[Great] Aunt Nellie was born four years after Glen, 25 June 1888, the middle child of Edward and Mary Peters, at Mariaville, of course. [Great] John F. Feddersen was born 10 March 1881 at Bryant, Iowa. She married him at Dustin, Nebraska, 3 July 1907. I'd never heard of Dustin but discovered it was a village with a Congregational Church in Dustin Township, the township the only Dustin left now, on the Niobrara River on the north edge of Holt County. It's near Anoka and Naper, Boyd County, where Uncle John was school superintendent. They had three sons, but I knew only the two who lived, Mervin W. and Donley F. The third, Robert, comes from the Bassett Cemetery roll with simply the year 1922, "Baby." The three are the only Feddersens there. I found this out recently on the Internet, for I've been to the Bassett cemetery and took photos of Aunt Nellie's and Uncle John's graves (which I can't find right now) but do not recall the infant's grave. Nellie died 1 June 1945 at 57 in the Stuart Hospital, he at 66 on 11 January 1948 in Sioux City, Iowa. Judging from Uncle John's obituary, included here, they packed a great deal into their lives besides having two very successful sons.
This is the earliest picture I have of her, which I suspect is around the time of the early one of Aunt Myrtle. The writing on the photo is Fern's (Grandma's).
Aunt Nellie was a hearty, authoritative woman, efficiently businesslike, a born organizer, with a gusty laugh, very motherly, easily sociable, affectionate. She was one of those bosomy women like Mom who grabbed one and hugged him. I liked her a lot. She often wore a red crystal necklace that I cherished so much, I ended up with it, after Grandma's and Mom's deaths, though I gave it to my sister Sue because I felt guilty that no one was wearing it. I think red must have been her favorite color as it is mine, for I remember a red-and-black-figured dress she often wore. Rather like Sweet-and-Sour/Tart cuisine, she was opposite to Aunt Myrtle in temperament, though certainly just as well-read. She and her husband spent their lives teaching, after all, and she created the first teachers' magazine, I'm sure, in northeast Nebraska, which Linda Mindemann Bartleson now has in its very old cardboard covers bound by wire, the issues read and re-read by me when I was a boy, used by Mom in her rural school teaching. The mimeographed pages had project designs, playlets, stories, a creatively varied hodgepodge rural elementary teachers could--and apparently did--find very serviceable. I kept it in my closet for ready reference when I had the back bedroom in our house, and any penciled lines traced over her designs are mine.
That's Myrtle with Mervin, not Nellie. I'm curious where they lived that it was so barren, but I love the hobbyhorse and old wagon. Below are Mervin and his parents, about 1911-1912.
This photo is when they were teaching at Naper, where he was school superintendent. John and Nellie are in the back row.
The following two photos were apparently taken at the same time and are how I remember Uncle John and Aunt Nellie, so sometime in the 1940s.
I'm guessing it was one of their funerals when I and Mike and Denny were dropped at the David Peacocks Up West while the adults went to the funeral, which puts it in the 1940s, when Aunt Nellie and Uncle John died. The occasion remains memorable for me because we played with the first and only Saint Bernard I saw until I moved to Omaha (after 1975), larger than I was, which also puts it in the 1940s. But I don't know for sure anymore. At any rate, I find it odd that we have the clippings for Uncle John but not Aunt Nellie. I'm assuming his obituary is readable and any reader will recognize they moved around in teaching. You will also note John lived with his older son, Mervin, and Agnes, Mervin's first wife, in Sioux City, Iowa, when he died.
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