Some Fredell history found!

I stumbled across some family stuff I'd only vaguely heard about many years ago.  I was trying to figure out when exactly the Fredells came to America.  I started with the photos that I took a few years ago of the headstones I discovered at the Red Oak cemetery:

 

John was the first one to come to America.  I'm not sure when he came, but I can probably get pretty close.  Maria was his mate - I say it that way because it doesn't necessarily sound like they were married.  Of course, coming from Sweden, I think even way back then they were less puritanical than Americans, so that was probably not uncommon.  But John was a prick and intended to leave his woman and child (my great grandfather, Gust) behind, or at least that's the story I've been told.  My understanding was that Gust was young when his father left, and since he was born in 1882, I'm guessing he came in the 1880s.

So John was born in 1863, his wife Maria was 4 years younger, born in 1859.  She would have been 24 and John would have been 20 when Gust was born.  And John would have been a fairly young man when he came to America.  Another tidbit we only found out when Wes did some digging several years ago:  he did not come to America with the name Fredell.  Apparently the family name back in Sweden was Karlsson, which is kind of interesting because I have a Hoya chum in Sweden whose name is Christina Karlsson... we could be related!  Anyway, I'm not privy to why he changed the family name and how he came up with Fredell.  This is what I found about the name with a google search:

In Swedish, "Fredell" is a surname derived from the word "fred" which means "peace", with the suffix "-ell" added on essentially translating to "little peace" or a diminutive form of "peace".

Origin: It's considered an ornamental name, meaning a variation added for aesthetic reasons.

In the end, Maria and Gust ended up joining John.  I don't know any of that story and why they ended up joining him, but they did.  They never had other children, so Gust was an only child.  However, I seem to recall that someone told me once that he was one of twins and the other was lost.  Whether that means at birth or sometime after, and whether it is true or not, I suppose we'll never know now that everyone is gone that would know.

John bought 80 acres (the original farm) of rich Iowa farmland.  They built a house on what is now called Pine Ave., just north of what's now called 140th St. The official coordinates of the house are 41.100046, -95.070477.  The address by the time we lived there was Rt. 2, Villisca, Iowa.  There was an old house that I believe was probably there when they bought the farm, and eventually, they built the new house in front of the old house, which was an empty shell.  It was more or less a big play house for us which also served, at times, as a chicken and turkey coop. And the house they built was added on to at some point.  When Mom and Dad first started living there, there was no indoor toilet, though there was indoor plumbing to the kitchen.  They used an outhouse until I was about 5.  Can you image that with three young children?? Yikes...

In October of 1935, John executed his will.  In a court case I will describe later, it is described as follows:

Under his will, his estate was left to his wife and son for their lives with the remainder to his grandchildren. Grandchildren is defined in the will as the children of the body of the son. A deceased grandchild's issue of the body would take the share of the deceased parent. If the deceased grandchild had no issue of the body living at the time of the death of the son, then the remainder would be divided by the children of the body of the son living at the time of the son's death.

John died 12 days after executing this will at 72, and Marie died in 1942 at 83. Gust had married Edith, my great grandmother who is the only one who was alive when I was born.  Gust died at the young age of 52 in 1945, shortly after his mother died.  Gust and Edith had four children - my grandfather, Lester (1903); Gladys (1906), who lived near Red Oak and who I vaguely remember; Maxine, who lived in California and who I really have no recollection of; and Fern, who died at the age 21 from peritonitis, a complication after having her appendix removed.  Here is Grandma Edith's grave marker:

Grandpa's gave marker (above) is in Pilot Grove cemetery.  (What are the chances he married a woman with the same name as his sister?!) I never did the math before, but apparently Grandpa was on 19 and Grandma 18 when they got married.  She talked about teaching in a country schoolhouse before they married - I guess you didn't need a college degree to teach back then! Reviewing her obit, it looks like she taught for 5 years and worked for an attorney for 5 years.  If she was only 18 when they got married, it's obvious she worked after they got married! Here is her obit:

And Grandpa's, 4 years later:
 

 

Incidentally,  the way this stone looks, I was reading her full first name as Fernludille, but I looked it up and it's Fern LUCILLE.  You have to enlarge it to huge to see the little break that makes that "D" a "C".  And there seems to be no space between the "N" and the "L".  Anyway, here is Fern's obit - I was amazed I found it!

Kind of weird seeing an obit that's almost 100 years old! I think this is actually an article, which tells me the family had some clout or standing in the community back then.

I could find nothing about Maxine.  I'm not sure if she was the oldest or somewhere else in the lineup.  With a last name like "Davis", it's a pretty common name.  I found a couple of obits in Iowa of Maxine Davis's that were born around the same time, but I remember her living in California.  And according Grandpa's obit, by 1993 she was living in Kentucky.  So who knows where she was when she passed.

So on to what I know about Dad's generation.  Grandma and Grandpa had my dad's sister, Carolyn, in 1931 I believe, and dad, John Delaine Fredell (he went by Delaine, not John) in 1936. They built a new home across the farm from the house built by John.  It was a little 2 bedroom bungalow with a walk up attic like my house. I know that Maxine had a daughter, but I don't know her name and it's possible she had other children.  I don't ever remember meeting any of them, though I think it's likely that I did at some point.  And Gladys and her husband adopted their daughter, Mary Ann. (Who I just found on FB!)

Going back to that old will of John's (and what piqued my interest), I wish I knew more of the details about the land. I always assumed that it was 80 acres John bought because that's what was protected by the will when Grandpa died.  But it brings up questions.  Was there more land initially?  Because when John died, there were 3 siblings left to split the land.  Well, Maxine was in California by then, so I always assumed Grandpa bought her out.  But would that have been allowed with the will in place?  Could Grandpa have been renting some of the land from Maxine all those years? The will stipulated that the original land went to the heirs in the next generation, Dad's being the last generation subject to the will. So I think there must have been 240 original acres... each getting 80 acres upon John's death because it was 80 of the original land that Grandpa had when he died that was split between Dad and his sister.

And there was the issue of Mary Ann being adopted.  In 1983, Mary Ann (whose married name was Skoog) took Grandpa and Grandma and Maxine and her husband to the Supreme Court of Iowa because they apparently made it clear that she would not be inheriting her mother's land because she wasn't a "child of the body" of the grandchild of John.  It's a very interesting read, even as a lay person.  It can be seen HERE.  In the end, she lost.  Which means the land reverted back to Lester and Maxine, right?  So now that changes what the original number was.  It must have been 160, not 240, because again, it was 80 that Grandpa had upon his death...

The next generation:  Dad married my Mom, whose maiden name was Karen Kay Bean, in 1957.  I (Denise Kay) was born in 1958, Wes (Wesley Clair) was born in 1961, and Merry (Merry Noel) was born in 1962.  Mom and Dad divorce in 1974.  Dad married again, oddly enough to a woman with the same first and middle name as Mom!  And as if that isn't weird enough, her maiden name was Beem, Mom's was Bean.  She had some mental issues - I was told that she had spent time in a mental hospital after trying to burn her house down with her kids in it!  YIKES.  And put her with Dad, who definitely had issues and I'm sure it was a nightmare.  He divorced her after she held him at gun point (one of his guns) after a fight.  Then later, he married another woman, Pat Laird.  She eventually left after running up several credit cards into the $45,000+ range.  When Dad died in 2004, after paying minimum payments for years, they were still well over $40,000.  It was sad to think of him burdened by this debt all those years, but he was too proud to consider bankruptcy. 

Aunt Carolyn married a man named Marvin Young and I believe Jon Young, my oldest cousin, was born in 1956.  Marvin left Carolyn before Jon was born - it would have been a scandalous story at the time if Grandma hadn't been so good at keeping it a secret.  Marvin was sterile and when Carolyn turned up pregnant, he left and Grandma  told only Dad that she had been impregnated by artificial insemination, which was in its infancy. And the family guarded the secret.  If you look up AI in the 1950s, it says a few doctors were doing it on the sly and it was kept very hush-hush.  I'm not even sure that Jon ever knew, which to me seems cruel - allowing him to believe that his father deserted him before he was even born. Anyway, Jon was eventually dumped off on Grandma and Grandpa so Carolyn could go on with her life, and she later married Larry Whitehead.  His first son was Larry (namesake) born in January of 1959, then the second son, Rick, was born in November of the same year!  They split and she had one last son a few years later, Tony, out of wedlock.  I'm just guessing, but I think he was born in 1963 or 1964.  I've been unable to find out when Aunt Carolyn passed away. 

Each generation only had one male child, so the name stopped with my generation.  Wes was the only male child to have the Fredell name, and he didn't have any children.  

Lester lived to be 90, passing in 1993.  Before he passed, Carolyn's oldest son, Jon, successfully persuaded Lester to sign over all of the farm to him, with the exception of the protected 80 acres.  By this time, Lester was in the throes of dementia, but that's very hard and very expensive to prove. This is the farm that had been promised to my Dad, Delaine, as his reward for spending his whole life as the underpaid farmhand.  What he ended with was half of the 80 acres (the other half had to go to Carolyn).  I'm not sure how much land Grandpa had by then.  I would imagine that he very likely bought the rest of the original property from Maxine's heirs because they lived (assumably) in California.  And then he bought Jack Halbert's property after he passed.  So I think surely he had in excess of 300 acres, maybe a lot more. It would have made my Dad's retirement years very comfortable.  But it wasn't to be...

Dad passed in 2004.  Wes passed in 2013.  So the last person to possess the Fredell name is Wes's wife, Sally.