Ancestors

Jacob Bieker

Jacob Bieker was born on 5 July 1896 in Rush County, Kansas, the seventh of the eight children of Phillip Bieker and Dorothy Siegel, who had come from the Volga colony of Obermonjou with the first Catholic emigration of 1875. His draft card of 1917 gives the date as 4 July 1897 and the place as Russell; the family stone and his obituary say 1896 and Rush County. He was named for an older brother Jacob who had died in 1878 at four. By 1895 the family had moved from Rush County to Russell County and settled in the German Catholic district around Gorham, and in 1900 Jacob was a small boy in his father's house in Winterset Township with his grandmother Elizabeth, 70, born in Russia, living with them. In 1910 the family farmed in Big Creek Township.

On 29 February 1916 he married Elizabeth Delaphene Riedel at Gorham. She was a daughter of Peter John and Anastasia (Geist) Riedel of the Herzog families, born at Hugo, Colorado, in 1896, and raised in Graham County. Their son Alvin was born on 28 September 1917, in the months when Jacob was registering for the wartime draft as a Russell County farmer, and their daughter Delephine Elizabeth, called Betty, on 29 December 1927.

He farmed in Big Creek Township all his working life. The census of 1930 lists him as a farmer born in Kansas to parents born in Russia. In 1940 the household at Gorham was Jacob, 43, Lizzie, 44, Albin, 22, and Betty, 12, in the same house they had lived in five years before. In April 1942, when men of his age registered again, he stood five feet ten, 160 pounds, with brown eyes, brown hair and a dark complexion, self-employed at Russell. In 1950 he and Elizabeth were still farming in Winterset Township with Alvin and Betty at home.

Elizabeth died on 20 February 1961. Jacob Bieker died at his home in Russell on Tuesday 25 July 1972, aged 76, after a short illness. His obituary called him a retired farmer who had lived there seventy years, a member of St. Mary's Catholic Church, survived by his son Alvin of Russell, his daughter Mrs. Betty Height of Russell, his sister Mrs. Frances McCoy of Delphos, and four grandchildren. Monsignor Francis Sencal sang the funeral Mass at the church, the rosary was said at the Deines Funeral Home, and the body was cremated. His flat granite marker in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery at Russell reads JACOB BIEKER, JULY 5, 1896, JULY 25, 1972.

If Jacob Bieker is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Jacob Bieker (1896-1972)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jacob-bieker-1896-1972-e5248c.