Ida Slight was the daughter of John Slight (1834–1879) and Frauke Margrette Sweeden (1824–1923), born on 24 Jul 1863 in Ackley, Hardin County, Iowa. She was a first-generation American born to parents who came to the United States from Lower Saxony, which is now a state in Germany.
The Three Slight Sisters
Ida was the middle child, one of three daughters born between 1862 (Anna) and 1866 (Hilke). Ida was named after her maternal grandmother, sort of. Frauke’s parents brought her and her siblings to the States in about 1855, and in the old country, her mother’s name was “Itje” which morphed into the more English-friendly “Ida” once the family settled in Iowa.
The sisters grew up in Etna Township, Hardin County, Iowa, several miles south of Ackley. They almost certainly attended one of the nine schools mentioned in this 1911 article:
In Etna township the first school was taught in the summer of 1855 by Martha George, in a building erected in the previous winter, of hewed logs, the work being accomplished by the neighbors interested. The size of this rude affair was eighteen by twenty-two feet and it stood on the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section 34, on land owned by Ichabod Lathrop. The attendance at this first term of school was twenty-one. By 1882 there were nine school buildings within the township and much interest taken in educational matters. (IAGenWeb, “Hardin County, Iowa Township Schools (1911)“)
Younger sister Hilke was the first to wed; she married Heike Muller on March 28, 1885, in Grundy County, Iowa. The following year, 1886, Anna married John Brinkman, and Ida married Bernard Blom.
Different Kinds of German Immigrants
German-speaking people have been coming to North America since the earliest colonial settlements, and first arrived in the British colonies in significant numbers in the 1670s. France transported thousands of German people to the Orleans Territory in present-day Louisiana between 1718 and 1750. Benjamin Franklin famously complained about the prevalence of German-language signs and newspapers in Pennsylvania, worrying that his German neighbors were unwilling to assimilate and might supplant the English-speaking population of his new country.
Some bad ideas about immigrants never seem to go away, despite centuries of evidence demonstrating their fallaciousness.
Over 200 years, from the 1670s to the 1850s, different groups of German-speaking people came from Europe for different reasons. Those reasons were often related to religious strife in the Old Country, but as the anti-monarchy sentiments of the American and French Revolutions disrupted the old order, that religious strife often became political and violent.
Arriving in America after the Civil War proved to be good timing for many of these groups, including the Slight family. The railroads (subsidized by government spending, and fueling outrageous wealth inequality, of course) generated an upward economic growth trend that made it easier for these hard-working farmers to try new techniques and to get the fruits of their labor to an increasingly nationwide and global market.
Brinkmans, Mullers, and Bloms (Oh, My!)
After they married, the sisters no longer lived in the same household, but their families lived close to each other. John and Anna Brinkman raised their nine children in Wright County, just north and west of Hardin County, while Barney and Ida Blom raised their five daughters in Ackley; Hilke and Heitle Muller raised their nine children in Grundy County, just east of Hardin.
Of these 23 cousins, only one died young, as far as I can tell. Ida and Barney’s daughter Carrie was born and died in 1893. Otherwise, all of them appear to have grown and had families of their own, except for Flora Brinkman (born November 22, 1893), who died in 1913 during a measles outbreak. Apparently, she contracted the disease after caring for others in her family who had contracted it.
After Barney
Barney Blom died in 1917, when his youngest child, Edythe, was 17 years old. He had lived to see his older daughters married, and Edythe married in 1919. This left Ida more or less on her own. She supported herself for several years working as a housekeeper, but remained a widow until her death.
Ida died at the home of her daughter, Mary McCullough, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on January 20, 1949.
Say hello, cousin!