NOTE: This essay is excerpted from the opening and closing chapters of In Search of Susanna: An Auto/biography, University of Iowa Press (1996). Earlier versions of portions of this essay appeared in the summer 1982 issue of Iowa Woman and the winter 1993 issue of The Palimpsest.
WRITING AUTO/BIOGRAPHY
The problem is, I think, that the lines of narrative never jell. When it gets too bad, you do what I have done: chuck it aside and go on a pilgrimage, hoping to bring back the initial sense of joy and curiosity, and find the tale whose telling will bind the scattered lives of a family line (63).
--Kem Luther, Cottonwood Roots (1993)
On a muggy August day in 1980, I sat at an old oaken table in my room at the Maison des Vacances in Niederfeulen, Luxembourg, poring over black leather-covered books containing the Feulen parish records. I was midway through a two-week trip to Luxembourg with my cousin, Father Frank Klein. We had come to see what we could learn about our Klein ancestors, who had left their native villages of Oberfeulen and Niederfeulen and had immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s.
As I studied the lists of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, jotting down names of Klein ancestors, my eyes paused at one name: Simmerl. I reached for my diary, where I had copied vital statistics on ancestors taken from the records of St. Joseph Parish in Granville, Iowa. There it was--Simmerl--the same name. Coincidence. Pure chance. Still, Simmerl was not a common name, either in Luxembourg or the United States. Could it be that not only my maternal ancestors, the Kleins, but also my paternal ancestors, the Simmerls, had once lived in Oberfeulen and Niederfeulen?
On that summer day, as I skimmed the pages of yellowed church records, I encountered Simmerl again and again. I jotted down each reference, thankful that my meager knowledge of Latin and French was making it somewhat easier for me to decipher the tiny inscriptions in that intricate scrolled handwriting. Eventually, I came upon this baptismal record:
Die Trigesima Decembris 1856, hora septa matutina nata eademque die baptista fuit Barbara, filia naturalis Angela Simmerl ex Oberfeulen, levantes erant Petrus et Barbara Simmerl.
On December 30, 1856, at seven in the morning, was born and baptized that same day Barbara, the natural daughter of Angela Simmerl of Oberfeulen. Godparents were Peter and Barbara Simmerl.
The summer before, I had seen the names of Angela and Barbara Simmerl in the St. Joseph Parish death register. Barbara Simmerl Bunkers was my great-grandmother. Her tombstone in St. Joseph's cemetery listed her birthdate as January 1, 1856, and her date of death as February 4, 1943, seven years before I was born. My first clue that Barbara Bunkers' maiden name was Simmerl had come from a penciled-in notation in the death register: "Grand-daughter of Angela Simmerl."
Armed with that name, Simmerl, I had leafed back through the death records until I had found this death record: "Simmerl, Angela. Died July 15, 1897. Old age. Age 90. Funeral July 17, 1897. Granville, Iowa." Pencilled in between Simmerl and Angela were the words, "Grandmother of Barbara (Simmerl) Bunkers." So, Angela Simmerl had been the grandmother of Barbara Simmerl Bunkers. That made Angela my great-great-great-grandmother. But who had been the link between Angela and Barbara? Had Angela's son been Barbara's father? Who had been her mother? The St. Joseph Parish death register held no clue to that mystery, and I had no idea how to find out.
Now, looking over the Feulen, Luxembourg, parish records, I did. I glanced again at Barbara Simmerl's baptismal record. Something did not make sense. How could Barbara have been the daughter of Angela, who had been a forty-eight-year-old widow in 1856? What did filia naturalis mean? Why was no father's name listed on Barbara Simmerl's baptismal record?
These questions swirling around in my mind, I closed the parish books and took a walk with my cousin Frank to the home of Monsieur Francois Decker, the local historian, whose study, Feulen, 963-1963, had been so helpful to us at the start of our research.
Sitting in Monsieur Decker's study, conversing haltingly in French, I confessed my preoccupation with the mystery of Barbara Simmerl's birth. Monsieur Decker smiled and gestured up to the top shelves of his bookcase, where tattered shoeboxes lined the wall. "Here," he said, "are my copies of the civil records for every person who has ever lived in the Feulen area. We will study the Simmerls. Perhaps I can help you answer your questions."
Down came the shoebox marked "S," and Monsieur Decker's eyebrows knitted together as he glanced at index card after index card. "Yes," he explained, "the Simmerl family in Oberfeulen can be traced back to the mid- to late-1700s. Joseph Simmerl, born in Bissen, Luxembourg, about 1758, married Maria Joanna Gilson, also from Bissen. By 1800, the couple was living in Oberfeulen, where Joseph was the Deputy-Burgermeister. Theodore Simmerl, the second of their children, was born in Oberfeulen in 1797. He eventually became a teacher in Oberfeulen."
Monsieur Decker continued: "The Hottua family's roots in Niederfeulen can also be traced back to the mid-1700s. The Hottuas lived in the "Schmidden" house and were Hufschmieds (blacksmiths or horseshoers). Peter Hottois married Catherine Glesener in 1779. Their daughter, Angela Hottua, was born in 1808. In 1827, Angela married Theodore Simmerl of Oberfeulen."
Finally, he pulled one more index card from the box: "'Barbara Simmerl. Born in Oberfeulen, December 30, 1856.' You are right. Barbara was the granddaughter of Angela Hottua Simmerl and her late husband, Theodore Simmerl. And the mother of Barbara was Susanna Simmerl, the daughter of Angela and Theodore."
Monsieur Decker paused. "You see, Susanna Simmerl was not married when she gave birth to Barbara. Filia naturalis means illegitimate daughter. Barbara was listed in the parish records as the daughter of her grandmother, Angela Hottua Simmerl, not her mother, Susanna Simmerl. But the civil records tell another story. They say that Susanna Simmerl was Barbara's mother."
So Susanna was the missing link, the piece to the puzzle I had been trying to complete. Susanna Simmerl. My great-great-grandmother. She had borne the same name as I, although my parents could not have known that when I was born in 1950 and named Suzanne because, as my mother liked to joke, she loved the song, "Oh, Susannah."
I knew I needed to think more about that phrase, filia naturalis. Surely, in nineteenth century Luxembourg, an illegitimate daughter would not have been viewed in the same light as a legitimate daughter. Why had Barbara Simmerl's baptismal record listed her grandmother Angela as her mother? Why had Barbara's biological mother, Susanna, been wiped out of existence? How could I find Susanna again?
. . . . . . . . .
There may come to be places in our lives that are second spiritual homes--closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, not anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed.
--From Eudora Welty's essay, "Place in Fiction," in The Eye of the Story and Other Essays (1956)
For many years Eudora Welty's words have inspired me to ask, "What is the 'home tie,' the 'blood tie,' in my life? What defines 'Home' for me?" My sense of the home tie, the blood tie, derives not only from places but also from people. My sense of Home is linked to my roots in Iowa and Luxembourg, and it is linked to my search for Susanna.
Susanna Simmerl was born on April 2, 1831, in Oberfeulen, Luxembourg, the third child of Theodore and Angela (Hottua) Simmerl. On December 30, 1856, at the age of twenty-five, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Barbara. Then, in the spring of 1857, along with her older brother Peter Simmerl, Susanna immigrated to the United States. Her infant daughter Barbara remained in Luxembourg with Susanna's mother, Angela Simmerl. Six months later, in December 1857, Susanna married Frank Youngblut, another Luxembourger who had immigrated to the United States in 1852. The couple began farming near Gilbertville, Iowa, a small community just outside Waterloo. Susanna and Frank had nine children, and they farmed for many years, then retired and moved into town. Frank Youngblut died on 11 May 1892. When Susanna died fourteen years later, on 20 May 1906, she was buried next to her husband in the Youngblut family plot in Immaculate Conception cemetery in Gilbertville.
I was born on April 20, 1950, at Sacred Heart Hospital in Le Mars, Iowa, the first child of Tony and Verna (Klein) Bunkers, who lived twenty-five miles away in Granville, Iowa. I was baptized Suzanne Lillian Bunkers at St. Joseph Catholic Church. The oldest of five children, I grew up in Granville, and I left home at the age of eighteen to attend Iowa State University in Ames. Six years later, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to attend graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. After completing my doctoral degree in August 1980, I came to Mankato, Minnesota, to teach English at Mankato State University. On October 17, 1985, I became the mother of a baby daughter, Rachel Susanna. Our family continues to live in Mankato.
These facts briefly outline the particulars of two women's lives. But, as I have learned during the past fifteen years, facts are only the tip of the genealogical iceberg; they do not tell the whole story. To create the story told on the pages of this book, I have needed to search in unconventional places, and I have needed to come to terms with a complicated web of ideas and feelings about the meanings of motherhood, family, and home.
When I think of Home, I think of the first home I remember: the tiny white-shuttered house my parents rented on ELm Street across from St. Joseph's church in Granville. Then I think of the green three-bedroom rambler at 620 Long Street that my parents built in the mid-1950s. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in these two houses, one at the east end, the other at the west end of our town of 350 people. Even though it has been more than twenty-five years since I have lived there, when someone asks me, "Where's your home?", I still say, "Granville."
When I think of Home, I also think of Luxembourg, the tiny European country that my maternal and paternal forebears left in the mid-1800s. My ancestors were farmers, and when they began arriving in the United States, they settled near Dubuque, Iowa, in the small farming communities of Guttenberg, Dyersville, New Vienna, and Luxemburg. From eastern Iowa, some family members went south to Gilbertville, Iowa, others west to Granville and Remsen, Iowa, others to the Dakotas and Minnesota. Today, their descendants number in the thousands.
In Search of Susanna is about my family and my ongoing fascination with its history. Over the years, as I have worked on this book, I have wondered if I were writing history or literature, nonfiction or fiction. Now I no longer think in these either/or terms about this book or about the lives chronicled and imagined in it. This book is based on historical records about the indivividuals whose lives are reconstructed on its pages. At the same time, this book is based on the ways my imagination has interacted with historical records to recreate a sense of time, place, and character.
How and when did In Search of Susanna begin? In early 1980, my cousin Father Frank Klein and I began researching and writing Good Earth, Black Soil (St. Mary's College Press, 1981). This book, a study of several generations of Frank's paternal and my maternal Klein ancestry, was based on our research in Luxembourg and the United States. Because Frank and I decided early in our work that we wanted our book to be more than a compilation of genealogical charts, we decided to shape each chapter of the book as a narrative told by one of our ancestors. In the book's preface, we explained that "rather than recite a chronology of names and dates, we wanted to create a sense of real people and authentic situations in our family's history. Doing so has involved combining historical fact with imaginative detail to shape what might be called a work of historical fiction" (iii).
When I wrote the chapter entitled "The Tadler Home," I told the story of my great-great-grandmother, Mary Muller Klein Flammang. As a young woman, she married Michel Klein, and the young couple lived in Tadler, Luxembourg, where their sons, Nicholas and Jacob, were born. Then Michel Klein died unexpectedly, leaving Mary pregnant with their third son, Theodore, born six months after his father's death. Mary Klein raised her three sons from her first marriage; she eventually remarried, had a fourth son, Franz Flammang, and was widowed again.
One by one, Nicholas, Jacob, and Theodore Klein immigrated to the United States. Years later, they bought their mother Mary and their half-brother Franz tickets to join them in northwest Iowa. As I began writing "The Tadler Home," I was haunted by the image of Mary Klein standing before her first husband Michel's grave just before she sailed for America, knowing she would never return to Luxembourg. That image became the cornerstone of my chapter and the heart of Mary's story.
It was while working on the story of Mary Muller Klein Flammang that I first learned of the existence of Susanna Simmerl Youngblut, another of my great-great-grandmothers. The more I found out about Susanna, the more determined I became to piece together the story of her life. To do this, I have studied the history of Luxembourg, the many reasons why Luxembourgers left their homeland for America, and the varied lives of those immigrants and their descendants once they arrived in this country.
Dailiness is central to this book. As Bettina Aptheker explains, "The search for dailiness is a method of work that allows us to take the patterns women create and the meanings women invent and learn from them. If we map what we learn, connecting one meaning or invention to another, we begin to lay out a different way of seeing reality" (39). By using diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, church and census records, autograph books, photographs, holy cards, oral history interviews, and family stories to lay out patterns of dailiness, I hope to make more visible the lives of individual women within the context of families, generations, and cultures.
I call this book an "auto/biography" because it interweaves details of my ancestor Susanna's life with some of my own observations and experiences. To make this book, I have gathered and selected "fabric," cut "squares," laid them out to create the book's "pattern," and stitched them into the finished "word quilt."
As I have studied my ancestor Susanna's life, I have been stitching my own diary entries, my research on nineteenth-century women's lives, and my understanding of my family's history into the book that you are now holding. Stories from my life as a daughter and mother as well as my work as a teacher and writer make up some of the "pieces" stitched into this "word quilt." So do excerpts from the diaries I have kept since I was ten. I know that what I write in my diaries represents my own point of view and my own version of events, not anyone else's.
I have spent many years working on this "word quilt." Since 1978, I have combed census, church, and county records in the United States as well as in Luxembourg. Two brief visits to Luxembourg in 1980 and 1984 initiated my research there. In 1988 a Fulbright senior research fellowship made it possible for my daughter and me to live in Brussels, Belgium, for six months, where I continued my study of nineteenth-century women's lives in the farming villages of Luxembourg and Belgium. At the Bibliotheque Nationale in Luxembourg City and at the Royal Albert I Library in Brussels, I had access to historical materials, civil and church records, letters, photographs, and village demographics. I spent a good deal of time staying with cousins who still live in Niederfeulen. Since 1988, I have returned to Belgium and Luxembourg three more times to conduct further research and to synthesize my findings.
My research has helped me place my ancestor Susanna into the context of nineteenth-century working-class life in Luxembourg, a country with a tempestuous history. I now have a better understanding of the economic and political matrix surrounding Luxembourgers' immigration to the "New World." I have gained a wider perspective on working-class immigrant women's experiences in nineteenth-century America. And I am able to appreciate Susanna's relationship with her daughter, Barbara, through the filter of my relationship with my daughter, Rachel.
This has not been an easy book to write, for my work on In Search of Susanna has presented its own special challenges. My research process has had many twists, turns, and surprises. It began, and it has continued, based on hypothesis-formation and testing. At the same time, it has included a healthy dose of coincidence and chance. This book is not the result of an objective, scientific study. It is intensely personal. It reflects my thoughts and feelings about myself and others, and not everything I have written here will please all those who read it. At the same time, the stories in this book are as true as I can make them, given that my interpretations of people and events bear the marks of my own experience and personality.
I am a teacher, a writer, a daughter, and a mother. This last fact, more than any other, has drawn me to the story of my ancestor, Susanna. During the past seventeen years, as my life has changed, I have formulated and discarded many theories about who Susanna might have been. At every turn, my study of my ancestor's life has been fueled by encounters with others who, like me, are trying to relate their lives to the lives of those who came before them. Like these searchers, I want to explore the generations of my family, reconstruct their lives, and tell their stories, so that someday these stories will give my descendants a "family map" that will help them discover where they have come from.
In Cottonwood Roots, Kem Luther tells the compelling story of his search for his genealogical roots. Early in his book, he explains what makes his work difficult: "The presence of the story is what makes genealogy hard to write. The rest, the construction of the sequence from the network, can be learned by rote. The real problem is how to follow and develop the narrative. It is so difficult that it is a wonder that it gets done at all" (63).
I had to laugh when I first read those words; they summed up just how I felt about my search for Susanna. For years, my attic study has been overflowing with genealogical charts, letters from relatives, childhood memorabilia, old family photographs, thirty years' worth of diaries, and hundreds of books. How would I ever manage to pull everything together into a meaningful whole? Only by seeing the problem Kem Luther describes, then doing what he suggests: "The problem is, I think, that the lines of narrative never jell. When it gets too bad, you do what I have done: chuck it aside and go on a pilgrimage, hoping to bring back the initial sense of joy and curiosity, and find the tale whose telling will bind the scattered lives of a family line" (63).
In the end, it is the interaction of the writer's imagination with the cultural records that makes the story meaningful and the search worthwhile. Like Kem Luther, I have gone on a pilgrimage to find the tale whose telling will bind the scattered lives of my own family line. My search for Susanna embodies that tale.
. . . . . . . . .
The life that was unused in me was the part that could wait and watch and discover that I live in a vibrating web of connection. That web connects dreams to the world, the living to the dead, and the living to each other. We are forever tearing it. Now that I know I live in a cosmos and not a chaos, I have to try to mend the gaps I can see (292).
--Joan Weimer, Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak (1994)
"For whom are you searching?"
Had someone asked me this question fifteen years ago, I would have answered, "Susanna."
Now I know that, although I have been searching for information about a woman named Susanna Simmerl Youngblut, she has not been the only object of my search. My family's ancestral origins in Luxembourg; the links to present-day cousins there; the circumstances surrounding Susanna's, Angela's, and Barbara's immigrations to the United States; Frank and Susanna Youngblut's life together with their children; Barbara and Henry Bunkers's life with theirs; the web of Susanna's descendants in this country; my own roles as a daughter and as a mother--these, it turns out, have been the objects of my search all along, whether I realized it or not.
And, finally, I have been the object of my own search. In her book, Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak (1994), Joan Weimer writes about her journey back into the life of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a nineteenth-century author. Weimer's research leads her to explore what she calls "the ghosts of my buried selves" (196).
I have been doing something similar: discovering that web of connection, examining the tears, trying to mend the gaps. I have been doing these things through the interaction of memory and imagination, through stories that I have heard and told over the years, through the reinvention of what could not be learned or remembered, through the pages of the book that you are holding in your hands.
Writing in History and Memory (1993) about the intersections of history, memory, and narrative, Mark Freeman has observed, "The process of self-understanding is itself fundamentally recollective, taken here in the sense of gathering together again those dimensions of selfhood that had heretofore gone unarticulated or had been scattered, dispersed, or lost" (29). Like many others before me, I have been gathering the scattered, the dispersed, and the lost; sifting through raw materials; piecing them into various patterns--this time on the computer keyboard rather than on the livingroom floor; exploring the nature of the home tie, the blood tie; and doing what Kem Luther recommends: finding "the tale whose telling will bind the scattered lives of a family line."
. . . . . . . . .
In January 1983, I asked my mother to give me a special birthday present. I handed her a blank journal, its cloth cover decorated with tiny red, gold, and blue flowers.
On its first page, I wrote my mother a letter, asking her if she would spend some time writing in this journal for me, telling me about her childhood, her marriage to my father, her memories of me as a little girl, her feelings now as she looks back on all those years.
Just before my birthday that April, a small package arrived in the mail. Inside was the journal I'd given my mother; it was filled with her reminiscences.
Mom wrote of her childhood on a northwest Iowa farm, with her parents and six brothers and sisters. She wrote of her days working as a "hired girl." She wrote of the early days of her marriage to my father during the 1950s and of the births of their five children. She recounted funny stories about my childhood. Yet, the most moving entry in her journal was the final one, for it spoke to me of a mother's memories and a mother's love:
There was much to be done in a household of five children, but everyone helped and time and the years passed happily! Dad, myself and the kids, we all had our jobs to keep us busy. Sometimes now I wonder just how we handled it all. And sometimes now, I almost tire when I think of the busy years gone by, and how we struggled along.
But I wouldn't want to trade those years; some were very good, some not so good, but all in the process of a family growing up. And sometimes now, I wish I could go back and relive some of those years, the busy years, when this house was full of kids, fun, and laughter! Sometimes I just wish . . .
There are days when I wish I could make myself go up into the attic and do some cleaning, and maybe the closets, too, but everywhere are memories. In the far southwest corner of the attic is the old high chair you kids all used, far to the north end is a small red rocker, the half-intact doll house and cases of Barbie doll clothes! It's all been there for quite a few years, gathering dust and taking up space! But there it can stay, until the day someone decides it has to go.
There must be many things I've forgotten to mention in this book. It's been hard to relive the past, and I find it hard to put together times and places. I've tried to recall times and occasions as they were, and hope, Suzy, you enjoy the things I've put together!
It's been fun, and though I may have shed a tear or two in between the lines, I've enjoyed penning this book for you, Suzy!
My best to you always. I'm proud to call you my daughter, you have accomplished so much! May the good Lord bless and keep you.
All my love, "Your Mom"
. . . . . . . . .
The concept of biography itself has changed profoundly in the last two decades, biographies of women especially so. But while biographers of men have been challenged on the "objectivity" of their interpretation, biographers of women have had not only to choose one interpretation over another but, far more difficult, actually to reinvent the lives their subjects led, discovering from what evidence they could find the processes and decisions, the choices and unique pain, that lay beyond the life stories of these women . . . (30).
--Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (1988)
I appreciate Carolyn Heilbrun's assessment of writing about women's lives because I've had to choose which interpretations of events to accept, and I've had to reinvent, through the interaction of memory and imagination, aspects of the lives that my subjects might have led. I've learned that no single theory or interpretation can account for all the complexities of an actual life. I must concur with Michael Ondaatje who, near the end of his memoir, Running in the Family, observes: "There is so much to know and we can only guess" (200).
Like my theory of Susanna as the "heroic mother," my theory of Susanna as the "deserting mother" has been shattered. In fact, the more I have reconstructed (and reinvented) Susanna's life, the less qualified I feel to pass judgment on her actions. And the less willing I have become to believe that I can neatly sum up what her life meant--or what it means.
The dynamics of mother-daughter relationships are complex; feelings between mothers and daughters are powerful and often contradictory. As I have studied Susanna's relationships with Barbara and Angela through the filter of my relationships with my own mother and daughter, I have become better able to appreciate the distinctions that scholars have drawn between acts of mothering and the cultural institution of motherhood, past and present.
My search for Susanna has deepened my understanding of how my own experience of daughterhood and motherhood has inevitably affected my interpretations of what Susanna did and why she did it. My search has helped me gain perspective on a woman whom I never knew but whose experiences and decisions are interwoven with my own. It has made me grateful for my close relationships with my mother, Verna, and my daughter, Rachel.
My search has turned out to be a search for many "missing persons"--Susanna Simmerl Youngblut, Frank Youngblut, Barbara Simmerl Bunkers, Frank Bunkers, Tony Bunkers. My search has helped me recognize how important it is for my daughter to enjoy the presence of both her mother and her father in her life so that one day, she will have her own memories and her own stories to tell. I hope that Susanna's story will be one of them. Slowly pieced and carefully woven, it will become a warm and cherished coverlet for her descendants.