My step-father grew up in Emmons county, North Dakota. His grandmother was Katherine Feist from Strasburg. I’ve vaguely known that Strasburg was also the home of Lawrence Welk, but I hadn’t really thought about it that much. Today I ran across a map from 1916 that shows where her farm was. It’s marked in red in the map. Each big square on the map is one mile on each side. The Feist farm is a half-mile square.
About a mile and a half to the west is one farm owned by Ludwig Welk, Lawrence Wel’s father. And about 3 miles to the north is another owned by the Welks. Both are marked in green. The Lawrence Welk birthplace is just north of Strasburg, which is not either of the two properties.
I couldn’t tell you which of them actually had the family homes, nor do I know the exact time frame for the map. It was published in 1916, when Lawrence Welk was 10, and Katie Feist had married and moved away 2 years before. But another page of the atlas has a different relative owning property that I’m told he lost in 1911 or 1912, so there was quite possibly a few years lag from when the people listed as owning the farms actually owned them. The 1900 census has the Feists in Strasburg, but by the 1910 census they are in a township called Marie, which is quite a way away. So it appears the maps are quite a bit out of date when published in 1916.
Anyhow, for a couple of years, they were fairly close.
