Angeline: A Frontier Mother's Story

In 1847, Catherine Angeline Hibner was born in Barton, New York, the daughter of German immigrants. By the time she was barely two, she was taken from her parents' bustling boardinghouse and raised instead by her grandparents, George and Anna Maria Barr. No one ever told her why.

At just nine years old, Angeline journeyed west with the Barrs to the Minnesota frontier, where the little town of Forestville became her new home. There, she grew into a strong young woman, carrying unanswered questions in her heart.

When the Civil War breaks out, Angeline marries Daniel Grabau, a soldier who returns to her broken in body and spirit. Together they raise seven children before tragedy strikes, leaving Angeline a widow at twenty-nine. Desperate to hold her family together, she remarries Herman Luedtke, a kind German immigrant who offers her safety, steadiness, and a sawmill by the Root River. With him, she will raise eight more children-and bury some too soon.

Through war and widowhood, joy and unbearable loss, Angeline writes to the mother who gave her away. Her words, tucked into journals, reveal a vow whispered again and again:

I will not let us fall. I will carry us forward.

Inspired by true events and grounded in family history, Angeline is the sweeping saga of a woman who became the matriarch of fifteen children and more than fifty grandchildren-her legacy carried on by generations who still walk where her apple trees once bloomed.