Joseph Alphonso “Allie” Sohm(1) was born in 1889 to Joseph Sohm (1826-1902) and Christianna Friedericke Wissmann (1852-1920). Although he was listed as “Joseph Alphonso” on many official records, he was known as “Allie” beginning in his youth, and for the remainder of his life.
Allie’s father, Joseph, had lost his first wife, Fredericka Minnier (1842-1872, married May 1870), when their daughter, Pauline (1870-1965), was only 14 months old. At that time, they were living in Dubuque, in eastern Iowa. Joseph remarried in 1872 to Christianna Wissmann. Two more children were born — Carolina (born 1873) and Katherina Elizabeth (1874-1957) — and in either 1879 or 1880, the family moved to O’Brien County, where they settled on a farm in Liberty Township. There three more children were born: Marie Antoinette (1883-1957), Allie, in 1889, and Joseph Paul (1893-1983).
This early residence in the region makes Joseph one of the pioneer farmers in Liberty Township. He was also a founding member of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Calumet, listed along with 21 other charter members in 1891. Unlike almost all of the other families of Calumet German Band members (and unlike most families in Liberty Township at this time), Christianna and Joseph did not hail from the Schleswig-Holstein region; Joseph had been born in Austria, and Christianna had been born in southern Germany, in Esslingen, near Stuttgart.
But father Joseph, who was already 67 years old at the birth of the last child in the family, died in 1902, when Allie was 12 years old. Upon the death of Joseph, the small family moved to the town of Calumet, where in the 1910 census the household consisted of the widowed Christianna, who performed housework for other families; Allie, as a 21-year-old, who worked as a carpenter; and the older daughter Carolina, who worked as a nurse in the Calumet hospital. The other children had left the household by that point. Incidentally, Carolina’s work as a nurse would have been in collaboration with Dr. Claudius Laurentius “C. L.” Sievers (1876-1953), the brother of Calumet German Band member Hans Henry “Hugh” Sievers (1888-1978) and the owner of the Calumet hospital. See the Sievers biosketch for more information about C. L. Sievers.
For the remainder of his career, Allie continued to work as a carpenter and journeyman contractor, and he was also employed by J. H. Queal & Company, the lumberyard in Calumet, which had been among the first business establishments in the town. A short item in the local paper, which reported the comings and goings of all residents, no matter how small, noted on 21 January 1910 that “Allie Sohm was at Gaza Monday and Tuesday putting in the bank fixture.” In April 1914, Allie took charge of the J. H. Queal & Company offices. A 1914 history book also shows that he was involved in the civic affairs of the town, serving as treasurer on the town council at that time.(2)
Two years after this photo, on 24 October 1911, Allie married Mavis Lenora Steen (1891-1973), who had been born in Paullina, the daughter of German immigrant Theodore Henry Jacob Steen (1862-1924), born in Schleswig-Holstein, and Christina Wolleson (1871-1950), born in Tama County, Iowa, to a German immigrant family.
Allie and Mavis had two daughters, Josephine Lenora Sohm (1912-1988) and June Lois Sohm (1921-1985). Numerous local newspaper reports through the years show Allie and Mavis, along with Josephine and June, as actively involved in the social life of Calumet and O’Brien County. They remained in Calumet through 1930, but by 1940 the family had moved to Storm Lake, in Buena Vista County.
The Sohms’s daughter June Lois married Henry George Ivers (1919-2003), and the Iverses lived near Allie and Mavis in Storm Lake, raising three children. The older daughter, Josephine, married Glenn Jacob Westphal (1907-1976), and that couple settled in South Dakota and raised four children there.
Allie Sohm died in Storm Lake in 1968 at the age of 79; his wife Mavis lived until 1973. They are both buried at Buena Vista Memorial Park Cemetery, Storm Lake.
Subscribers to Ancestry.com may wish to further explore some family connections of Allie Sohm by accessing an Ancestry profile page (within the context of a “Mugge Family Tree”).
Connection to Other Band Members
Through his own marriage and then another one two years later, Allie Sohm would become the brother-in-law to his bandmate John Mehrens (1889-1941). As detailed above, Allie married Mavis Lenora Steen in October 1911. Mavis’s older sister Anna Christina Steen (1889-1983) married John Mehrens on 19 February 1913. (Thus of course there is also an in-law relationship with John Mehrens’s brother Albert Mehrens, 1891-1957.)
Footnotes
(1) The surname is sometimes rendered as “Sohn” in census and other records. That spelling was also used in the caption when The Des Moines Register published the Calumet German Band photo on 6 December 1964 as a historical curiosity. (See the “About This Project” and the “Town and Township” sections for more information.) Likewise, the maiden name of Allie’s mother is spelled in various sources as Wissmann, Wiszmann, Wiszman, Wismann, Wisemann, and Wessman. Census records and even marriage documents are sometimes unreliable for name spellings because the census enumerator or county official is often making a guess or simply careless.
(2) Past and Present of O’Brien and Osceola Counties, Iowa, by Hon. J. L. E. Peck and Hon. O. H. Montzheimer (for O’Brien County) and Hon. William J. Miller (for Osceola County). Vol. I. Illustrated. Indianapolis, Indiana: B F. Bowen & Company, Inc., 1914.