| His parents | Her parents | |
| Ancestor 20 (10100): 2GGF Peter Meyer (1866 – 1937) |  WI –> ND | Ancestor 21 (10101): 2GGM Anna Mary Ackerman-Meyer (1865 – 1915) |
| Their ancestral child |
Peter and Anna had their shotgun wedding in Marinette, WI on April 19, 1887. They remained in Marinette for two decades. The photo above apparently shows their first ten children, all born in Wisconsin. In order of birth, they were Joseph (b. 1887), Charles, John, Frank, Peter Anthony*, Bernard, Rosa “Rose”, George, Anna “Annie”, and Leo (b. 1903). (Notice they had six boys before any girls!) Their last three children were born in North Dakota after this portrait: Florence (1905), Nicholas, and Veronica (1909).
Peter’s grandson Wayne remembered Peter being “tongue tied” with some kind of speech impediment. Wayne also recalled Peter having eczema. “He was always scratching his knee,” said Wayne, “and he had it on his face too.”
Peter was a farmer. The Ackerman family came from a forestry tradition, and at least one of Anna’s sons, Charles (upper left), followed this path.
The family moved to North Dakota in 1903, probably to homestead. They settled on a farm five miles southwest of Kenmare. Anna died there in 1915 at age 49, not from childbirth complications as we might expect. Her obituary cites an unspecified cancer. Women who have numerous children have heightened risks of breast cancer and thyroid cancer.
On Christmas Day of 1915, Charles got into a drunken fight with his uncle-in-law John Kramer and shot him dead. Charles spent several years in prison before he filed for retrial and was acquitted on the basis of self-defense.
Peter took a second wife, Mae Wiltse, in North Dakota. I do not know of any children that they had together. Interestingly, Peter’s son Peter Anthony married Mae’s younger sister Lottie! Lottie’s daughter Loretta recalled that as a child they never knew what to call Mae: Aunt or Grandma?!
Peter and Anna are buried side-by-side in St. Agnes Catholic Cemetery, Kenmare, ND. Anna’s obituary indicates that the family attended church there. Dad and I visited their grave in 2015.
Although this family was lucky enough to have all 13 children live to adulthood, only two of them (Rose and Florence) survived into old age. Several of them died young – middle aged or in accidents. A short time after his release from prison, at age 36, Charles was killed in a horrible forestry accident. His obituary spares no details: “Saturday November 1 … he fell 60 feet onto a log, while attempting to rig up a gin pole when a tractor donkey line had became entangled. He was terribly crushed in the fall and lingered until Sunday when he died in the hospital there.” Frank was killed in a truck-driving accident, and a newspaper photo points to the two different spots where his upper body and lower body were found. My great grandfather Peter Anthony died in a coal mining accident that apparently involved a vehicle sliding backward into a pit.
