10.22.19 My Texas Roots

Texas Road Trip 2019
Cuero and Cheapside
In search of family homes
The families of both my maternal grandparents (Roesslers and Junkers) and my paternal grandmother (the Kruses) emigrated to Texas from northern Germany in the late 1880s. (My paternal grandfather’s family, the Cornetts, arrived in the US in the late 1700s and into Texas in the early 1900s from Louisiana). The German sides eventually had homesteads in south Texas around Cuero.
On this trip, I discovered that the Kruse homestead buildings in Cheapside had been torn down for fracking operations, but we found the Ruppert Cemetary, with the headstones of my great, great grandparents, who married shortly after arriving in Texas.
[Johanna Sophia Stoeffers (DOB 9/7/1848, DOD 7/19/1913) migrated from Schwye? Or Ellwarden?, German to Texas in 1871.
Johan Hinrick (John Henry) Kruse (DOB 3/3/1844, DOD 7/8/18895) migrated from Oldenburg, Reitland, Germany in 1871
Johanna and Johan married in December 1871. They settled in Brenham, Texas and worked as farm laborers until saving to purchase the homestead in Cheapside.]
The homes and some of the buildings of the dairy my great grandmother (Emma Kruse Gabler)created and ran in Cuero were still standing. And the home of my maternal grandparents (Ella Roessler Junker and Fred Junker) is there, though the garage where I played with parts from my grandfather’s automobile shop business and the bird houses where he raised parakeets, were crumbling, most likely from the floods from the Guadalupe River.
We had lunch at, what our family considers, the best smokehouse... Smolik’s, though I stopped eating their famous brisket decades ago.