Bureau-LaSalle-Will County IL Archives Biographies.....Hoffert, Anton 1854/55 - May 24, 1940 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/il/ilfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Richard Gehling GehlingR@aol.com February 20, 2010, 5:05 pm Source: Memories of Genevieve Reinart Gehling, 1980 Author: Richard Gehling Anton Hoffert was born in 1854 or 1855 at Naperville, Illinois. He was the son of Antoine Hoffert and Mary Forstoge. Antoine had come to the United States from France, and had settled in the town of Naperville, Illinois, just west of Chicago. Anton grew up in Naperville. His 17-year-old mother seems to have died soon after his birth, and his father re-married. Anton himself was blessed with red hair, and - in later life - always sported a mustache. When he first came of age he moved to Phelps County, Nebraska, where he purchased 160 acres of railroad land. While in Nebraska he also met the recently-widowed Augusta (Meisel) Schneider. Augusta was the eldest child of John and Fredricka (Staugie) Meisel, who had married in Prussia before coming to the United States. The young couple had settled first in Pennsylvania, then in Bureau County, Illinois. Their daughter Augusta was born 17 May 1855 on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She was eventually joined by a brother (Henry) and four sisters (Nancy, Bertha, Jane and Mary). All of them called her "Gusty." Augusta grew up scrubbing the family clothes and helping care for her younger siblings, and so never received any type of formal schooling. When eighteen years of age Augusta married twenty-year-old George Schneider. The ceremony took place in LaSalle County at Mendota, Illinois, on 21 February 1874. The bride signed the marriage certificate with an "X". She and her husband farmed for a time in Illinois. After the birth of their son John in 1878 they moved to a sod dugout in Juanita, Nebraska. The next spring they purchased 160 acres of land in Phelps County, Nebraska. Two years later George died of pneumonia. Money was so tight that the neighbors had to pitch in to help buy the coffin. After burying her first husband, Augusta returned to her parents' farm in Bureau County Illinois. Augusta married Anton Hoffert the following year. The ceremony took place before a Justice of the Peace in Princeton, Illinois. The newlyweds then returned to Nebraska before the birth of their daughter Mary (8 November 1883). They settled on Anton's farm near Funk, Nebraska, and Augusta transferred to Anton her portion of the land inherited from her first husband. Anton and Augusta farmed the land until 1919, when the time came to retire. Together they had endured years of drought and tornadoes and prairie fires, and they were ready for a long rest. They gave their two farms to their children, John and Mary, with the understanding that they would be allowed to shuttle back and forth between the two households for the remainder of their days. After retirement, the Hofferts first moved to the Iowa farm of their daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Pete Reinart. They stayed there until the Reinarts sold the farm in 1927, then moved with them into a house high on a hill overlooking the little town of Halbur, Iowa. The house in Halbur had both an enclosed porch at ground level and an open upstairs porch. There were two bedrooms upstairs, one for the daughters and another for the Hoffert grandparents. A cave for storing fruits and vegetables was built into a cement wall behind the house. From this cave a small tunnel (to be used in the aftermath of tornadoes) led to an above-ground cob house. In the corner of the cob house was a two-hole privy. The property also had a barn, with two milk cows at first, two brooder horses, and some chickens. Anton was sixty-four when they first came to live with the Reinarts in Iowa, and was already showing symptoms of the facial skin cancer that would eventually claim his life. His granddaughter, Genevieve Reinart, would long remember "the many times he went by train to the nearby town of Manning, Iowa, to have the cancer burned off his nose, lips, and face." "My grandfather Hoffert used to forecast the weather," she later wrote. "If the sun would go down red in the west it would be windy the next day. If he saw a rainbow in the morning, it would rain before noon, etc. He was usually right too." Augusta was also sixty-four at the time of the move. She had long before taught herself to read and to sign her name with her left hand. She was looking forward to many more years of piecing together quilts of her own design, but was already experiencing a painful edema in her legs, an edema which in another eight years would necessitate the use of crutches and a wheelchair. She would nonetheless eventually finish more than four dozen quilts. "My grandmother Augusta," Genevieve Reinart later wrote, "never cut her hair and had braids down to her waist...She was very superstitious: if a spoon dropped, a boyfriend was coming. If a dishcloth dropped, it meant dirty company. If a rooster crowed in the morning, it meant company. If a black cat crossed your path, it meant bad luck. Going under a ladder meant bad luck. If you broke a mirror it was 7 years bad luck. If you saw a snake while you were pregnant, it meant the baby would have a birthmark of a snake, etc. She used to make Pepperneuse cookies for Christmas." After more than ten years with the Reinarts in Iowa, the Hofferts went to live with their son, John Schneider, on his farm in Phelps County, Nebraska. They remained there for the rest of their lives. Anton died of cancer 24 May 1940 at the age of eighty-five. Augusta passed away from heart failure on 23 December 1945 at the age of ninety. Both were buried in Bethseda Cemetery, Axtell, NE. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/il/bureau/bios/hoffert1577gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/ilfiles/ File size: 6.1 Kb