mine is interested, some records from those times will be left.  These will be my personal memories, including those from and about members of my parents’ generation, Dad’s brother and sister and Mother’s brothers and sister and their respective husbands and wives.  They are the ones from whom I heard the stories of the families’ past.  I do not remember any of my grandparents as great story tellers.  So there will memories about them but not many from them.  Except for my brother Tim there has not been much contact with others of my generation since childhood.  Memories from our childhoods about cousins in the Ziebarth and Nunn families are about all I can expect.  If any of them, or others, become followers of this process and send me additions, corrections, or embellishments those could be included later.

I don’t expect these postings to be in any logical or chronological order.  I intend to make them as I am triggered to remember, by pictures I am scanning or reviewing, conversations with my brother Tim or my wife Charlotte, or whatever other memories occur.  Free association from one memory to the next will be expected and frequent.  I will try to include dates when possible so possibly they can be reorganized chronologically some time.  When a specific picture or document is the source I will include that, or at least a link to a source location.  Pictures are being stored in the Picassa program and may be uploaded as Web Albums.  I don’t work on scanning with any regular schedule, so postings will be sporadic.  I am likely to get on a roll and add something every day or so for a while, and then to get distracted as life happens for a while.  But among the materials from Mother’s house, other extended family pictures, and my own family pictures and materials from our house there will always be something for me to review and remember.