Holy Nosegay!

In the Sievert-Thompson collection at the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society Museum are several personalized bibles, with their covers bearing the name of a Sievert family member and a year — the year, I suppose, when the bible was presented as a gift to the family member, at Christmas or on a birthday or some special occasion.

Here we have one given to Ida Lewin Sievert in 1903. Ida was then about 28 years old. She and her husband, Henry, farmed just west of Ainsworth, and had a little daughter (a son was yet to come). It is a German-language bible, die Heilige Schrift.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

Ida, like nearly every other owner of a bible or prayer book, slipped things between the leaves — for example, the little card above from her neighbor, Pearl Ols.

She also pressed flowers in it, like this little nosegay with its stems still bound by a thread.



I think there are two roses in there, along with some clover blossoms and a couple of many-petaled blooms like chrysanthemums or zinnias. (By the way, 4 Mose = Numbers, for us English-speakers.)


The card from Pearl Ols mentions a 25th wedding anniversary, which was probably Ida's and Henry's. That fell on March 17, 1921, just about four months before Ida's death.

Ainsworth Then and Now: the Sievert Farmhouse

Circa 1942, and 2022:



(Click on images to enlarge)
Top image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

Thank goodness for Google street view, which saves me from having to go park my car on the shoulder-less 69th Ave. or DeKalb Street to get a photo of the old Sievert farmhouse.

Which, it turns out, is probably the old Brown farmhouse, since the county records show 1850 as the year it was built, and that was before the Sieverts came to Ross Township. The earliest record I can find of ownership of that land, from Early Land Sales, Lake County, is its purchase in May of 1844 by Severn Brown, who bought 80 acres constituting the west half of Section 7.

Severn Brown rests in the Chester Cemetery, along with his wife, Elizabeth.

I shall certainly have to write more about the Brown family, as well as the Sievert family, but at present my brain is very, very tired and has taken a leave of absence to rest and recuperate, and I don't know when it will return.