My name is Debra Hummel. My maiden name is Koch, and I am 53 years old. I was born October 30, 1953 in Racine, Wisconsin, and even though I only lived there for four years that’s where I consider home.

After that, or during that time, my dad was working and also going to college. We always figured that the entire family went into the ministry because we were with him through the seminary and through all of it. So, it was kind of a family thing rather than just an individual profession.

My father is David Francis Koch, and he was born in Baltimore, Maryland. My mother’s name is Ingerborg, she goes by Inga, Adelheit, which we usually just use A. Her last name was Rode, and I believe it was spelled Rode.

Adelheit is so rarely used and a lot of the things I see it in it’s written in German. All of her papers of course, because she was born there, are written in German and so I believe I’ve got the right spelling.

Her family immigrated when she was four years old to the area of Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin. I don’t know where her dad worked or brothers. They came over first and then an older sister was married and came over first. Kenosha is known for the Nash Company, automobile company, that’s where Nashs were built and of course became American Motors and on and on.

My one uncle Gustav, we called him Gus, he used my dad’s GI bill, I know, to start a bakery in Kenosha. Kenosha and Racine are very well known. They are very popular for Danish bakeries and they have very unique pastries that you don’t find other places.

So, and then another uncle which would have been a brother of my mother’s died at a very young age of ruptured appendix and he was working, as I believe, on the WPA program.

Her parents – it was actually a second marriage, and her parents did not live long at all after they came here. Basically my mother was an orphan by the time she was four or five, but there were enough brothers and sisters that were established that she lived with them.

Some of those details, of course, I don’t know. I only know what I’ve heard and Mom’s not real big on talking about things like that. She went through some hard times.

Sometimes if you get her in the right mood she’ll really talk about it and then other times she doesn’t want anything to do with it. Now, of course, she’s had a stroke and she’s out at Fox Run and, like I said, it just depends on her mood.

One thing she talks about though is how when she came over on the ship in the first place they were – she and her mother were quarantined on Ellis Island for like six weeks because they thought her mother had TB.

When she finally got into the port she said the men that must have unloading the ships and stuff would give them oranges. They had never seen an orange. They showed them how to peel an orange and they would throw the peels over the boat and how to eat the orange, because in Germany they didn’t have oranges. And they’d give her chewing gum. She had never seen chewing gum before.

I didn’t, and I’m thinking it was probably – she was born in 1924. I think she came over in 1929, but dad could verify that better than I could.