Follow-up

I followed up on the lost gravestone out in Tripp County, South Dakota and got a nice letter from the Historical Society there in return. The Koenig gravestone has been broken down and is fenced in, the owner said. She also included the newspaper clipping of the deaths of my relatives in the drowning accident ion 1911.

Here it turns out one of the sisters jumped in to try to save the other siblings and sacrificed her life in the attempt. Hulda was the middle of the three oldest of the family that drowned and the story said: "The affair was accompanied by an act of heroism on the part of Hulda Koenig, aged fourteen, which sheer bravery and self-sacrifice could not be surpassed by any of the strongest men living in this county or anywhere else, and which, had her strength and skill been equal to her courage, would have resulted in saving the lives of her brother and sister. ... With her life she paid the price of her great live for her brother and sister."

I get tears in my eyes again as I reread the entry and am glad for the follow-up research, as there was more to the story than my Grandfather, only seven at the time and a witness to the accident, remembered, or at least, more than what he told. Only eleven years later his mother died of cancer and as the then oldest child, he was left to help raise his younger siblings, which he did until his marriage to my Grandmother in 1933.