Memorials › Anna V. Kuta Bonk

Anna V. Kuta Bonk

1 Nov 1896 – 12 Jun 1992

Birth1 Nov 1896
Death12 Jun 1992
CemeterySaint Bonaventure Cemetery
Columbus , Platte County , Nebraska , USA
Added byShirley (Bruhn) Martys on 30 Nov 2008
FaGhttps://www.findagrave.com/memorial/17961609

Bio

Married to Charles P. Bonk Thanks to contributor #47247306; Anna (Kuta) Bonk born November 1, 1896, in a sod house east of Columbus (Colfax County, near Bellwood). Her parents, Joseph and Antonia Kuta came straight from the "old sod" of Poland, five years before. She says "My father came first on money sent by his half-brother Zuroski. He worked then, and saved and sent money to my mother. "She traveled here with three little children, a brother and two sisters, the youngest six months old, by crowded boat where there was much sickness." In New York, Antonia, who could not speak a word of English, managed to get her little brood on a boxcar going to Chicago. In the "windy city" they got on a westbound train. Not knowing when they would arrive, Joseph failed to meet his exhausted family when they stepped onto the platform in Nebraska. But Antonia, overhearing a group of Polish speaking people, was able to solve yet another problem. She was directed to a familly who put them up for the night. The next day, Joseph came to take them home. Home was a one-room sod house with a dirt floor and furnished with two beds, a stove, table chairs and cupboard. Grandma Bonk remembers when a window to the south, and that in the springtime, wild flowers and weeds would sprout inside, from the damp walls of the house. She also remembers that they were very happy there, "but" she says, "when we moved to our own forty-acre farm,(five miles east of Columbus in the river), and into a frame house, I thought it was a palace." Grandma Bonk walked a mile and a quarter each way to Colfax county's District 5. "It was closer," she says "than District 9." In those days nobody worried if we crossed lines to go to school, so we went to the closest one. If the weather was very bad, we'd hitch up the horses to the buggy, or stay at the home if the weather was very bad, we'd stay altogether. My formal education ended at fourth grade. Her older sisters, both deaf from early childhood, spent winters, in deaf institution in Omaha, and summers at home. "We were very close sisters," Grandma Bonk says, "We had a sign language all our own, and it was they who insisted that I read a lot, so I kept on learning. Written by Irene O'Brien in the Columbus Daily Telegram -1986 -

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