Jacob Dirksen was born October 1, 1841 in Alexanderthal, Molotschna Colony, Russia. His brother Abraham was born in 1843. On November 13, 1862 Jacob married Elizabeth Funk. In 1864 Abraham married Elizabeth's first cousin Sarah Funk. In 1876 Jacob and Abraham's families joined many other Mennonites emigrating to America.

Jacob and Abraham followed the influential Unruh families into Turner County north of Yankton, South Dakota. Soon Seventh-Day Adventist evangelists drew them from the new Brothersfield Mennonite Church.. Religious and financial factors combined with railroad expansion to make attractive a resettlement further north into Dakota Territory .

On September 24, 1886. Abraham was killed by lightning. By 1891 Jacob and Elizabeth, Sarah and other Turner County German speaking Russian immigrant Adventists had moved on to Logan County in North Dakota. There the German Adventist community grew. On May 14, 1895, Jacob's wife Elisabeth died. Widower and widow, Jacob and Sarah were married Feb 12, 1896.

Drought and hardship drove them still to search for better land. After looking north into Canada and south into Kansas they resettled to the northwest corner of Stutsman County, North Dakota. There they and their fellow immigrant families founded the still extant New Home SDA Church. where Jacob and Sarah are buried, he on February 24, 1916 and she on May 6, 1917.

Thanks to Jacob's grandson Louis T. Dirksen, several pages of Jacob's handwritten notes have been preserved. They also contain entries in English made by my grandfather, Sarah and Abraham's second son (Jacob's step-son and nephew) Abraham Adam Dirksen.

The notes do not appear in an apparent order so I have arranged them within groups. Martha Becker, daughter of 1875 Turner County Mennonite immigrants, made the translations.

Martha Becker's correspondence Pages 2 - 4
Family members and dates Pages 5 - 11
Financial notes and records Pages 12 - 21
Trip to Canada Pages 22 - 25
Patients treated Pages 26 - 29
Abraham Adam's notes Pages 30 - 39

Reference is made on the next page to a disease called Scheilstonweg(?). Kathy Sperling suggests that it might have been Schleichendem Fieber from this list.

Jacob's notes about his travels in Canada do not include reference to the year. It seems likely however, that they occurred after the Dirksens came to North Dakota because north/south railroad lines were only then being developed.

It was also in 1891, soon after arriving in Logan County, that Jacob began practicing as a "Bone Doctor" among the German Adventists. This would have placed him in a position of community leadership, as it had his brother Abraham ten or twelve years earlier in Turner County.

Jacob did not file for land in Logan County as Sarah did. She "proved up" her land May 25, 1896 just three months after she married Jacob. This may have been the time when they began to look for better land, that their entire community could move to.

There is also an obscure family reference to a "Missionary" trip made by Jacob and David Funk (Sarah's first cousin, Elizabeth's brother) during which they traveled "as far as the Pacific Ocean".

We know also that Sarah was in Kansas visiting her sister Wilhelmina sometime around 1898 – 1900. This may have coincided with a trip to Lincoln, Nebraska where daughter Sarah entered the Adventist Union College. Possibly inquiries were made about land availability there.

Whatever the speculations, in fact by 1900 Jacob and Sarah and many of their friends and relatives were in New Home by 1900. Abraham Adam wrote elsewhere,

New Home was a small village on land that Jacob eventually bought. But when the Railroad came through nearby Woodworth, the New Home Post Office was abandoned, and soon the rest of the village was gone too.

Although my family has for many years spoken of grandpa Abraham Adam Dirksen's father as a "Bone Doctor" I did not know what to make of the term until receiving the following note from Dr. Tim Janzen, a prominent Mennonite genealogist.

Tim wrote, "My grandmother introduced me to the term 'bone doctor' (Knochenartze). Her grandfather Peter Peters was a 'bone doctor'. I wasn't exactly sure what that was, but as she explained it to me he helped set fractures and take care of basic medical problems. I don't think that most 'bone doctors' made their living being this. They were probably still farming most of the time and only in a few cases were doing a lot of medical care."

GAMEO includes this page on Russian Mennonite Doctors.