Gerhard Willems (1820-1900) &
Katharina Rempel Willems (1823-1875)
An Invitation to a
Willems Reunion 1980[1]
“Dear Relatives,
Our
great-grandfather, Gerhard Willems, was born in Holland (or Prussia) on Oct. 3,
1820. He was married to Katharina Rempel
in 1841. They spent some years farming
in Russia. Great-grandmother died in
Russia in 1875 at the age of 52.”
Willems Gen. I. II. III.
“Gerhard and
his family moved to Minnesota in 1875; however, his wife Katarina died just
shortly before they left for America.
Gerhard moved from Minnesota to Canada.
After he died he was put into a grave and it was covered with
boards. In the Spring when some of the
sons came from Minnesota his body was viewed and then buried.”
Gerhard Willems (1820) and Katharina Rempel Willems
(1823-1875) are my paternal great-great-grandparents. They were completely unknown to me till my
mother sent me a mimeographed invitation to a 1980 Willems Family Reunion to be
held at Bethany Bible Institute in Hepburn, Saskatchewan. The people invited were the descendants of
Gerhard and Katharina, and the invitation listed twelve children born to
Katharina and Gerhard with birth and death dates for most of them. It noted that some of the information might
need correcting and invited people to bring pictures and other information they
might have about the family.
I was not able to
attend the reunion and learned nothing further about Gerhard and Katharina and
their children until a 1994 visit to my Aunt Mary (Willems) Davis in Dinuba,
California. I had just finished my
doctoral dissertation and was finally turning in earnest to writing about the
story of my Willems grandparents and their family. I told Mary about my project,
and we talked about her parents and what she knew about their families. She said she had something I might want, then
searched in her papers and took out a mimeographed sheet of data that was given
to her by one of her cousins. This
document, Willems Gen. I. II. III, gives the same names and dates as those on
the 1980 Willems Reunion Invitation but with some additional dates and
information about locations of births and deaths. It was probably put together and distributed
after the pooling of information at the Reunion.
Two years later, in the winter of 1996, I was able to
return to Dinuba, this time for six weeks, two of which I spent with my cousin
Joanne who lived in Fresno. I slept on
her couch and each weekday morning drove with her to the high school where she
was teaching. She got out of the car,
and I continued on to the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies at Fresno
Pacific University (my family was MB).
The rest of the day was spent immersed in the Center’s resources. Kevin Enns-Rempel, the archivist, introduced
me to the archives and other primary and secondary sources. He also entered the information on Willems
Gen. I. II. III into a computer data base, the Genealogical Registry and
Database of Mennonite Ancestry, referred to as “GRANDMA.” That information brought up an ancestry chart
that gave exact dates for Gerhard’s birth and marriage to Katharina Rempel as
well as information for Katharina’s parents.
GRANDMA was just getting started when that first
genealogical chart was printed. In the
years that followed, much more data was gathered and entered. In April 2006, I was able to attend a
genealogical workshop at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas, which also has a
Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies.
The workshop was conducted by Tim Janzen, a physician who is also deeply
involved in the GRANDMA project. After
the main program, Tim met with us individually.
When I gave him my Willems-Rempel material, he said that he was
corresponding with a relative of mine,
Gerhard Willems (b. 1955), a great- grandson of the Gerhard (1844-1916)[2]
who stayed in the Crimea when the rest of the family emigrated to North
America. This living Gerhard Willems was
born in Kazakhstan but moved with his family to Germany in 1988, just after the
fall of the Iron Curtin. Gerhard (1844-1916), the son who stayed in Russia,
died during the terrible years of the Russian Revolution, but his descendants
were not wiped out. They not only
endured they were able to preserve important family records that is now in
GRANDMA. In those records were the names
and dates of birth four children who were not on the list that I’d received from
my family.
Gerhard
and Katharina had a total of 16 children,
and we know all their names and dates of birth.
We also know the date of death of all but one of them.
~~*~~
To read the full story of Gerhard and Katharina, click on their names listed under "Pages" in the column to right of this text.
[1] Sent out by the Reunion Committee: Sam Willems,
Waldheim, Sask.; Wes Willems, Saskatoon, Sask.; Elmer Andres, Hepburn, Sask.;
Herman Berg, Hepburn, Sask.
[2] This Gerhard’s son Peter (1877-1942) was born in
Kutyki, Crimea, but died in Spasskoyi, Kazakstan. His son, Gerhard (1908-1997), was born
in Yalantusch, Crimea, married 1940 in Crimea, had children in Kazakhstan and
died in Germany (GRANDMA).
