When I saw this photo, I thought about Howard and Eveline Butcher, a newly married teenage couple in Indiana, who left their families in 1874 and traveled by covered wagon to Kansas in search of a new life as young farmers. They would lose five of their 11 children in infancy. One of those who survived to adulthood was Jenny Christa Butcher, who gave birth to my father in 1911. I knew great-grandmother Eveline when I was very young. She was in her 90s then. I can only imagine the struggles she and her family must have faced. The Rommels would have faced similar struggles in Colorado, with the additional obstacle of being German-speaking Russian immigrants.

In 1915, Lewis Hine took about 100 photos of Colorado beet farmers such as the Rommels. The National Child Labor Committee was concerned that most of the children in these families had very little schooling. The following is excerpted from their 1920 report Farm Labor vs. School Attendance (public domain).

"The school term in the country is shorter than that in cities. In a comparison of rural and urban statistics made in 1912, the Bureau of Education reported that the average term in urban communities was 46.4 days longer than the average for rural communities. The actual difference between the term in city schools and in country schools is even greater, for the above figures include in 'rural communities' towns with a population of 2,500 or less, although the school term in such towns approximates that of the cities more nearly than that of the country regions."

"This condition is usually attributed to the difficulty of raising funds in the country. Another factor enters in, however the tendency in many rural districts to subordinate education to farm work. The compulsory education law of Georgia, for instance, empowers the city, town and county boards of education to excuse children temporarily from attendance, and expressly authorizes them 'to take into consideration the seasons for agricultural labor and the need of such labor in exercising their discretion as to the time for which children in farming districts shall be excused.' Schools in Michigan frequently declare 'beet vacations' in the late fall."

"The same thing is true in the beet-growing regions of Colorado. In one section, the schools opened November 29, and closed May 1, a term of only five months (less than the very low minimum required to entitle a state to receive federal aid under the proposed Smith-Towner Bill). To shorten the school term in accordance with the requirements of the farm is manifestly unfair. It not only permits children to miss school; it obliges them to."

"The most serious effect of farm labor, however, and the one which has been made the special point of the National Child Labor Committee's investigations, is the amount of absence which it causes. Children enter late in the fall, and leave early in the spring; even during the winter months they are absent from time to time to help on the farm."

"In Colorado the local school authorities of counties in the sugar beet growing section estimated that 4,841 children between the ages of 6 and 15 miss from two to twenty-two weeks of school, with an average of nine and a half weeks, because of work in the fields. In one school, four rooms were reserved for beet workers, but when the school opened only 30 children enrolled. This number soon dropped to 21, the third month there were 58 children, and the fourth 125. The Juvenile Court of Weld County as the result of their investigation referred to above, concluded that, 'by far the most of the children who are withdrawn from school to work are found on the farms.'"

"There are as in any child labor field two classes of families to be considered. There are those who do not need the assistance of their children, but who nevertheless allow and encourage them to stay away from school and work. This class constitutes a large majority. A (Colorado) family consisting of the father, mother and two girls, 9 and 10 years, worked 40 acres of beets, although they own a good home elsewhere in the state. They board it up for half a year, and live in a shack 'in the beets.'" (Note: This is obviously the Rommel family, judging by the caption under their photograph.)

"There are some, however, so crushed by poverty that they do actually depend upon the work of the children for the support of the family. This should not be so. It is a short-sighted as well as an unjust policy to cripple the future of children because of present economic necessity. If forced to do without the help of the children, either the families would receive other assistance (such as scholarships or mothers' pensions), or the conditions creating the poverty would be ameliorated."

Shortly after discovering this photo, I found the family in immigation records and in the 1910 and 1920 census, living in Ft. Collins, Colorado. They entered the US through Ellis Island in 1902, and went to Kansas. One of their children, Martha, was born about 1910, and her 2005 obituary popped up in a search of Colorado newspapers. I called one of her surviving daughters, Pat Speyer, and interviewed her and her husband a month later. According to them, Jacob Rommel was born on March 1, 1867, in Hussenbach, Russia, and died on June 21, 1944, in Fort Collins, Colorado. Jacob's wife, Alice (Gietz), was born on Sept 15, 1868, also in Hussenbach, and died on April 14, 1933, in Fort Collins.