Lessig Brinkmeyer, circa 1929
“Have you ever had a secret so dark and so deep that you are willing to go to your grave with it? Never speak of it to your closest family members. Always looking over your shoulder for someone to appear who knows the truth.
“That was my father.
“He kept that secret so well that only once, when he was in the hospital on high-powered painkillers, did he speak of it—and then I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Looking for Lessig
Maryann Jorgenson has spent the past 11 months looking for her father’s true identity and the why behind the lies he told.
Jorgenson, a California native currently living in Penn Valley, California, has traced her roots to Seward but is still looking for answers.
After Seward Memorial Library Director Becky Baker found a photograph of Jorgenson’s father in an old Seward High School yearbook, Jorgenson wrote the Independent in hopes of finding someone with more information about her father.
Her story continues:
“I grew up being told my father was Swedish, born in Seattle and orphaned. My own retirement has given me the time, and Ancestry.com the tools, to research my genealogy and learn who those regrettably unknown grandparents were—the perfect project to pass family information on to my own family.
Honestly, my thinking was that I could quickly learn my father’s parents’ identities, make a family tree and move on to another project.
There had to be a record of his birth and his parents’ deaths. He died 25 years ago at age 82, having had a successful business career and being married with two children. He was a pilot who served and was injured in the military during World War II.
I started my Ancestry.com research using the information I had grown up with. I got nowhere using those ‘truths’ I had been told as a child.
After weeks of researching, I made the decision to do a DNA profile. The results came back, but mentally I continued to be stuck in the loop of ‘Swedish, Seattle, orphaned.’
Knowing the answer had to be staring me in the face, I just gave up on what I believed and looked at the evidence.
The names and places I had been ignoring came to life.
The questions constantly coming out were ‘who are these people?’ and ‘Where are Seward, Nebraska, and Minier, Illinois?’
My own life has been spent in California. I was born and raised and retired here.
I spent hours searching, being confused as I found stories that simply didn’t fit what I was told and thought to be true.
One day, it all came together. I had whittled it down to only one truth:
My father was not an orphan, wasn’t born in Seattle and wasn’t Swedish.
He had an extensive family and parents named Otto and Edna Eisenberger, and a sister, Bernice. He was born in Seward in 1911. His name was Lessig Eisenberger Brinkmeyer. His family was well-established in both Seward and Minier.
Ancestry.com allows you to contact people through the website, and I did just that. The people who appeared in my DNA profile as close cousins all got emails as I asked for more information.
The final removal of all doubt came when I was provided with a picture from the Seward High School yearbook from 1929 of a young Lessig.
Becky Baker at the Seward Memorial Library found the picture and sent it to me.
There, in that high school graduation pose, was my father.
But that wasn’t the end. Now I have even more questions and research to do.
Lessig simply disappeared off the face of the earth sometime around 1934. My father, who used the name Donald Jorgenson, first appears in 1937 with no evidence of his existence prior to that date.
Why did Lessig choose to disappear forever only to re-emerge with a new name, ethnicity, date and place of birth and family story? What happened?
I can find no evidence of any story relating to the truth of Lessig walking away. Why did he not share that story with his California family?
My only glimpse into his secret came years ago while he was in the hospital. He told me of having done something he regretted his whole life, something that affected the rest of someone else’s life.
His story was interrupted, and he never finished it. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what he was talking about.
Through all of this, I have found extended family members I never knew existed. Some have been wonderful in sharing their knowledge, pictures and time in answering my many questions, but the one question no one has been able to answer is ‘why?’
The family members who knew the answer have long since passed on.
I am looking for anyone who might have some knowledge, some hearsay, some ‘hand-me-down’ stories from their own family.
The names I have become familiar with through my research and the people I am related to are Eisenberger, Bluhm, Imig, Patch, Freitag, Hallstein and Zillig. The name Brinkmeyer was Lessig’s step-father.
Any tiny bit of information would be greatly appreciated.”
The search continues
Most recently, Jorgenson has come into contact with a first cousin, Ann Faerber, the daughter of Edward Brinkmeyer Jr., who was Lessig’s half-brother.
Faerber wrote that she grew up knowing about Lessig, even though she was born 24 years after he disappeared.
“Everyone in our family knew of Lessig; the memory of him was not hidden or forgotten. My impression of the emotions surrounding his memory was of sadness, mystery and resignation,” Faerber wrote.
Faerber shared a reflection from her 94-year-old mother, Lucille, that Lessig worked out west, maybe in Nevada, after high school.
On his last visit, a disagreement with his mother, followed by him returning a blanket to her in the mail, was the last his family heard from him.
Through an exchange of letters, Jorgensen and Faerber have explored theories of Lessig’s disappearance—a humiliating divorce of his parents or that he ‘died’ while serving in the military—and have drawn connections between their fathers’ careers and interests around aviation, what Jorgenson called “startling similarities.”
The research process consumed her thoughts for the first few months, and she became overwhelmed with questions.
“When it became apparent that Donald Keith Jorgenson didn’t really exist, then it became a challenge, then it became fun, then it became this mind game of finding out who he really was,” she said. “I became obsessed, like a junkie.”
She is planning a trip to Nebraska this summer and has traveled to meet some of the other people and visit places that have cropped up in her research.
Though she’s still hungry for answers, Jorgenson said she’s been fed by the excitement of it all.
“Since I was not horribly close to my father, it has not been an emotional sadness connected with this or a ‘how could he have done this,’” she said. “I’m excited to have met new family members who I never knew existed. I am so happy that this is a family I have found of just wonderful people. This has been exhilarating.”
Anyone with information is encouraged to contact Becky Baker, Seward Memorial Library director, who will pass information on to Jorgenson. Baker may be reached at (402) 643-3318 or info@sewardlibrary.org.
