RAGBRAI rider finds her family’s story in Charles City

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

The trail of paperwork left by immigrant Schwantje Cramer ends abruptly.

Out of 12 children, Cramer’s descendants were only certain of the location of one daughter, Frauke Loop, their great-great-grandmother.

Descendants in New Orleans and Georgia scoured German records, but nothing was known about Cramer — whose last-known spelling was Schwantze Krammer Loop — after she left Germany for the U.S. in the late 1850s.

In the meantime during the search, Cramer’s descendant Anna Lee Jordan started riding RAGBRAI.

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Jordan joined Team Fly for RAGBRAI 2012, four months after she began dating her now-husband, Jesse — and she hasn’t missed a year since. Inspired by Jesse’s career as an airline pilot for Delta, the team bus even features an airplane propeller.

“I loved it from the beginning,” Jordan said about the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.

“We have an assortment of family members and friends that ride as a team,” she said. “I grew up in a small town in southwest Georgia. It’s a farming community. So I always felt that draw, that RAGBRAI was riding through small communities.”

The couple moved from Tennessee to just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, among the Uinta Mountains, for Jesse’s career, but they keep returning to Iowa for the annual bike ride.

In her free time, Jordan continues her family’s interest in tracing genealogy lines.

Jordan and her sister were aware her father’s family arrived in South Carolina and Georgia. Jordan’s grandmother used to take her along to cemetery visits, where they would make rubbings of headstone engravings with paper and crayon.

On her mother’s side, half of the family arrived from Sweden in the 1920s, but the maternal half remained a mystery. Jordan and her cousins knew that Frauke Loop — Jordan’s great-great grandmother — arrived in New Orleans from Germany with her husband, and settled in the city.

The family also knew that Loop’s mother, Cramer, left Germany with her husband (Hendrick Loop), parents (Remmer and Lena Cramer) and multiple siblings. After that, Cramer is unaccounted for.

The mystery started to tie up a few months ago, when Jordan’s sister, a nurse, did a DNA test that opened up the search again.

“She wanted to know the health factors of our lineage,” Jordan said. “It talked about the maternal lineage, mitochondrial DNA and the maternal line … we had a couple questions.”

Once again, Jordan started searching online for Cramer — listed in Frauke Loop’s obituary as her mother, Schwantze Krammer — and finding little under the original German spelling.

“Many immigrants that came to the U.S., either at Ellis (Island) or New Orleans, their names changed. Understanding that really helped me,” Jordan said. “Whoever was taking them in spelled it however they could.”

In the midst of her searches, on a day when she should have been out training for RAGBRAI, up popped the Floyd County Genealogical Society.

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Historical records name brothers Harm and Henry Cramer as farmers and landowners in section 31 of Floyd County. They had moved with their parents, Remmer and Lena, and siblings, including Schwantje Cramer, to Charles City from Freeport, Illinois in 1861, after Cramer’s daughter Frauke Loop had already moved to New Orleans. Cramer died in 1884.

Jordan found Cramer’s tombstone on FindaGrave.com.

“When it said Charles City, I could not believe it,” Jordan said.

Jordan also learned that almost immediately after settling in the U.S., Cramer had another brother who was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.

“I’ve been to Shiloh and didn’t know I had family there,” Jordan said.

“I have relatives in New Orleans who have done genealogy, and they did not have this information. They couldn’t find her, she just disappeared,” she said. “It was the work of the Floyd County Genealogical Society that did this. They went and did the work. They posted it, and that allowed me to find this information.”

It was two weeks before Jordan would leave for RAGBRAI — and she realized it wouldn’t be long before she’d be right in Charles City, the fourth day of the ride.

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Jordan rode Team Fly’s support bus in from Clear Lake on July 26, leaving early in the day since the team was concerned by the weather forecast. The team parked between the YMCA and the Senior Center, and Jordan bought a poncho and some artificial flowers at the Dollar General.

She decided to walk to Riverside Cemetery, instead of riding her bike.

“I just wanted to enjoy it a little bit more,” Jordan said.

“It was misting. The cemetery had an airiness about it. It was quiet except for the geese honking, and I almost felt like someone was calling out my name.

“Riverside was beautiful, well-maintained, and I found it almost immediately,” she said.

It was a peaceful and emotional visit. Surrounding Cramer’s tombstone is the grave of her brother and multiple unmarked, infant headstones. The monument bears her maiden name.

“She died in her 60s alone, but she was devoted to her parents,” Jordan said. “It was a hard time to live, and it is emotional. … You just realize, will I have someone looking at my gravesite 150 years from now? Will someone be looking for me?”

Jordan was not able to identify where the family’s farm was located in Floyd County, but she hopes to someday return with Jesse and find more of Cramer’s story — including a photo of Cramer. There are also cousins potentially buried in Ida County.

“I really liked north Iowa. It was beautiful, a wonderful route,” Jordan said. “Now I feel like there was a reason that (Iowa) always resonated with me.”

“We are all connected somehow. That’s the story there.”