Pat: Some people sent it to my mother. They were doing the family history.

JM: Were you aware of the historic nature of the photo?

Pat: No.

JM: Do you know whether anybody in the picture mentioned this and remembered that they were photographed?

Pat: Nobody ever mentioned it. They're all deceased now.

JM: What do you think of the photograph and what it is depicting about your family? It looks to me like they were having a difficult life at that time.

Pat: The stories we had from my mother is that they lived in a home in Fort Collins (Colorado), on Loomis Street, and they would also go out and work in the beet fields and live in a little house. And when the season ended, they would go back to the house in Fort Collins.

JM: One of the photos shows the house on Loomis Street. Were you ever in that house?

Pat: Not inside of it. My mom and dad lived a few blocks away on Sherwood Street, and when we drove by it, Mom would say that was where she lived. And she'd tell us all these stories.

JM: Your mother was Martha. Which one was she in the photo?

Pat: She was the little one. She was probably five years old then. The next sister was Lydia. She was probably nine. She married Fred Brunz. The one next to her was Molly. She married Frank Kinner. The older one is Elizabeth, or Betty. She married Clarence Geist. They had an older sister Alice, who married an Ellis, but she's not in the picture.

JM: Did you know Jacob, your grandfather?

Pat: He died in 1944, before I was born.

JM: What about your grandmother?

Pat: She died quite young, in 1933. I remember we had pictures of her sitting in the rocking chair. After she died, my grandfather remarried.

JM: Who did he marry?

Pat: Oh gosh, I don't know that.

JM: Did your mother have a job when she grew up?

Pat: She worked on the farm, and she also cleaned houses and stuff.

JM: So your father was a farmer?

Pat: We were sharecroppers.

JM: In Fort Collins?

Pat: Sometimes in Fort Collins. We also lived in Nebraska and Wyoming. In the winter, when he wasn't sharecropping or farming, he would work in the sugar factories in Greeley (Colorado).

JM: Did any of the girls have a job or career when they grew up?

Pat: Aunt Molly worked for the state of California for many years. That's all I know.

JM: You live in Florida now. When did you leave Colorado?

Pat: We moved to Texas in 1984, and then we moved to Florida about nine years ago.

JM: So up to 1984, you were still living in Colorado?

Pat: My husband was in the navy, and we were in California. But Colorado was still our home.

JM: What did you do for a living?

Pat: I worked in the office for the power company, and I worked in the hospital as a clerk. And my husband and I had our own business. We were cosmetologists for a long time.

JM: Did your mother talk much about her days of working on the farm and going out to the beet farms.

Pat: She talked some about it. My husband probably knows more, because he's always been interested in what Mom and Dad talked about.

JM: What was your mother like?

Pat: She was a hard worker. She had 10 kids. She was able to take care of us and put food on the table no matter what. And she was always happy. Mom and Dad had a lot of friends, and they danced a lot.

JM: How well off were you when you were growing up?

Pat: We weren't a very wealthy family, not with all of us kids. But we lived on the farm, so we always had food on the table.

Gerhard: My wife's family history is interesting, because the Rommels were Germans who lived in Russia. A lot of the information we have about the family is written in the German language, and I speak and read German. Are you familiar with the history of the Germans from Russia, or the Volga-Deutsch, as they are called?

JM: No.

Gerhard: There's a guy in Fort Collins that's done quite a bit of research at the university. There were a bunch of German people that lived in Russia, near the Volga River. Catherine the Great had opened the country to them. Many of these people left Russia and went to the United States in late 1800s and early 1900s. When they came over, people here called them Russians, because they were born in Russia, although these people never spoke the Russian language. They had their own little agricultural towns over there.

A lot of them went to Kansas, towns like Victoria, Russell and Ellis. These little towns in Kansas were started by the Volga-Deutsch, these Germans from Russia. A lot of them moved later into Eastern Colorado to work in the sugar beet business. They raised sugar beets. Jacob Rommel used to farm about 40 acres. It was about 15 miles from their house in Fort Collins. That's why they built those shacks out there, so they could stay in them. They were sharecroppers. They would get a percentage of the beet crop. They couldn't afford to hire laborers, so the whole family helped. They would dig up the beets. They had to get them out of the ground before November or December, before they froze in the ground.

So the Rommel kids were actually helping the family. They weren't going out and making money and bringing it home. They would dig the beets up, take the tops off, pile them, and then come back with pitchforks and a wagon and put them on a wagon. Then they would take them to a prearranged place where they would dump them, and then someone would come with railroad cars and take them to the sugar factory. Since the sugar factory in Fort Collins was probably only six or seven miles away, it's possible that Jacob got a cart and some horses and took them to the sugar factory himself. They also had jobs at the sugar factory, and that's how they made money through the winter months.

JM: Did the kids work in the sugar factories in the winter?

Gerhard: No, because they had their chores to do. They had chickens and cows, and had to do milking and things like that.

JM: Would they have gone to school then?

Gerhard: Yes. And they were very active in the church. They would read the bible and stuff like that. They were Lutheran.

JM: It's interesting that you mentioned about them being Germans inside of Russia. Hine notes in the caption that one of the girls said, ‘Don't call us Russians, we're Germans.'

Gerhard: People over here would say, ‘You were born in Russia, so you are a Russian.' But they did not want to be associated with Russians, because to them, a Russian was a bad person. There were lots of fights about it. I remember Martha saying, ‘I pulled out a girl's hair once because she called me a dirty Russian.'

JM: Would you say that the Jacob Rommel family was better off than other families doing the same thing? They owned a little house, and they did other work during the winter, so it seems like he might have been a bit better off than some of the other sharecroppers.

Gerhard: No, I think they were all in the same boat.

JM: Is their house in Fort Collins still there?

Gerhard: Yes, but it's been remodeled. There's a stone façade on the front, and there are big trees growing all around it, and there are lots of other houses there. It's a nice old neighborhood. A lot of the old houses were built square, with a chimney in the middle. They put the stove in the middle and the rooms all the way around. That way they could get the heat to all the rooms.

JM: Lewis Hine was on a crusade to get the laws changed so that kids could go to school and not have to work all the time. Do you think these pictures of your wife's ancestors were a good example for Hine to use?

Gerhard: Well, this was their culture. They were raised that way in Russia. The Germans had an old saying, ‘Work makes life sweet.' They were farmers. They got up early in the morning, they worked hard, and they took pride in their work. They would challenge each other to see who could pick up a 100-pound sack of potatoes with their teeth, and that kind of stuff. If Jacob had been lucky enough to have some boys, he would have expected that they were going to take over the farm someday, and that the girls were going to eventually marry farmers, and then they would leave.

So I don't think we can say that these kids were like the kids that had to work in the coal mines. The families worked these kids, but they didn't work all the time. I've seen old pictures of farm families with the sons out in the field, but the girls were not out there. But Jacob, this poor guy, had no sons, and he needed help to get the beets out of the ground, so he had to use his daughters. If you understand their history and background, where they came from, and read their songs and their letters, this was just something they did then.