It would have been wonderful to be able to sit down again with Grandpa and Grandma Heiden (William Carl and Mary (Rambow) Heiden) and interview them for their memories of the Heiden Family. They would have had wonderful tales of long forgotten days on their farm in Raisinville Township. Perhaps they would have known more of the history of their parents and could have answered questions about how the Heidens came to Monroe County.

Unfortunately, such a conversation is impossible, but, the next best thing would be to talk to those people who grew up with them and knew them better than anyone else, their children. On two separate afternoons, I met with the remaining children of William Carl and Mary (Rambow) Heiden to discuss their memories of growing up in this family. Each meeting was recorded. This turned out to be a tremendous help in keeping track of what was said since, once the ball got rolling, memories and stories began to flow across the room in several directions at once.

The second conversation took place on Sunday afternoon, September 24, 1995 at the family homestead at 8861 Dixon Road which is the current home of William F. and Helen (Henning) Heiden.  Two children of William Carl and Mary (Rambow) Heiden, William Frank Heiden and Marie (Heiden) Tommelein were present along with two daughters-in-law, Mildred (Mrs Arthur)Heiden and Helen (Henning) Heiden, three grandchildren, Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann, Dianne (Heiden) Houpt and Ralph Heiden and one son-in-law, Morris "Brick" Tommelein. Dianne is the daughter of Wm and Helen and Ralph is the son of Mildred. Mary Lou is the daughter of Leo and Lucille (Smith) Heiden.

Ralph Heiden - Do you recall any stories about your grandfather, August Heiden ?

William Frank Heiden - About all I remember of him is going over to their place on South Custer and he would be sitting in that old high back chair.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - And he had that earphone in his ear so he could hear.

William Frank Heiden - Other than that, I really don’t remember anything else about him.

Ralph Heiden - We always heard a story about when they came over that a little daughter died on the ship. Well, Myrna (Drake) Bishop who is Bertha (Heiden) Drake’s daughter and granddaughter of Herman Heiden, was told that the little girl lived through the voyage but died here and is buried in Monroe. Mary Lou did some detective work and found that she was buried in Zion Lutheran Cemetery in Monroe on June 16, 1873 only 12 days after they landed in New York.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - And there was a gravestone for her?

Ralph Heiden - Yes.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - There was a Laas baby buried next to her too.

Ralph Heiden - That’s another question. I keep hearing about the Laas’ but nobody really knows what relation they were to the Heidens.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - They were always there at the reunions.

William Frank Heiden - I think it was Bill Laas from Texas. They came every year.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - There was Miss Libbie Laas. I don’t think she ever got married but I can remember her being there.

William Frank Heiden - Maybe they came over from Germany together or something. There had to be some connection. They were always big at the reunions along with the Burmeisters.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Since Meta was buried next to a Laas, it makes you wonder if they had some early connection.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Did the Laas’ come over on the boat with August?

Ralph Heiden - No. The one (Laas child) that is buried at Zion Cemetery was buried in 1869, four years earlier. So, they were already here.

Here’s an idea that I’m starting to wonder about. August, my great grandfather, had a half sister. In the 1920's, her granddaughter sent a series of letters to August’s wife, Rika.

I finally found an elderly German lady who could read the old script writing and is translating those letters word for word. I have about 5 or 6 of them done now.

In one of the letters, they say that they were corresponding with Elizabeth Laas. So, perhaps, the Laas’ are descendants of August Heiden's half-sister. They would be a distant relative but still related. I don’t have any evidence to draw that conclusion but it might be that way.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - That could be the connection.

Ralph Heiden - The letters are rather sad overall. They were having some very tough times in Germany then and they were always asking their Aunt Rika, my great grandmother, for money.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - In one of them, they ask for some money for a house and some land. Then, later they say they bought the house but needed more money for the land.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Did they ever help them?

Ralph Heiden - Yes, they sent money when they could and they were always very appreciative of it and told what the money would buy.

Brick Tommelein -   My dad said that at that time, everyone over in Europe called America “the land of opportunity.”

Ralph Heiden - A lot of people here were helping their relatives then too. In one of the letters, they ask Rika to send her letters registered because people were stealing things from mail from America because those envelopes were likely to have money in them.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   Now are these letters all from Mecklenburg?

Ralph Heiden - Yes. They are from the area called Mecklenburg and the port city of Rostock. The little villages where our ancestors came from are the size of Grape and Maybee and they are about 50 miles from Rostock.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   From the Hennings, I heard them say that the people were like slaves back then in Germany. They worked for all these big rich people. They provided pay for them and took care of them but they couldn’t get ahead. They didn’t want them to get married because there were already too many of them to take care of. That is where the Hennings came from too.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - Didn’t you say that our name should be something other than Heiden?

Ralph Heiden - Yes, my great grandmother, Maria Heiden, did not marry the father of August. So, he took her name rather than his father’s which was Kannsehr or Canseyer.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   That’s the same way with my grandpa Henning. Grandma wasn’t married when she had those two kids.

Ralph Heiden - That was a real common occurrence back then.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - They wouldn’t let you get married unless you could support yourself.

Ralph Heiden - They technically weren’t slaves but there was nowhere else for them to go except to another big estate to work and they were full too. Also, the landowner had the responsibility to take care of the people on his land so he was stuck too.

That is why they pushed a lot of them to leave and go to America. Also, the illegitimacy rate went way up because even though they weren’t legally allowed to marry, people continued to form couples and do what they needed to do.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   You wonder why the Heidens would come here but they said on the Henning side that they would send money back to Germany to help others come here.

Ralph Heiden - But with the Heidens, we don’t know who was here to pave the way for them. Maybe with this Laas connection, there might be something to go on.

The Rambows came a year later. They came here in 1874 and I don’t know if they came from the same part of Germany as the Heidens. I haven’t looked into that yet.

I think about the only way we are going to learn why the Heidens came here is if we stumble onto somebody in one of the other branches that has an old box of papers up in the attic that someone gave them long ago. Otherwise, the reason may be lost to history.

[Note: According to Karen (Berns) Wheaton, the Rambows did come from the same area in Germany.]

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - You might get something from Caroline Brown too. Helma was going to check with her. She and her husband, Bill, used to attend all the old reunions. He used to take movies of the reunions. She is somehow related to the Laas side.

William Frank Heiden - She was Uncle John Laas’ daughter.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - She came to our place in Florida one time looking for Helma’s address.

Ralph Heiden - Perhaps she would have the old films laying around someplace. We could put them on videotape.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - I don’t remember him taking movies.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Oh, yes. Don’t you remember everybody trying to duck out of the way all the time?

Helen (Henning) Heiden - You know, Aunt Agnes probably had some old papers.

Ralph Heiden - Yes, that is where I got a lot of these old documents. They had the names of the old villages in Germany where August and his wife and three of their children were born. There was also a document that I think is August’s discharge paper from the army. He served from 1859 to 1861.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - His naturalization papers were there too.

Ralph Heiden - Yes, the papers where he applied for citizenship and then was granted U.S. citizenship.

[Looking at some old pictures of the Heiden Family Reunion and family gatherings. ]

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Is that you in the back row there at the reunion, Brick.

Brick Tommelein - I don’t know. I only remember one time going to the reunion.

Ralph Heiden - That picture was taken over at the Grange Hall sometime in the late 40's.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Yes, I can see Pa there and I recognize a lot of these other people but I can’t tell if that is you or not.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - I have a couple of albums with some old pictures. Maybe you already have them all.

Ralph Heiden - You never know. I’d like to take a look at them.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - The caption under this picture says that’s Libbie and me sitting on grandma Heiden’s lap.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - We can spot you in all these pictures because you had that short, blond hair, Marie.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - Did they shut the Bridge School down at some point?

Ralph Heiden - I think kids went there through the late 1940's before they were bussed to Dundee.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - I went a half a year there before going up to Dundee.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   I remember when you were little, you missed the bus once and went running behind it, bawling like mad.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - Ralph, do you remember that we started out with the red, white and blue buses and then the yellow ones came along later. At school, they never seemed to line them up the same place every night. They would line up in the order that the drivers happened to pull up. Some nights, we would get lost.

Ralph Heiden - I remember having Wes Feinauer as a driver. One day, I was showing off acting like I wanted to thumb a ride as he pulled up. For some reason he didn’t like that and made me sit in the front seat for a week. I was probably only in the second grade and it scared me.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - He came to the back of the bus and escorted me to the front seat one time. I saw him years later and he said he wanted to laugh all the time while he was doing it but didn’t dare in front of the other children.

Ralph Heiden

[Note: Wm Carl Heiden bought the farm on April 1, 1909 which was his 35th birthday.]

William Frank Heiden - I heard them talking about walking over here from South Custer when Pa was about 13 or 14 to help his dad do the brick work.

[Note: August Heiden was a brick mason by trade.]

Ralph Heiden - Then that would have been about 1890. So that was when someone else owned it?

(Note: Which would have been while the Meyers still owned the property.)

William Frank Heiden - Yes, I think it was the Langs or someone else who owned the farm at that time.

Ralph Heiden - The 1873 county plat book I think lists the owner of this farm as a man named Meyers.

William Frank Heiden - They called him “Milky Meyers.” I always heard Pa talking about him.

Ralph Heiden - The plat map also showed a piece of landlocked property located on the back of this property. There wasn’t any access from Ida-Maybee Road, Dixon, Mulheisen or South Custer.

William Frank Heiden - That would be on the back end of Suhciks farm. It was the Stokes that had an old house back in there on a hill. Could be some relation to Bill Stokes, Aunt Emma’s’s relations.

Ralph Heiden - There also used to be a house on the north side of the road just east of here. I know Mary Lou was born there and Carl and Anita lived there for a while too.

William Frank Heiden - Carl lived next door here where Jessie Barnes lived. Verdell was born there. Edna and Henry lived in the other place for a while and Bill and Alice (Brossia) Heiden lived there too. Bill worked the farm. That was when old Jesse Wakefield owned it.

[Looking at family pictures again.]

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   Those are the Rambows there. Uncle Will and Aunt Minnie. That’s Aunt Rika.

William Frank Heiden - They more or less looked alike. They were all pretty big women.

Ralph Heiden - It’s interesting to look at Grandma and how she changed over the years.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - She was really a pretty young girl in the Rambow group picture.

William Frank Heiden - She held up awfully good for someone who had 13 children.

[Reading through the minutes of the Heiden Family Reunion.]

Brick Tommelein -   Look at this 16 gallons of beer, 250 ice cream cones, 7½ gallons of ice cream. All this stuff for the reunion and it only cost 25 dollars!

William Frank Heiden - That ice cream was something else. It was really good. They put it in those great big insulated boxes.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - We had lemonade in those big crocks too.

Ralph Heiden - The first few years, they debated on whether to have everyone bring their own food and drink.

Brick Tommelein -   That was 1938, William.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - Did anyone take minutes of this year’s reunion?

Ralph Heiden - I wrote a few notes up and called it the 59th reunion although technically it’s the 58th. The one in 1959 was “postponed” but they gave it a number anyway. All the minutes from the old reunions will be in the final book.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt - Did you get my reply to your E-mail?

Ralph Heiden - Yes. Isn’t that amazing.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt - Ralph says on his email to me, “This is a long way from the farm, isn’t it? From the farm to email.”

Ralph Heiden - Myrna (Drake) Bishop’s husband, Jim, (left) is a professor at Notre Dame so we have been emailing things back and forth for a while now. It is a local call so it doesn’t cost anything.

(Note: This was in "ancient" times when internet connections went through a modem and a telephone line. I had a second phone line installed because while you were on the internet, you couldn't get regular phone calls to your land line which is another ancient technology.)

Helen (Henning) Heiden - Who is that now?

Ralph Heiden - That is Bertha (Heiden) Drake’s son-in-law. He is married to Myrna.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Where is Walter Berns’ daughter? She’s a professor too.

Ralph Heiden - Margie (right) is a professor of linguistics at Purdue University. She has her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - She got married recently didn’t she?

Ralph Heiden - Yes. I think they are both professors at Purdue. There are also several medical doctors in the family now. Linda’s daughter, Erin, is a doctor. And so is Connie Sedelbauer and she is married to a doctor. She has a pretty responsible position at the University of Michigan Hospital.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - That’s where I work and I see her all the time there. She’s partly in our department now. She is so pretty.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Where is Linda’s daughter a physician at then?

Ralph Heiden - I think she is at the Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   I think both of Linda’s daughters are moving back to Michigan now. Linda mentioned that at the reunion.

Ralph Heiden - It’s also amazing to look at where all the kids have gone to college. Some of Carol’s (Toburen) children went to Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Janice’s (Clark) went to Louisiana Tech and Northeast Louisiana.

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - That’s interesting because before I came over here today, I went back and looked through all that stuff to see where all my nieces and nephews went to college.

William Frank Heiden - Millersburg. Isn’t that were Mike (Toburen) was taking a class and it turned out the guy teaching wasn’t even a professor. They arrested him and found out he did the same thing somewhere else too.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   Mike said the kids knew more than he did!

Ralph Heiden - What do you two (William Carl and Marie) remember about going to Bridge School?

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - I had Kenneth Bordine the first year I went there and then Harrison Dentel the rest of the way.

William Frank Heiden - We had fifty some kids all together in one room. He would teach one grade at a time. But I really don’t remember much about my childhood.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   Seems funny he doesn’t remember any of his childhood about going to school and stuff.

Brick Tommelein -   I agree with William, I just remember a few bits and pieces here and there but not that much.

William Frank Heiden - I remember Fritz Milhan hit me in the head with a ball bat. We would play toss up and he swung and got me good. I didn’t have to go to school for about 3 months!

Ralph Heiden - I have a scar underneath my chin. The teacher used to ring a bell at the end of recess and I was standing too close and she popped me right under the chin.

William Frank Heiden - You should have sued them for that, Ha!

[Looking at a picture.]

Ralph Heiden - That is the only five generation picture taken with Grandpa Heiden.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - Who is that then?

Ralph Heiden - There’s Edna, Walter, Lauren, Grandpa and Lauren’s first son, Sean. Walter made me this nice print since he still had the negative.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Denny got us an old newspaper for 1945, the year we were married. It was fun to look through but sometimes you’d look at a price and say, “God, it couldn’t have been that cheap back then!”

I remember the first year after we were married, bread was still rationed after the war. We had a neighbor who used to go and stand in line to get a loaf of bread. She would take her 16 year old daughter along with our ration stamp and get us a loaf too. I was at home with the baby and couldn’t go.

You had to wait in line at the Kroger store to get a loaf of bread.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - We only had one car in those days too so you couldn’t just go when you wanted to either.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - No. You were lucky if you had one car!

[Looking at a picture.]

Dianne (Heiden) Houpt  - Isn’t Anita’s wedding dress just gorgeous?

William Frank Heiden - She worked for the Comstock family in Monroe. Then Howard Comstock bought the Wakefield place next door. Carl and Anita lived there for a while too.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Verdell was born there and Velda was born here in Pa’s house.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - Was your brother, David, born here, Mary Lou?

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - He was born while my parents lived here but he was born in the hospital.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Roger was born over to the store on the corner of Ida-Maybee and South Custer.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Remember when you used to stay with us sometimes when you couldn’t get home because the road was in bad shape?

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - The night he was born, your dad went to get Mrs Spohr.

William Frank Heiden - There was another small house down the road on the east end of the Wakefield farm and that is where Mary Lou was born. They had that little house for the guy who worked the farm to live in.

Wakefield lived where Jesse Barnes lived and they didn’t want to work the farm. Old man Wakefield gave me a cow on the condition that I would give them some of the milk. I used to take over a couple of quarts a day to them.

When Wakefield died, he gave me a gold watch and he left Art a horse and buggy.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - That was a nice watch.

William Frank Heiden - Here it is. I still have it.

Brick Tommelein - Does it run, William?

William Frank Heiden - Yes we had the movement replaced. It’s got a porcelain dial.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - We took it down to a jeweler to see how much it might be worth in case somebody might break in and take it. They told us it’s not pure gold because it wears off over time.

William Frank Heiden - I’ve had it seventy years and I rarely carry it in my pocket yet it’s all worn off. Old Wakefield must have carried it for a long time before he died.

Brick Tommelein - Some of those old railroad watches used to be worth something.

Ralph Heiden - Why did Mr. Wakefield leave things to you boys?

William Frank Heiden - Well, we always waited on him and did things for him all the time.

Brick Tommelein - Mil, was that when Art started courting you when he had that buggy?

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - No, he had an old Model T Ford by the time we starting going out.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Remember we used to play tricks on old Wakefield? It was after we got a telephone. When Ma and Pa would be gone, we would watch to see when he was outside and then we’d call him up. As soon as he got in the house, we’d hang up. Later he would tell Pa, “Somebody kept calling me all day today. By the time I got there, they’d hang up!”

Ralph Heiden - I didn’t think you guys did that kind of stuff.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Oh, yes we did but Pa never knew it.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - What kind of house was the one that I was born in? It has been gone for a long time now.

William Frank Heiden - It was a nice enough house. I think it had one bedroom upstairs. That was where Billy Miller and what’s her name lived.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Helen MacDowell. He married that woman with a little girl and we used to go to school together.

William Frank Heiden - We used to go sparrow hunting with him back when there was a bounty on sparrows. He used to put the dead sparrows in his pockets and he’d go to divide them up and we’d sneak into his other pocket and take one out while he wasn’t looking.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - I used to hold the flashlight for Art and Heinie Heiden when they would go after sparrows at night. They got 2 cents a piece and I never got anything!

William Frank Heiden - I used to go into that house a lot of times. There was a barn across the road on the south side. They had a corn crib and chicken coop on the north side where the house was. The red garage out in our drive came from that house when they tore it down. The beams and things came from that old house.

Ralph Heiden - Now, on this farm, Grandpa owned all the land on the north side of the road to the river too? Did he sell off the parcels where the other houses are now?

William Frank Heiden - Leo was the first one to buy a three acre lot from Dixon Road back to the river. His was the one right next to Jesse Barnes’ place. Then he sold three acres to Wally Grams. The last lot went to Paul Goetz.

Ralph Heiden - I remember Jerry and Anabel from Toledo who had a small place there where they came out on weekends.

William Frank Heiden - Those were the Feebacks. They bought the lot from Leo.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - I think they sold the lot when they bought the house on South Custer where Mother lives now.

Brick Tommelein -   When Leo bought it, were they going to live there? Wonder why they never did.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - They had intentions of building. I can remember them looking at books and books of house plans but they never did build. Probably because they had a chance to buy the home on South Custer.

William Frank Heiden - I think Pa sold all those lots for $1500 each.

Ralph Heiden - Someone thought that Grandpa delivered the mail at one time.

William Frank Heiden - I think they probably heard him talking about going down to the corner when the road was muddy and getting the mail down there and taking it to the people along the way.

[Looking at old family reunion pictures from the 1920's]

Brick Tommelein -   Mother (Mary) Heiden was a tall woman. It didn’t seem like it at the time but when you look at her in these pictures, she seems quite tall.

Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - All the Rambows were big people.

Ralph Heiden - In this one old picture that guy with the hat and string tie looks like he just got back from the wild west.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   He looks like Wyatt Earp!

Ralph Heiden - This was about 1921 or so, I think.

William Frank Heiden - Maybe that was old Bill Laas from Texas. He might look like that.

Ralph Heiden - I asked people to write down a little remembrance of Grandpa and Grandma and those have turned out to be really nice.

Brick Tommelein -   Here, one of our kids says that Grandpa used to reward him with a little sip of beer.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Pa always knew all of his grandchildren by name. When you think of it, that was amazing since he had so many of them.

William Frank Heiden - And it’s not like today when your grandchildren are spread all over and you don’t get to see them very often. Back then, they got to see them all the time.

It’s hard sometimes to keep track of them especially with the names they come up with now. You don’t see many Johns or Bills.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Tell me about it!

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - My grandchildren go from A to Z. Adam to Zachary.

Helen (Henning) Heiden -   Tom and Janice’s last grandchild is named Peyton.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Our neighbor’s have a little girl they named Montgomery Alicia! That poor kid when she goes to school. She has a long life ahead of her.