Playing for Time

The  recent photo sorting with my sisters has yielded much treasure, all of which I appreciate infinitely more than the first time I saw those pictures.  Some I’d never laid eyes on before, and I do a little dance over each one.  We’ve tossed bags full of bad pics — exceptionally bad pics of blurry armpits and floors and the back end of a cat — that nobody ever bothered to weed out, but we’ve glommed onto anything of interest, everything that sparks memories and smiles.  Today’s little collection has been making me smile all morning, so I’m sharing …

My great-grandmother, Caroline Fuhrman Dierking (looking outward), and her sister Emma.

On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting:  “Caroline Fuhrman, my mother, was born in Germany.  The family emigrated to America in 1872, with eight sons and two daughters, my mother being one of them.  Aunt Emma was born in Atchison County, Kansas after they came to America.  My mother and her sister loved each other very much.  This is at Aunt Emma’s Camp Creek home in Atchison County, sometime around 1920.”

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Caroline Fuhrman married Louis Dierking and after living northeast of Emporia for a time, they moved to this dugout northwest of Bushong in 1894.  Several sons were lost at birth or in childhood, but daughters Nora and Clara (my grandmother) survived, and after the move to the dugout, Ruth was born in 1896.  

This photo was taken when my dad, brother and grandmother went to a Camp Creek family reunion in 1966, and shows the house my great-grandfather Louis Dierking built onto the front of the dugout.  Pretty sure the horses, and whatever other livestock they had, lived in the lower part made from rock.  

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The daughters of Louis & Caroline Dierking, Nora, Ruth & Clara, Christmas, 1917

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Ruth Dierking Cox in 1920 — clearly things had changed a bit in three years’ time,

although my grandmother’s comment was

“I believe her car was a Studebaker.  Always breaking down or out of fix.”

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And now we’re back to sweet Great-Great-Aunt Emma, with pretty little Colleen, who was in some way my cousin, and 2-year-old me with my naked doll and a scowl.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1949.  Life is both long and unbelievably short.