Family History Notes and Photos by Bob Mesenbrink

A lot of families have stories about having a great grandmother or other ancestors who was a Native American. My family doesn't. And my DNA shows no Native American ancestry. But that doesn't mean they didn't have a part in the story. When one people colonizes another's land, pushes them out, and takes over their land, there are interactions to say the least. But my ancestors were settlers, not frontiersmen. They were immigrants, not colonists. They were farmers, not soldiers. But not in every case... The following are various bits and pieces that I've gathered over the years on my ancestors. It may seem a bit rambling and disconnected, but my hope is it helps the reader put Indian relationships with our family in perspective.I use the term "Indian", rather than "Native American", since I think that is what my ancestors would have called them. I think my brother still has a big old Indian doll that he collected on some family trip. And my dad

Several years ago, my mother and I joined several of my aunts and cousins for a "tour" of some of the Crawford county area farms where my grandparents lived and raised their children. The help of my aunts, Edna and Lois, was invaluable since they lived in this area their whole life and the locations were still fresh in their mind. As the oldest children of Fred and Maude Stephenson, they knew more about where the family lived than anybody else still living. The trip covered an area between Denison, Dunlap, and Castana, but mostly places just north of Dow City and Arion. But rather than describe that trip, I thought I would try to put together a timeline of the Stephenson family, using what I gathered from that trip. The pictures were taken on this trip, which I would guess to be around the year 1990. Fred Stephenson was born in 1886 near Dunlap. Dunlap itself is just across the county line inside of Harrison county, Iowa. Fred could have been born in Dunlap itself, but