Klossner Reunion

The most salient memory I have of my Grandpa Klossner is his wooden leg.  Sometimes he would let us kids knock on it.  Sometimes, he'd be lying on his daybed under the windows of the dining room when we arrived and it would be there on the floor, dismembered, beside him.

The thing about my family is that the generations are unusually long.  My grandfather was born in the 1800s (1894 to be exact) and a veteran of World War I.  He was an old man when I knew him.  He lost his leg in a farming accident the year before I was born.  He was no longer healthy.  Combine these factors with my youthfulness (I was only eight when he died), and it's no wonder I did not know him as a person.

This weekend, though, I had a chance to, in a way, draw a little closer to my grandpa.  I drove with my parents to Pershing, Missouri to attend a family reunion.  I gained a connection to the past and a connection to my grandpa.

I learned that the belfry of this church building overlooks the land my grandfather's great-grandfather, John Klossner, an immigrant from Switzerland, purchased soon after his arrival in Missouri in 1843.

Partial view of the Klossner homestead, which is directly below this bluff, and adjacent lands

His son, John Jacob (also a Swiss immigrant), inherited the homestead, which is bordered by the Gasconade River, upon his father's death around 1845.

John Jacob's son and my grandfather's father, John Wesley, later moved 80 miles south to the part of Missouri where five generations of his descendants (including me) have been born and raised.  That 80 miles may as well have been half-way around the world, because our branch of the family lost track of our Gasconade River relatives.  We knew virtually nothing of each other's existence until my fourth cousin once removed, Nelda, brought us together again about 25 years ago.

At that time, she began writing a book called At the Gasconade.  Her book revealed to me my grandfather's story, which is my story too.  It is a family history of three immigrant families, including the Klossners, and their descendants.  It is part historical narrative and part family tree.  Those many years ago, she tracked our branch of the family down to get a record of our births, marriages and deaths.  Since that time, my parents have consistently attended the reunion she organizes every three years.  I went to the reunion in 1990 when I had little to no interest in family history and again for the second time this past weekend.

Every family needs a Nelda.  This book is a family treasure.  It filled in the blanks of my family's history.

Nelda also organized an interesting and informative reunion program.  We heard a speaker discuss the history of steamboats along the Gasconade River, the river that winds past the original Klossner homestead.  There was a second speaker who explained the German heritage of the region.  The German Society of Philadelphia purchased tracts of land along the Gasconade for German immigrants to repurchase.  The intent was to prevent further assimilation of Philadelphian Germans by encouraging them to move to the isolated Missouri hills along the Gasconade where they could live as Germans in 'all the various particulars'.  My Swiss ancestor purchased his homestead among these German folks.

Another bit of information I learned from Nelda's book was the origin of the name Klossner.  It is a derivation of a German word meaning hermit, or "one who keeps to himself."  It would seem that as an introvert, I'm just following a family tradition.