Penner - Karber - Gertz

 Table based on Paulina Foote, "Family Tree of Henry Foote."
List of families below also from Paulina Foote, "Family Tree of Henry Foote."
  

(p.19)

HENRIETTA (PENNER) KARBER 1857 - 1940

Henrietta Penner Karber was born June 10, 1857 in the village of Kicin (Kitschen) located near Warsaw, Poland. she was the youngest of eleven children in the family of Benjamin and Maria Kurzhals Penner. Aside from two sons and two daughters who died in childhood, the children were as follows: Jacob, Eva, Susanna, Peter, Maria, Elizabeth and Henrietta. Henrietta was named after a princess, possibly one of German origin.

It was in the Polish countryside that Henrietta grew up as a carefree little girl. She loved the out of doors, enjoying the flowers and the many trees. In her later life when she visited her youngest daughter in Washington, she would often make the comment that here it looked so much like Poland. Herding geese was one of her responsibilities. On one occasion a neighbor lady admonished Henrietta for her careless ways -- she had let the geese get into the bean patch! Henrietta however responed by saying, "et sen unsa ganse en et sen unsa schöbla" (they are our geese and they are our beans). It was also here in Poland that she learned to know Katherine Karber, her future husband's mother.

It may be mentioned at this point that a move may have been made to the village of Wymyschle, about fifty miles northwest across the Vistula River from Kicin [incorrect]. Henrietta often spoke of her mother selling cheese at Gambin, a town about four and a half miles further west from Wymyschle. She also spoke of her sister Eva (Ewert) having lived on a boat or raft for a whole year because of the Vistula flooding. There was also a Kurzhals family that lived immediately next to Wymyschle and today there is still a plot of ground referred to as "the Old Penner Place". Henrietta also spoke about a certain tree that has been found to grow in this village area and she was familiar with certain other towns located nearby. If they did live in Wymyschle, then it would have been from here that they moved to Russia.

In the year 1868, Henrietta being eleven years old, the Penners moved to Volhynia which is located in the Ukraine area of southern Russia. (There were a number of Mennonite settlements in the Volhnynia, some of the settlers who lived there had come from Prussia and some from the Wymyschle, Poland area. There were also many Swiss Mennonites. It is very possible that the Penner family settled in what was known as the Kutuzovka Settlement. Teh Mennonite Church here was served by a certain Elder Jacob Stucky who in 1874 provided the leadership for the emigration of almost that entire settlement to America, most of them eventually settling in McPherson County, Kansas in the Moundridge area.

Here in Volhynia, the Penners did quite well. Henrietta had to herd cows together with her nephew, Henry Foote, who had become a part of their family, being the son of Eva, Henrietta's sister. The Penners had no intention of leaving the Volhynia. The larger number of the other Mennonites were preparing to leave due to military conscription. Finally a man came and offered the Penners such a good price for their land that they likewise decided to sell and leave. Just prior to their leaving, they had built a new and very comfortable home.

The Penners left their home on August 6, 1874. (Here again it may be noted that they possibly were one of the seventy-three families led by Elder Stucky on the same dat in a departure from the Volhynia.) They traveled to Hamburg, Germany where they boarded a small ship and after sailing for two days and one night they landed in Hull, England. From Hull they traveled by train to Liverpool, England where they boarded ship for America.

(p.20)

(Henrietta often talked of a ship named "Jungfrau" (The Virgin). This may have been the ship, a German one, which they took from Hamburg, Germany to Hull, England. [Incorrect] The name of the ship on which they crossed the Atlantic must evidently have been "The City of Richmond". After eleven days on the Atlantic, they landed in New York. Their intentions were, as mentioned earlier, to go on to Kansas but because of the grasshopper problem there, they were advised only to go as far as Illinois until conditions imporved. They arrived at Bloomington, Illinois, September 3, 1874. Here Henrietta, now seventeen, took a job as housekeeper and farm worker for some Pennsylvania Dutch people. The parents with their grandson, Henry Foote, settled temproaritly in the Peoria, Illinois area. In February of 1876, the Penners moved to Marion County, Kansas, taking Henrietta along with them. It may be added that Henrietta learned her immaculate housekeeping ways and her cooking techniques from those Pennsylvania Dutch people.

(p.21)

DAVID and HENRIETTA (PENNER) KARBER

A new chapter now begins in the lives of both David Karber and Henrietta Penner. Henritetta had been in Kansas about a year and a half and David possibly up to six months when they were married on August 26, 1877. How they met we are not certain but it was not love at first sight. David needed a wife and the Penner parents, knowing the Karber family from Poland, decided that their daughter should marry him, beleiving that he would be a good provider. (Henrietta had come to appreciate the special interests of several American boys by this time and was not inclined to want to marry David, knowing that he was a somewhat ungodly man with a violent temper.)

For the marriage ceremony, they traveled to Moundrigde to have Elder Jacob Stucky of the Swiss General Conference Mennonites perform this service for them. Evidently there was no special wedding service, meal or celebration.

Their first home was established on an eighty acre tract of land near the town of Marion for which David had filed. Here they began farming, raising corn and possibly other grains along with hay for the cattle.

It seems