Ernie Margheim: On Barn Dances, Wedding Dances, and Musician Cousins

This is an email Ernie wrote to relatives as he shared an obituary of his cousin Helen Morgenstern in 2008. How many people would love to get details such as these simply when someone shares an obituary with them!

Jake and Hannah (Templing) Margheim family group

Jake Margheim was the brother of John Margheim as shown in the chart below. Jake's daughter Helen was the subject of the obituary Dad was sharing.

You can see that Mollie Koleber and John Margheim had son Ernest Margheim, who is my father. So the children of Jake and Hannah Margheim were first cousins of my dad.

Listed as the second child in this family group is
Hannah Templing, who married my granduncle
 Jake Margheim. She and her siblings are the
children of Henry and Eva Elisabeth (Maier) Templing. 

Ernie writes: "This obituary on Helen Morgenstern is of my cousin. She was the daughter of my "Dad's brother Jake and wife Hannah (Templing) that lived up near Susank, KS. I worked on their farm a couple of summers in the wheat harvest. Our folks used to go visit them many Sunday afternoons. I have many memories of walking their pastures with their son Marvin, checking for horny toads, rattle snakes, and lots of small lizards. (The horny toad is like a toad, dry hide, and when you approach them, on their backs they raised their spikes. You did not want to step on them, the whole back is covered with spikes that raise up as their defense when scared.) The pasture was sort of rocky so those little lizards were hiding on the shady side of the rocks, panting from the heat.

The Templing's neighbors were the large Nuss family. They would come down to Uncle Jake's place on Sunday afternoon and their son Gerhardt would join us as we'd wander the pastures and countryside, often carrying .22 rifles to shoot rabbits. 

When I was a little older, a Senior in high school in 1939, while I was out at their place on Sunday, a car load of young folks (usually five or six to a car) came out to attend the Sunday Night Hejny Barn Dance and I got to go along. Of course we always had to first stop off at the bootlegger Bartonek and get a couple of bottles of wine. 

Those were memorable days. My stays at their farm, I got paid $3.75 a week, plus room and board and laundry. I helped through wheat harvest and I had the job of plowing the wheat stubble fields with their McCormick-Deering Tractor, pulling a three or four sheared plow. It was a great experience at my age of 16, 17, and 18. 

In those days they had no electricity on their farm. So evenings were spent with coal oil (kerosene) lamps. They also had a hand crank Victrola phonograph. We played Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry cowboy singing records and Bohemian Polka Band records. 

Uncle Jake's kids at that time were Viola (Warner), Rudy Margheim, Helen (Morgenstern), and Marvin Margheim. Cousins Viola, Elsie Michaelis and Alvina Koleber were real close buddies through those years (like the Three Musketeers - ha). Rudy later married Martha Brack. Helen and her husband Luther Morgenstern never had any kids. I went to visit Helen and Luther on one of my early trips from Canon City to Great Bend and I always stopped in at the rest home to visit Viola who was a resident there. I also visited Rudy's widow Martha one year when she was there. The next year she was released, so I visited her at her home.

During my high school years (1936-1940) there were several of us Margheims who had birthdays in August so we always had a birthday dance at the Susank Hall, with music by the Templing Brothers fiddle hochzeit bands. Henry, Jake, and Emanuel were real wedding dance musicians. In those days of German weddings, at the end of the wedding ceremony at church, musicians would (ouz blowza) stand outside the church steps as the people exited the ceremony and play hymns on their horns, (trumpet, baritone, trombone, etc.) It was a "Goose bumps on your back" experience for me. 

The Templing Band, compliments of
Judy Bender McGreevy, daughter of
Ernie and Helen (Templing) Bender.

David Templing made hammered dulcimers

A Hammered Dulcimer

(SchlochBret) for other people and also made fiddles. Those Templing men were brothers to the wife of Uncle Jake, Hannah Templing. Henry Templing's son David had a daughter Helen, who married Ernie Bender. She was a proficient accordian (Hochzeit and Polka) musician. Phyllis and I were friends of Ernie and Helen Bender. We visited with them when we took my mom to the Hays (KS) Dietz/Deines family reunions. Today Ernie and Helen (Templing) Bender are residents of Great Bend Health and Rehab, where Helen (Margheim) Morgenstern was a resident before her death. Great Bend Health and Rehab is west of the Great Bend Cemetery, near the intersection of K-96 and Broadway. Have I got you all confused? Some names and/or places might register with some of you, my family and friends. Stay in touch! Ernie" 

New discoveries from my post of Uncle Alex's fatal accident

I recently wrote a post about my Granduncle Alex Margheim's fatal auto accident in 1927. A Facebook Friend Terry Batt, a fellow Volga German descendant, read the post and confirmed the identity of the driver of the car that wrecked into Uncle Alex that Sunday morning.

George Daniel and Maria Elisabeth (Maier) Dietz
They are shown at the top left of the diagram below.

George Daniel and Maria Elisabeth (Maier) Dietz

The connections that surfaced as a result of those identities are shown in this diagram that I composed. 

At the bottom right in the shaded box are William Karst and his wife Lydia Templing. It was William '"Willie" or "Bill" Karst who drove the Hudson automobile that was identified in the newspaper article as the driver of the vehicle that collided with Alex Margheim, who appears in the shaded box at left. 

In drawing up this diagram, I was able to show the connection of William "Bill" Karst and Alex Margheim. As you can see since Bill was married to Lydia Templing, his brother-in-law was Jacob Margheim husband of Lydia's sister Hannah. And it was Jacob's brother Alex who was driving the car that Bill collided with. I can't imagine the agony and heartache so many families felt as a result of this accident. 

I've shown the Margheim brothers, Jacob, Alex, and John. John is my paternal grandfather---Ernie's father. 

Just last night as I developed this chart, I discovered  a connection between my grandmother Mollie (Koleber), wife of John Margheim, and the Templing family also! Hannah and Lydia Templing's mother is Eva Elisabeth Maier. I knew that Mollie's maternal grandmother was also a Maier--Maria Elisabeth Maier, wife of George Daniel Dietz. (The spellings of Maier and Meier seem to be interchangeable in those families.) The chart, with the red arrows, shows that Maria Elisabeth Meier's brother was George Jacob Maier, husband of Maria Elisabeth Koleber.

Well, lo and behold, my grandmother's maiden name was KOLEBER! So here are the discoveries: my Grandma Mollie (Koleber) Margheim's Grandaunt (through her mother's line) Maria Elisabeth Koleber was the grandmother of both Lydia and Hannah Templing. And her Granduncle (through her father's line) George Jacob Maier was the grandfather of both Hannah and Lydia Templing. And Grandma Mollie's brother-in-law Jake Margheim was married to her second cousin Hannah Templing.

Terry Batt supplied these photographs of Bill and Lydia Karst, for which I'm very grateful.

Bill and Lydia Templing Karst at their
wedding 1916

Bill and Lydia Karst 1966

My grandmother's photo collection, that I found as I was cleaning out my father's house, included the photos below, of the Margheim brothers and their wives.

Alex and Bertha (Schneider) Margheim
at their wedding in 1916

Jacob "Jake" and Hannah (Templing)
Margheim at their wedding 1912

John and Amalia "Mollie" (Koleber)
Margheim at their wedding 1920 

A comment I wrote in a previous post was "Dig a little deeper". We never know what we're going to discover. By digging deeper last night when I saw that Hannah and Lydia Templing's grandma was a Koleber, I found the relationships in the diagram above. 

When I noticed all these family connections last night, I first wanted to go tell my Dad (can't do that anymore!), and then I wished I could ask Grandma Mollie about her connection to the Templing family. The opportunities I missed during those years that I spent so much time with my Grandma! She'd have so gladly shared with me her family connections. I just never thought to ask.