Hello;
My name is David Farlow and Barbra Palm is also my gr,gr grandmother. My grandmother was Martha Rowe. She was Marie's second child. I believe Marie was Barbra's youngest daughter. I got to spend a lot of time talking to grandma about her family as she lived to the age of 104 and was sharp all the way to the end. She died early in 1998.
Joe and Barbra Miesen lived somewhere near the Bear Valley area in southern Minnesota where my Grandmother, Martha, was born Sep 9 1893. When Heinrich Willers and Marie moved to a farm near Turtle Lake Wisconsin, Joeseph and Marie moved to a farm about a mile away from them. It was about 1/4 mile south of the very East end of Moon Lake. All that was visable the last time I saw it, which was about thirty years ago, was a depression where the basement was. Joe Miesen was not, apparently, from what grandma said, an overly ambitious sort of guy. She more or less implied that her grandma, Barbra, was the little engine that could. She told of going cross country, there weren't any roads, only logging trails, to her grandmas with her older brother Otto and how her grandma gave them each a huge carrot to eat on the way home. Barbra also nursed people who were deadly ill, as did my gr grandmother Marie and my grandma Martha before she got married. She said that her grandmother had a large root cellar and also kept celery over winter among all the other stuff. She said old Doc Tanner would stop by pretty regular during the winter to discuss someone who needed help and sooner or later he would say, "Mrs. Miesen, could you spare a stalk or two of celery?" It was an uncommon vegetable at the time, and certainly in the winter time. Grandma said that her grandmother never wanted to leave KinderBeurern/Bausendorf. She said that Barbra's uncle was the BurgherMeister and her family owned the village's big brick oven. Joe was a natural drifter and came over a year before he sent for Barbra and the kids. He had been in one of the wars with France, where apparently he did well. Iv'e noticed from the guys I've known that a lot of guys who can adapt well to a choatic situation like combat don't do well in the more rigid structure of "civilized" life. He was kind of an autocrat and wouldn't let Barbra and the kids speak French. Goose gabble he called it and said that the French would have won the war if they hadn't spent so much time partying etc.
They didn't make a go of it with the farm and moved to Shakopee. I don't know if this was before the big forest fire of 1898 went through the area or after. Joe got a job as a mailman and thrived on a route where he could gossip a little at many stops. He liked lightning storms and grandma said he died watching one at the screendoor of there house in Shakopee. Grandma said that her grandma had a "good voice" but I never realized that it was so exceptional.
Grandma went to stay with her aunt Kate (Barston) near Elbow Canada about 1910 for a while. She considered her to be a very competent woman but didn't think much of Barston who I believe Katie eventualy divorced.
She wrote all her life to some of her Poncelet cousins in southern Min. I think Margret married one of Adam Poncelets three sons. They all had big families and I believe a lot of them still live in the Goodhue area.
She never told me much about her aunt Lena but she remembered young Joe Miesen as a real good looking guy who married a school teacher and then got a divorce and ended up out in the state of Washington with another wife and family. Doesn't seem to have been too much of a ball of fire. I've got some info and pictures that Kathy Walters, one of Marie's other daughters, daughter, sent me. I'll try to find it and send you copies of it sometime. If you Google, KinderBeurern Palm or Kinderbeurern Miesen you will see that there are still Miesens and Palms living there.
Hope you find some of this interesting and useful.
David Farlow
722 Market St.
Eau Claire, Wi. 54703
715-832-2408
davefarlow@att.net