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Nebraska: Connecting to the Land Through Stories (with Greg Wagner) · Stories That Live In Us

0:00
Greg Wagner: And they didn't really didn't really believe in banks very much, because things were kind of getting unsettled and they they kept the money to themselves on that farm.
0:10
Greg Wagner: Well, they got robbed.
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Crista Cowan: Stories That Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
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Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
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Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
0:34
Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
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Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
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Crista Cowan: We are continuing our move from the west to the east as it goes with our America 250 series.
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Crista Cowan: And today we get to visit the state of Nebraska.
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Crista Cowan: Now, we have had people on the podcast who have been expert genealogists and professional archivists, and some people who are just deeply, deeply tied to the place because their family has lived there for so long.
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Crista Cowan: My guest today is a little bit unique.
1:24
Crista Cowan: His family has not only lived in Nebraska for 158 years, but for the last 46 years, his career has been to help take care of the state of Nebraska.
1:38
Crista Cowan: He's worked for the State Parks Commission, the Game and Parks Commission.
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Crista Cowan: And I'm just going to read a little bit of his biography because I'm amazed at what he's been able to accomplish in his 46 years there, but also because it shows this really interesting connection to the land.
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Crista Cowan: He has worked for fisheries, parks and information, education, and now communication for the Nebraska Games and Parks Commission.
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Crista Cowan: But what I think is really interesting is he says not only does he passionately and deeply care about Nebraska's wildlife, parkland, natural and cultural resources, but because of that caretaking, he has visited all 93 Nebraska counties, all 76 state park areas and recreational trails, plus a host of state wildlife management areas, and has been on every highway and major river system in the state.
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Crista Cowan: If there is anyone who knows the state of Nebraska from both a professional and a cultural and a familial way, it is Greg Wagner.
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Crista Cowan: Not only does his career tie him to the state, but so does his family history.
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Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Greg Wagner.
2:59
Crista Cowan: Well, Greg, I'm so excited to meet you and to have this conversation.
3:03
Crista Cowan: I would love to just hear a little bit about your background in Nebraska and growing up and how family stories were a part of that life that you've lived there.
3:13
Greg Wagner: Well, I've been in Nebraska my whole life.
3:16
Greg Wagner: My family's been here 158 years, and uh the stories, the diaries have all been passed down through the generations.
3:26
Greg Wagner: And it's interesting to note that uh, you know, sometimes with families, they spread out across the country or around the world.
3:34
Greg Wagner: All of us who grew up here, who were raised here in the generations prior, no one left here.
3:41
Greg Wagner: We're all Nebraskans, we've all stayed here.
3:45
Greg Wagner: And to be honest with you, I love Nebraska.
3:48
Crista Cowan: Oh, I love that.
3:49
Crista Cowan: And you've all married other Nebraskans?
3:52
Greg Wagner: Yes, yes.
3:52
Greg Wagner: My wife from Grand Island, Nebraska, but uh my brothers married um women from Gretna.
4:01
Greg Wagner: You're gonna hear a lot about that in the Forest City area.
4:04
Greg Wagner: But uh, we've all married Nebraskans.
4:08
Crista Cowan: That's insane.
4:09
Crista Cowan: I don't I think that's very unique, actually.
4:12
Crista Cowan: It is.
4:14
Crista Cowan: I love that.
4:15
Crista Cowan: Well, so tell us a little bit about um as you were growing up, where you know, you you mentioned that there were journals and things, but like, was that a part of your consciousness as a kid?
4:26
Crista Cowan: Like, did you engage in that as a child, or at what point did you become interested?
4:31
Greg Wagner: I was always interested in history, and that was instilled in me by my mother and my grandmother, and a little bit uh with my great-grandmother, and they always instilled in me that those stories and the diaries that were kept some very loosely that were very important for me to pass down to my children and grandchildren.
4:55
Greg Wagner: Because if you don't know history, you don't know origins, you don't know um a lot of things, you don't know why the land became in our family.
5:05
Greg Wagner: And so it was very, very important.
5:07
Greg Wagner: And I really got into it.
5:09
Greg Wagner: I love history to this day.
5:12
Greg Wagner: I um can't get enough history.
5:15
Greg Wagner: Um, my mother is deceased, and obviously grandmother, great-grandmother deceased, but they just instilled in me this uh genealogical uh love of family and to always dig for more.
5:29
Crista Cowan: I love that.
5:29
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
5:30
Crista Cowan: It's so interesting because oftentimes in family history, we see people come in from two directions.
5:35
Crista Cowan: One is people who are just so passionate like you are and have been surrounded by it their whole lives, and others are people who just know nothing and are craving that knowledge and that information.
5:47
Crista Cowan: And it sounds like you very much come from this camp of being surrounded by good women in particular who have their part to pass those stories on.
5:56
Crista Cowan: So, at what point did you kind of pick up the torch and start really diving into your family history?
6:02
Crista Cowan: Was there a moment or a document or a story that captured your attention?
6:07
Greg Wagner: I think it was the passing of my grandmother in 2005.
6:11
Greg Wagner: We lived right next to my grandmother.
6:13
Greg Wagner: Uh, I did growing up.
6:15
Greg Wagner: So I spent enormous amounts of time sitting on the bench, hearing stories, reading some of the diaries, if I could kind of read some things and have my grandmother translate things.
6:25
Greg Wagner: And it was my grandmother's death, and I had recorded her back in the 90s on Half-inch VHS and through cassette recordings.
6:34
Greg Wagner: I've since had those transferred to digital, and said, You need, I need to capture these stories not just through me, I need them through you.
6:42
Greg Wagner: So upon her death in 2005, it prompted me to go, all right, now it's time to now it's time to really go to town and really dig and look at birth records, um, not only just the diaries and the anecdotal stuff, birth records, death records, tour the cemetery, and of course helping me connect the dots as we progressed down the line.
7:10
Greg Wagner: I'm gonna guess I can't remember, maybe 2015 was ancestry, big time, because there are there are the ship records, there are records that are gonna validate what I have or not validate what I have.
7:26
Greg Wagner: And so that's what prompted me to do it.
7:29
Greg Wagner: And I was urged by a lot of the other relatives to say, hey, you you know the history, tell us the history.
7:35
Greg Wagner: Well, I need to write it down.
7:38
Greg Wagner: My grandmother always told me, if you don't write anything down, no one will ever know any history.
7:43
Greg Wagner: So that's when I started.
7:46
Crista Cowan: What a gift to have her with you for so long.
7:49
Crista Cowan: And well done on you for making sure you recorded her stories.
7:53
Crista Cowan: I think if you ask any genealogist who's been doing this for any length of time what their number one regret is, and almost to a person, they will say, I'm sorry I didn't capture the stories before those people were gone.
8:07
Crista Cowan: So the fact that you did is amazing.
8:09
Crista Cowan: Do you have a favorite story from your grandmother?
8:13
Greg Wagner: I do actually.
8:14
Greg Wagner: It's very interesting.
8:16
Greg Wagner: So uh my great-great-grandmother, I found her death record.
8:22
Greg Wagner: Uh, my great-great-grandmother would be directly from Ireland.
8:26
Greg Wagner: Um, she was met in the eighth ward of Philadelphia by my great-great-grandfather James.
8:31
Greg Wagner: Uh, she was 24, he was 18, and married, then came across this country uh in a covered wagon to kind of the Chicago area, basically the Galesburg, Illinois area.
8:45
Greg Wagner: And um then they made their way west.
8:48
Greg Wagner: But my great-great-grandmother always told um her husband always told James, always told her four children, and wrote in her diary: When I die, never bury me with dead people.
9:04
Greg Wagner: I don't want to be buried with dead people.
9:06
Greg Wagner: I want to be buried on the land that we homesteaded and settled.
9:10
Greg Wagner: I want to be buried in nature.
9:13
Greg Wagner: And to this day, um, she has no headstone, no gravestone.
9:17
Greg Wagner: She is buried below a 250-year-old oak tree on our farm that we still own today.
9:24
Crista Cowan: Wow, what a gift.
9:26
Crista Cowan: And so that's your grandmother's grandmother, yes.
9:29
Greg Wagner: Correct.
9:29
Greg Wagner: I would have loved to trace back into history and go, oh, I want, I just want, I just want 30 minutes with you.
9:36
Greg Wagner: But uh no, did obviously did not know her.
9:40
Greg Wagner: Did your grandmother know her?
9:41
Greg Wagner: Yes, she did.
9:43
Greg Wagner: Okay, my grandmother lived to be almost 98 years of age, 97.
9:48
Greg Wagner: So she yeah, she knew her as a small child and said she was just a lovely human being and and a great cook, and she was tough.
9:58
Greg Wagner: And yeah, and she would hunt alongside the men and everything.
10:02
Greg Wagner: We had a lot of strong women in our family, and that carries over today, even with my daughter and um with uh my wife as well, actually.
10:15
Crista Cowan: Wow.
10:16
Crista Cowan: So James and what was her name?
10:18
Crista Cowan: Margaret.
10:19
Crista Cowan: James and Margaret.
10:21
Crista Cowan: And about what time was this that she immigrated?
10:24
Greg Wagner: James came here first in 1855, and so she she was already here in the eighth ward of Philadelphia, and got they got married, I believe, in 1857.
10:36
Greg Wagner: Uh, it was the potato famine, obviously, that drove James here.
10:41
Greg Wagner: He came over here when he was 16.
10:43
Greg Wagner: Wow.
10:43
Greg Wagner: They had a funeral awake service in County Limerick, Ireland for him and put him on a ship alone because they knew they would never see him again.
10:50
Greg Wagner: And he meets this beautiful older woman in the eighth ward of Philadelphia and Margaret.
10:55
Greg Wagner: And um, so she was more mature, and um the joke always was in some of her diaries my Civil War husband thinks he runs this family, but I do.
11:10
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
11:11
Greg Wagner: Yeah, so we have Margaret, is my great-great-grandmother.
11:14
Greg Wagner: Um, then her daughter was Mary, that's my great-grandmother, then my grandmother is Margaret, and then my mother was Margaret.
11:24
Greg Wagner: We have a lot of Margaret.
11:26
Greg Wagner: Did you name a child Margaret?
11:28
Greg Wagner: My the middle name of my daughter, Emma, is Margaret.
11:33
Crista Cowan: I love that.
11:34
Crista Cowan: I love the continuity of names.
11:36
Crista Cowan: I think that that's really important.
11:37
Crista Cowan: Um, we have that in my family as well.
11:40
Crista Cowan: So, as James and Margaret, they went to Chicago.
11:43
Crista Cowan: Um, at some point, you said he um she referred to him as her Civil War husband.
11:48
Crista Cowan: How do you know how he got involved in the war or where he signed up from?
11:52
Greg Wagner: Well, uh at the time, it was during the war, kind of the latter part of it.
11:57
Greg Wagner: Um they were still coming around Union Army officers and trying to recruit uh people uh for the cavalry, especially.
12:07
Greg Wagner: And so my uh great-great-grandfather James is the son of a blacksmith, so he was highly recruited and probably was made a deal he couldn't refuse.
12:17
Greg Wagner: But he always uh told my great-great-grandmother in the diaries that he felt no one should ever be enslaved, and he would always fight against slavery and fight to have no one be enslaved in this world.
12:30
Greg Wagner: So he he joined, and he was with the 5th Illinois Cavalry uh on horseback, and the 5th Illinois fought a lot of skirmishes in the South during the Civil War.
12:43
Greg Wagner: Um, there were two small children that Margaret had.
12:46
Greg Wagner: She had to be tough because he took off, he had to go go fight.
12:50
Greg Wagner: And uh the latter part of the Civil War in Louisiana, he served directly under General George Armstrong Custer.
12:58
Greg Wagner: Wow.
12:59
Greg Wagner: And then after the war, he tried to um evidently they tried to recruit him to stick around to ferret out uh renegade Confederate officers, and then to maybe fight in some of the Indian Wars, the Native American Wars.
13:13
Greg Wagner: And he said, No, I've had enough of war, and then came back to Illinois and then regrouped with my grandmother a little bit, and then took off for a while to go look for land and cross the Missouri River into Nebraska.
13:29
Crista Cowan: And was that land part of some of his pay for his Civil War service, or was there a homestead act?
13:35
Crista Cowan: Like, was like why Nebraska?
13:38
Greg Wagner: I think um he had told my grandmother in some of the diaries that he was going to go only as far as he had to.
13:46
Greg Wagner: And um he didn't really want to go, you know, by himself across the country because he'd have to come back and get them.
13:53
Greg Wagner: And it was wilderness pretty much, uh, and in 1866, uh, after the Civil War.
13:59
Greg Wagner: But um, so he went on his own, horseback, um, from that Illinois, that Galesburg, Illinois area, and then crossed the Missouri River, and then came to where we are now in the Gretna, Nebraska area, which is just southwest of Omaha, Nebraska, along the Platte River, in the bluffs along the Platte River, and found suitable land.
14:23
Greg Wagner: This is before Nebraska was uh an official uh the Homestead Act was signed before it was an official state.
14:31
Greg Wagner: It was a territory.
14:32
Greg Wagner: And so staked out, claimed the land, and uh he did odd jobs in this place called Forest City, which was a crazy lively Irish-based settlement near Gretna.
14:44
Greg Wagner: It was the forerunner of the town of Gretna.
14:46
Greg Wagner: They had gunfights, they had cat houses, they had all kinds of things go on, and he said he liked going into town, but only for short bits of time.
14:57
Greg Wagner: And but anyway, he staked out this land on the bluffs overlooking the Platte River, then went back to the Galesburg, Illinois area, got my um um great-great-grandmother and the two kids and covered wagon.
15:11
Greg Wagner: Here they come.
15:11
Greg Wagner: They're coming to where he had staked out and claimed land as best he could with the territory.
15:17
Greg Wagner: They about die on the Missouri River in the spring during the floods.
15:21
Greg Wagner: Just about they lost they lost two or three horses and just about perished themselves, but they made it.
15:29
Greg Wagner: Uh, I know that one child was in the river for a while, was grabbed by one of the the uh the ferriers going across the river, and then went further west a little bit, uh, probably a day's ride on the covered wagon, and then to their territory that they had staked out.
15:50
Crista Cowan: That is incredible.
15:51
Crista Cowan: It's incredible that you have that level of detail because they kept a record because the story had been passed on.
15:57
Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's so rare, but also just the incredible nature of that journey to to strike out on your own like that to a place that then was the Wild West, really, and to bring your family and to and did he do that alone?
16:13
Crista Cowan: I mean, did he have in-laws or men he had served with that he migrated with, or was he striking out all on his own, literally?
16:22
Greg Wagner: Well, initially he struck out on his own, but when the covered wagon um uh type scenario was playing out, he went with a cluster of other Irish immigrants, and so I'll tell you, it gets very interesting.
16:40
Greg Wagner: So um he um with this cluster of other Irish immigrants, they went west together and they crossed the Missouri River together, they all made it, and then they all went, they had land close to each other.
16:55
Greg Wagner: There was safety in numbers, obviously.
16:57
Greg Wagner: And so around our farm today, we have names like uh McMahon, Patterson, uh McMurtry.
17:08
Greg Wagner: We have all these names, we are all descendants of these Irish immigrants that came over in 1866, all of us that uh we're all friends today, we see each other, and we are all descendants of those people.
17:22
Crista Cowan: So, as your family got to um Nebraska, what were those first few years of settlement like?
17:29
Crista Cowan: It's not like you walk across the country and you've got a Walmart available.
17:34
Greg Wagner: Well put.
17:35
Greg Wagner: Well, the interesting thing is they lived in a dugout.
17:41
Greg Wagner: They did not live in a sodhouse, it was a dugout into a hill.
17:45
Greg Wagner: Uh, the area that they settled was it's today, it's beautiful.
17:49
Greg Wagner: It it's in its virgin state.
17:52
Greg Wagner: Um, it's gorgeous.
17:53
Greg Wagner: It's it would look something kind of a slice out of um of low mountain country.
17:59
Greg Wagner: It's beautiful, but they lived in a dugout.
18:02
Greg Wagner: Can you imagine?
18:04
Greg Wagner: Or I mean, we have such rampant weather.
18:06
Greg Wagner: We're in tornado alley here.
18:08
Greg Wagner: Um, we have real harsh winters at times, and they lived in a dugout.
18:14
Greg Wagner: That's where they started.
18:16
Greg Wagner: And then a a little over a year later, they had plentiful amounts of wood, and then they built a log cabin.
18:21
Greg Wagner: Then they built outbuildings and everything.
18:23
Greg Wagner: They then the you'll see from census records, they registered you know, the property and claimed it.
18:31
Greg Wagner: And when Nebraska uh had, you know, we we're the home of the Homestead Act, and whether we had that enacted.
18:37
Greg Wagner: So they lived in a dugout on the side of a hill.
18:41
Greg Wagner: We know where that is today, and we just shake our heads and cannot imagine living in a dugout for well over a year.
18:50
Greg Wagner: Wow.
18:51
Greg Wagner: So through all seasons, and they no one perished.
18:54
Greg Wagner: Um, I'm sure it was rough, tough, and they had an abundant amount of wood for you know for fires and everything, but it was a dugout in the side of side of a hill, and obviously facing south and not north.
19:08
Crista Cowan: I keep imagining like the hobbit houses.
19:11
Crista Cowan: Is that like when you think about a dugout, right?
19:14
Crista Cowan: Like literally just dug into the mountain.
19:17
Crista Cowan: And the yeah, like that's amazing.
19:20
Crista Cowan: But you think about like what else that land, like what else that land looked like?
19:26
Crista Cowan: You said today that it's still very much in a virgin state, but is there are there unique features about the land that made them choose that particular spot?
19:36
Greg Wagner: Yes, uh, there were fertile soil, very good soil, um, water.
19:43
Greg Wagner: We still have Bird Creek that was named.
19:47
Greg Wagner: There's an almoh Indian term for that bird creek, but it means bird creek.
19:53
Greg Wagner: Uh, it goes through the entire farm that we have, the entire parcel.
19:58
Greg Wagner: And that creek is fed by artesian wells, seep springs.
20:05
Greg Wagner: It is some of the best quality water we've been told in the country.
20:08
Greg Wagner: I've I've had it tested, and it's outstanding, it's crystal clear, it's ice cold, it never freezes, but that good water was very important to them.
20:18
Greg Wagner: Fertile uh land, fertile soil.
20:21
Greg Wagner: Um, we have probably oh, we have the widest variety of hardwood trees that Nebraska has to offer.
20:30
Greg Wagner: Um, we have hickory, we have burr oak, red oak, white oak, cottonwood, um, hackberry.
20:36
Greg Wagner: We have all this variety of trees for a variety of uses, and that was very important um to my early uh relative settlers as well.
20:48
Greg Wagner: So it was teeming with a lot of wild game, uh, from what we know, turkeys, deer.
20:55
Greg Wagner: Uh, the creek had fish in it, um, it had catfish, and so they were able also to live off the land, plus use a lot of the natural resources.
21:06
Greg Wagner: So they were fortunate.
21:08
Crista Cowan: Sounds like it.
21:09
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
21:09
Crista Cowan: Now, you mentioned earlier, as you were talking about living in a dugout, floods, tornadoes.
21:15
Crista Cowan: Like this is a place that um also has some harsh realities, as especially as it relates to the weather.
21:21
Crista Cowan: And one of the things that we see in a lot of history as things like that occur, a tornado comes through, a flood destroys the crops.
21:29
Crista Cowan: Um, in in my ancestor's case, it was an earthquake in 1813 in Kentucky that just freaked everybody out.
21:36
Crista Cowan: Like, what, like, why do you think they stayed like and didn't keep looking for something better when things like that happened?
21:44
Greg Wagner: I think it was the aspect of freedom that this this is now their official land.
21:50
Greg Wagner: And it does have a lot of uh abundant and plentiful natural resources available.
21:56
Greg Wagner: We have good water, we have good soil to grow crops, we have wild game and fish to catch, we have a lot of wild fruits and berries and wild edibles that we can pick.
22:06
Greg Wagner: So this is this is a nice home, even though we're dealing with uh the crazy realm of Nebraska weather: hail, blizzards, um, tornadoes, uh, drought, um, heavy rains.
22:22
Greg Wagner: They didn't have to worry about flooding because we were in the bluffs above the Platte River.
22:27
Greg Wagner: And there's another interesting story to that.
22:30
Greg Wagner: But um I remember that um when they first got there, they remembered or they had pinned down looking at the wagon trains on the Mormon Trail on the Platte River below them.
22:42
Greg Wagner: Just they said a sea of covered wagons, and they just kept coming and coming.
22:49
Greg Wagner: But during periods of high water on the Platte River below them, um, they had what's called the Oxbow Trail.
22:56
Greg Wagner: And so the wagons couldn't get through because the bottom land was flooded, so they would come up into the hills and go through uh their property uh and down it was the Mormon Trail.
23:09
Greg Wagner: And so there were quite a few settlers during the latter part of the Mormon migration on the trail that came through our property.
23:19
Greg Wagner: Um, my great-great-grandfather was always gracious if people, if neighbors wanted to hunt or fish, or if uh, for example, the wagon trains, you know, being a pioneer himself, they understood if you you need to get west, you know, before winter, you can come through my property.
23:36
Greg Wagner: No problem, no problem.
23:38
Greg Wagner: And they would circumvent the fields and everything.
23:40
Greg Wagner: So an interesting aspect of it.
23:42
Greg Wagner: But I think just to cut right to the chase, it was freedom.
23:47
Greg Wagner: It was this is ours, this is our land.
23:50
Greg Wagner: Isn't it beautiful?
23:52
Greg Wagner: Look at all the natural resources.
23:54
Greg Wagner: That was kind of a recurring theme in my great-great-grandmother's diary.
23:59
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
24:00
Crista Cowan: Well, and what an interesting fact about the Mormon Trail.
24:02
Crista Cowan: So I have uh one grandparent who has Mormon pioneer ancestry, and many of her ancestors came from England in the late 1850s and early 1860s.
24:12
Crista Cowan: So maybe some of them stopped along on your property.
24:15
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
24:18
Crista Cowan: So, uh, how many children did James and Margaret have?
24:22
Greg Wagner: They had four children.
24:23
Greg Wagner: Um, the they had three boys and a girl.
24:27
Greg Wagner: Um there were there was James Jr., was the oldest, then Mary.
24:32
Greg Wagner: This is in line, and then it was William, and then it was Dennis.
24:36
Greg Wagner: Um, so one girl and three boys there.
24:40
Greg Wagner: The three boys became hermits and never married.
24:44
Greg Wagner: They never married.
24:45
Greg Wagner: They were a little paranoid because you know, it was the wild, wild west still, and and there's a lot of craziness going on.
24:53
Greg Wagner: But the three boys pretty much stayed on the farm, farmed, and never married.
24:57
Greg Wagner: But um, Mary, the daughter, that is um my great-grandmother.
25:05
Greg Wagner: So she married another Irish uh settler, Peter Ward, who came from Shenandoah, Iowa here.
25:13
Greg Wagner: But uh, and they had met, I think, um, in Forest City, I think at the General Mercantile Store.
25:20
Greg Wagner: And I think uh from what I can gather, Mary had dropped some flour, and this gentleman helped to pick it up and sweep it up.
25:28
Greg Wagner: Well, that's a meat, a meat cute.
25:31
Greg Wagner: Look at that in the grocery store.
25:33
Greg Wagner: But so uh, but the three boys um never married.
25:38
Greg Wagner: Uh they were pleasant, they enjoyed neighbors and everything, but never married.
25:44
Greg Wagner: Um James Jr.
25:46
Greg Wagner: Uh obviously was older, he had died first.
25:50
Greg Wagner: Uh Mary lived, that's my you know, there is there's my great-grandmother, who also really did want to be buried on the farm, but she ended up in the Forest City Cemetery.
26:01
Greg Wagner: But um, and then it was Mary, she lived a good good life in I think into her 80s, and then there was um William.
26:11
Greg Wagner: William lived to be 99, which was a long time back then, died in the 1950s.
26:18
Greg Wagner: Um, and then Dennis, the young one, had died eating breakfast uh during the depression.
26:24
Crista Cowan: Well, it's interesting because kind of where I was going with that was they had four children, but if only one of them married and had children, then there probably wasn't a lot of dispute about who to pass the land on to.
26:37
Crista Cowan: That is correct.
26:38
Crista Cowan: Whereas if they had all had children, that then becomes kind of a something that changes family dynamics when they've all been raised working that land.
26:47
Crista Cowan: Um, and so Mary got married, and because she had a family, I assume the farm went to her and her husband.
26:54
Crista Cowan: Absolutely.
26:56
Crista Cowan: And then how many children did they have?
26:59
Greg Wagner: They had two.
27:01
Greg Wagner: Um, and this gets out this gets interesting as well.
27:05
Greg Wagner: So it would be my grandmother, Margaret, um, and they had her later in life, which is interesting, and then she had a brother, Thomas.
27:17
Greg Wagner: So Thomas was a World War I veteran, and he uh came back, worked on a bridge gang, and had fallen off the bridge, and my grandmother said he was he was not doing well, he was spitting up blood, and then he died.
27:33
Greg Wagner: And he and I said, I I can't find his gravestone either.
27:37
Greg Wagner: He's on the farm too.
27:38
Greg Wagner: He's buried on the farm on the high hill.
27:40
Greg Wagner: I have her on tape saying that.
27:42
Greg Wagner: I go, the highest hill?
27:45
Greg Wagner: She goes, the high hill.
27:46
Greg Wagner: You know where the high hill is, Greg.
27:47
Greg Wagner: Yep.
27:48
Greg Wagner: So we have two people buried on the farm, but my grandmother, um, you know, with him, he died young at 20.
27:56
Greg Wagner: Oh, I'd have to think look back a little bit.
27:59
Greg Wagner: I think 25, 24.
28:02
Greg Wagner: So falling off the bridge, working on a bridge gang after he served in World War One.
28:07
Greg Wagner: So it and then here's my grandmother.
28:10
Greg Wagner: So she inherits this farm.
28:13
Greg Wagner: And she gets it all, and then she um again, born later in life.
28:19
Greg Wagner: I think when uh my great-grandmother had hers, she was 48 49.
28:26
Greg Wagner: But anyway, so uh persevered and she ended up taking care of the older relatives and the hermits, and she took care of and there was no question that she was the apparent heir to that farm.
28:40
Greg Wagner: And she had met up with my grandfather at a dance.
28:44
Greg Wagner: Uh, it was actually in Gretna because Forest City had moved at that time, and uh, so they had met right before they had dated before the depression.
28:53
Greg Wagner: I have some wonderful photos, and he was of German ancestry from Madison County, Nebraska.
29:00
Crista Cowan: And so now you've got this German family and this Irish family with your grandparents.
29:06
Crista Cowan: Like, did they have cultural things they had to work through?
29:10
Crista Cowan: Did like when it comes to food or celebrations or like even just how they worked the land, were there differences they had to navigate?
29:17
Greg Wagner: And I spent a lot of time with my grandpa, and hence is the name, H-I-N-T-Z German.
29:22
Greg Wagner: But uh, he always told me, he goes, I Greg, young Greg, I can't get used to the wakes that these Irish people have because around the caskets there's more alcohol flowing than food and everything else.
29:35
Greg Wagner: And he said, Irish whiskey.
29:38
Greg Wagner: He goes, Boy, and he said, and you don't bring Jameson, that's really not Irish, you know.
29:43
Greg Wagner: I go, Oh, oh, okay.
29:44
Greg Wagner: But um, he always had a difficult time getting used to a lot with funerals and wakes, it was a celebration of someone's life, and boy, the alcohol flowed, stories flowed.
29:57
Greg Wagner: Oh, and to this day, when we have a few.
29:59
Greg Wagner: Funeral our family, that is how we do it.
30:02
Greg Wagner: We have videos, a collage of photos.
30:04
Greg Wagner: We have alcohol there.
30:06
Greg Wagner: We do.
30:07
Greg Wagner: And yes, we have Guinness.
30:09
Greg Wagner: Um, and food Irish food, and that would be Irish stew.
30:13
Greg Wagner: Um, and to this day, we still celebrate our wakes and our funerals like that.
30:19
Greg Wagner: My grandpa was of German answer.
30:21
Greg Wagner: He goes, Yeah, he goes, and then he got tired of a he goes, they have potatoes for every meal.
30:28
Greg Wagner: I'm not used to potatoes for every meal.
30:31
Greg Wagner: I'm German.
30:32
Greg Wagner: And he goes, We don't have potatoes for every meal.
30:34
Greg Wagner: I remember him saying that, and a lot of stew.
30:37
Greg Wagner: They liked I they liked a lot of a lot of stew meat.
30:40
Greg Wagner: And and my grandma always said, because I yeah, I held her on her deathbed.
30:46
Greg Wagner: I was she requested me.
30:47
Greg Wagner: She goes, I need I want you with me.
30:50
Greg Wagner: And you know, on her deathbed, she told me, tell the stories, relay the information from the diary, tell the generations, tell them about us.
31:00
Greg Wagner: And I said, I will.
31:01
Greg Wagner: And I did, and I am.
31:04
Crista Cowan: I love that.
31:05
Crista Cowan: And I love that your family was able to maintain that Irish identity and in spite of the German influence or maybe your grandfather's sensibilities that he wanted to impose on the family.
31:16
Crista Cowan: That's that's always an interesting thing to see how those cultures either blend or kind of subsume one another in in different ways.
31:24
Greg Wagner: Yeah, and my grandfather's side is also very interesting.
31:27
Greg Wagner: Germans from Madison County.
31:29
Greg Wagner: That would be northeastern Nebraska, near the town of Norfolk.
31:32
Greg Wagner: But um, yeah, and in into ancestry, when I got into that, and then doing full three, uh, my my grandfather, my grandpa, hence that would be my grandmother's husband, um, could have got a deferment in World War II as um a farmer at age 35 and chose not to, chose to go to war in the infantry six days after D-Day.
31:58
Greg Wagner: My grandfather came ashore at 36 years of age and said, This is my destiny.
32:04
Greg Wagner: I have I have to do this.
32:06
Greg Wagner: I have to do this.
32:07
Greg Wagner: Um interesting on my Civil War grandfather, great-great-grandfather.
32:12
Greg Wagner: So to this day, I don't I should have brought them.
32:15
Greg Wagner: So I have his buttons and his cufflinks, and I have his sword.
32:20
Greg Wagner: They were willed to me.
32:22
Greg Wagner: I have them.
32:23
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
32:24
Crista Cowan: What an what an inheritance.
32:26
Crista Cowan: To have not just an inheritance of land, but an inheritance of story and history and family and those connections and those traditions.
32:36
Crista Cowan: I think that is so rare.
32:38
Crista Cowan: Um, and so what a gift that you've been given.
32:42
Greg Wagner: I feel very fortunate.
32:44
Greg Wagner: And my wife always says, you know, today, Greg, your family probably would be declared hoarders.
32:50
Greg Wagner: I said, if you don't save anything, you don't know anything.
32:54
Greg Wagner: I said, we're collectors of sorts.
32:57
Greg Wagner: We have to save these things to tell the stories.
32:59
Greg Wagner: And she'll say, Oh, okay, all right.
33:02
Greg Wagner: All those volumes of diaries and pictures and I love that.
33:07
Crista Cowan: Um, so as you think about um, you know, the fact that this land has weathered so much time and has stayed in the family, through all of that, like from you know, 1860, what was it, 60 1866, 1867?
33:22
Crista Cowan: Okay, so from 1866 until now, this land has remained in your family.
33:28
Crista Cowan: But through that period of time, there have been, you know, the Great Depression, there have been economic hardships, there have been natural disasters.
33:36
Crista Cowan: How did your family hold on to the land?
33:40
Greg Wagner: Difficult.
33:41
Greg Wagner: Um, and my father actually was a banker, and that I think helped helped later on with the savings and loan crisis in the 80s and everything else, but um, it was tough.
33:52
Greg Wagner: Um, the 1888 schoolhouse blizzard um was just a big killer of pioneers here in Nebraska.
34:00
Greg Wagner: Um, the pandemic of 1918-1919, um, all my relatives never left the farm.
34:08
Greg Wagner: They never left the farm, they never went into town, lived off the land, grew everything, ate everything, hunted, had livestock, never went to town.
34:17
Greg Wagner: Um, you fast forward then to 1932, they had an armed robbery on the farm.
34:22
Greg Wagner: And they didn't really, didn't really believe in banks very much because things were kind of getting unsettled, and they they kept their money to themselves on that farm.
34:33
Greg Wagner: Well, they got robbed.
34:35
Greg Wagner: And you know, neighbors kind of knew they, well, they're kind of hermits, they're keeping the money on the farm.
34:40
Greg Wagner: And the word got out and uh they were robbed at gunpoint.
34:45
Greg Wagner: And uh the robbers um were from a nearby town, Ashland, and they were caught, and the money was retrieved.
34:54
Greg Wagner: Believe it or not, uh, they were caught pretty quickly by the sheriff at the time.
34:58
Greg Wagner: Um crazy.
35:00
Greg Wagner: And then, you know, you come up to the savings and loam, the farm crisis of the 80s, tough times there, very difficult times.
35:09
Greg Wagner: Uh, but we're able, you know, to hang on to everything.
35:13
Greg Wagner: And and uh my dad, I remember my father having to sell some stock and to do some other things just to preserve that farm.
35:23
Crista Cowan: Wow, but they chose to do that, like in spite of everything, like nothing was too hard for them to overcome.
35:29
Crista Cowan: They made the effort, which is so admirable.
35:32
Crista Cowan: As you think about that and other, like just characteristics that kind of get bred into you because of living in that place, because of having this experience of living on a multi-generational piece of land.
35:46
Crista Cowan: What do you think your children uh inherit from you and from your grandmother and from your great-great-grandparents uh and from the land?
35:58
Greg Wagner: I want them to intricately just know that no, that picture just isn't your great-great-grandfather.
36:05
Greg Wagner: Here's what your great-great-grandfather did.
36:07
Greg Wagner: Here's what your great-great-grandmother did, here's what they said, here's here's how they persevered.
36:12
Greg Wagner: Um, and it's interesting that uh you bring up the land.
36:17
Greg Wagner: I will have my grandson on that land um tomorrow.
36:22
Greg Wagner: We'll hike it.
36:24
Greg Wagner: We'll I get my grandkids out there all the time.
36:26
Greg Wagner: My children, we we are hunters and and anglers, fishermen, and we spend a lot of time on the land.
36:34
Greg Wagner: I've restored the prairie.
36:36
Greg Wagner: Um, it's beautiful with the wildflowers and everything else.
36:39
Greg Wagner: We farm our best land and conserve the rest.
36:42
Greg Wagner: We farm the best, just as they did, my relatives, and conserve the rest.
36:47
Greg Wagner: Um, the land to me, when I get out there, I start thinking of all of the characters in uh our family history.
36:55
Greg Wagner: And I I get a little emotional, I get very emotional, uh I'll tell you, because that land is like wow.
37:02
Greg Wagner: And I just want to say thank you to all the generations for what you did to uh keep this in the family 158 years.
37:11
Greg Wagner: Now it's up to me, with my own kids, obviously, and with my grandchildren, to relay the love of the land, the appreciation of natural resources, and you need to know the people that came before you and what they went through uh to retain this land, for you to be on it today.
37:32
Crista Cowan: That's an incredible legacy that you have both inherited and are preserving and passing on.
37:39
Crista Cowan: So thank you for sharing that with us.
37:41
Crista Cowan: Um, as you think about what it means to be a Nebraskan, what how would you describe that?
37:48
Greg Wagner: Well, this is what I tell everybody that I'm a Nebraskan through in and throughout.
37:53
Greg Wagner: I've traveled all across the United States and Canada and Mexico.
37:58
Greg Wagner: I don't want to live any other place.
38:00
Greg Wagner: I do not.
38:01
Greg Wagner: Nebraska's still very rural.
38:03
Greg Wagner: Um, our farm sits from where I live, about a half-hour drive, and I'm on it, basically.
38:11
Greg Wagner: Um, and I just think it's the people here in Nebraska.
38:16
Greg Wagner: Um, the analogy I give is this that I had uh broken down during a deer hunt uh not far from the farm, and the first person by stops.
38:28
Greg Wagner: Are you okay?
38:29
Greg Wagner: Can I help you?
38:31
Greg Wagner: What's wrong?
38:31
Greg Wagner: What's wrong with the vehicle?
38:33
Greg Wagner: The second person by stops.
38:35
Greg Wagner: The third person by stops and says, Hey Greg, yeah, I I've heard of you.
38:40
Greg Wagner: Hey, we're branding cattle over here.
38:43
Greg Wagner: Why don't you come and have lunch with us?
38:45
Greg Wagner: I know how to fix this this truck.
38:46
Greg Wagner: You don't need to take it to a shop.
38:48
Greg Wagner: Come over.
38:48
Greg Wagner: And you, you two people that stop to help you come too.
38:51
Greg Wagner: That's Nebraska.
38:53
Greg Wagner: I love it, absolutely.
38:55
Greg Wagner: Um, I love the people, um, and and everything about it.
38:59
Greg Wagner: I would choose not to live any other place.
39:01
Greg Wagner: Sometimes when people come here or they're transferred here, uh, whether it's with a business or a company, they'll say, You're winters.
39:10
Greg Wagner: Oh, your winters.
39:11
Greg Wagner: But you know, I enjoy the changing of the seasons, it's never boring.
39:15
Greg Wagner: I love it, um, and I embrace it.
39:19
Greg Wagner: Um, my family is all here, and I would choose not to live any other place than Nebraska.
39:24
Greg Wagner: And I work for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, the state fish, wildlife, and outdoor recreation agency.
39:30
Greg Wagner: So uh I'm really entrenched here.
39:33
Crista Cowan: Well, Greg, thank you so much for sharing Nebraska with us, for sharing your family history with us.
39:39
Crista Cowan: I so appreciate that.
39:41
Crista Cowan: Thank you very much.
39:42
Greg Wagner: I appreciate you.
39:44
Greg Wagner: I appreciate Ancestry.
39:46
Greg Wagner: It helped me to connect the dots.
39:49
Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.