March 28 – Name

I have this picture hanging in my home. These are the Kapplingers. I am their namesake.

The story I received is that they came to the United States as young adults from Germany. George Kapplinger came alone. Hulde Klimpel was unmarried – I don’t know if she traveled here independently or with family. George and Hulde found each other and it was more a matter of practical necessity than anything you would call love. He intended to farm, and he would need a farm wife. She would need a husband – well, to survive. The two of them went to Minnesota where they set up a home and a small farm, which they worked together. Their family grew. Hulde gave birth to seven children – three girls followed by four boys.

It was a hard life, but they probably didn’t expect anything different. The eldest child, Ella, told her nieces stories of how she remembered it. Each morning after breakfast, her mother would set her in a chair and put the baby in her lap. She would tie Ella to the chair so she wouldn’t fall off or try to climb down. Ella would sit there all morning holding the baby and watching her little sister, Freda, run around the house. If Freda, or Fritz, as they called her, got into mischief, Ella cried because she knew she would get scolded for it when her mother came back.

Ella was four years old.

Later, both Ella and Fritz recalled sharing in all the housework with their mother – cleaning up after five boys/men, all working the farm. Both Ella and Fritz would marry and leave the farm. Neither of them would ever have children, and it’s not clear why. What was clear, though, was that they both felt they had done their share of raising kids.

Three of the four boys were content on the farm, but one was not. Helmer wanted to be a doctor. He knew, probably before anyone told him, that medical school was impossible. So he decided to settle for barber school. The family laughed at his ambitions. Why should he go to school? What would he need that for?

Helmer left the farm, attended barber school, and went to work in Mason City, Iowa. He married my grandmother, Wilma May, who gave birth to two girls – my mother, Jean, and aunt, Karen.

I was the second daughter of Jean Kapplinger and James Gillespie. When I was born they named me Margaret for an ancestor on my father’s side – I think it was his paternal grandmother. And they gave me the middle name Kapplinger.

So I carry the name of George, who brought it to America. There’s a funny side story about George. The story he told everyone was that he came to America because, back in Germany he got in a bar fight one night. Which maybe wasn’t unusual for him. But on this particular night, he left a guy on the ground looking dead. George wasn’t sure if he had really killed this guy, but he decided not to stick around and find out. He hightailed it out of there and sailed across the Atlantic. This became the family legend.

But many years later a relative doing genealogical research located some church records in Germany that told a different story. George had fathered a child out of wedlock, they said, and the mother’s family wanted him to pay child support. George didn’t want to, so he skipped town. And, evidently, he didn’t feel proud of his choice because he made up a story about murder to cover for the truth.

So, it is what it is. I come from people who were hard working, imperfect; foolish in some ways, courageous in others. Probably like most of us. But whenever I look at this picture of George and Hulde on their wedding day, I think of the incredible bravery that brought them to an unknown world, to make a new life.