I wrote this the night after the Paris terrorist attack and have been debating a post here ever since. I'm sharing because I AM French and I pray for us all.
France
I am a compulsive genealogist, and I have spent the last few nights entering data into my mother's side of the tree: the Hoffs, the Wolfs, the Bushus, who are French. Eva Hertling and Johannes Muller have donated their German ancestors to the cause, but for the time being, I've been focused on France. The process means seeing, again, that Salome died at 34, leaving seven children. That Anthony was felled by a tree and left his wife with 11 children to raise. That Jean died 25 days after marrying. It's hard to do this without seeing tears and pain in faces I never knew.
In the process I've been writing, laboriously, to my French relatives (and a genie friend) with questions. In answer, Michel has sent me some of the loveliest photos imaginable of Brittany (a slide show of chrysanthemums was breathtaking), and Etienne has graciously answered my demands about just how strong and accurate his sources are (very!).
Tonight, France is hurting. And I realize just how much my world has grown to embrace a land across the Atlantic. Intellectually, I have been educated to the nth degree to be culturally sensitive, to embrace the wider world, to empathize, to feel. But it's different tonight. I have relatives -- LOTS of them, I imagine -- in France, and given the propensity of restless young people to put their rural homes in their rearview mirrors, I imagine I have relatives in Paris. So suddenly an intellectual exercise has changed; I have skin in the game.
Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that the violence in Paris appalls me because of relatives I've never seen. I'm saying that this recent research process has made me think about France in ways I never have before. I've been researching agricultural processes, folk sayings, living arrangements, marriage rituals, the relationship between husband and wife, the dynamics of life and death in a small farming community. I spent a week reading and recording all the deaths in three tiny towns from 1810 to 1830; the families, whom I already knew because of marriage and baptism records, became real to me as I read about some killer years when three or four children might die within two weeks, of whole families wiped out, of priests and town officials dying, of death visiting house after house and leaving his mark. I am still haunted by what I learned.
Two hundred years ago, the villain was probably disease. Today, we have a new villain. There was a time I would have been saddened by what's happening to people in France. Tonight, it stalks me, perhaps because of the incomprehensibility of people hating enough to kill. But also because I just discovered this beautiful spider web of connections in France, and tonight explosions and gunfire sent tremors along those delicate threads, reminding me that in mourning for France, I mourn for myself. Je suis une Francaise.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Should you use Google Translate?
First, let me say that Google Translate has helped me enormously in my genie work. Because the Bushu and Wolf families were Catholics from Europe, I spend a lot of time with documents written in Latin, French, and German. I also spend a lot of time on German and French websites. I can get by in all three languages, though at a very, very, basic level.
I also correspond with five people in France and Germany. While I can use English with two of these people, that is not the case with the other three. One friend writes in French, and I answer in German, another writes in German, and I respond in kind. And the third, let's call him Jean, prefers that we use a translation program, so he composes in French and lets his program translate; I compose in English and turn the translation over to Google.
I tell you this to demonstrate that my use of Google is pretty complex. I cut and paste lengthy text from foreign websites into Translate. (I can manage short stuff, but it takes a while; long stuff is overwhelming.) I compose my long emails to Jean in Translate. But I compose the German emails, and the short French ones, "freehand," meaning I use the language as I know it, using a dictionary to look up words I don't know. It's a long, arduous process, but good for my brain. However, when I'm done writing, I submit it to Translate for comparison. Translate fixes my spelling and syntax, but sometimes changes my meaning. Sometimes a LOT. So I don't always accept what Translate tells me because sometimes Translate is wrong.
So based on my pretty complicated experience, I'd like to offer some suggestions to those thinking of trying out a translation program. I'm writing about Google Translate, which I understand is one of the best, but I imagine much of this applies to other programs as well.
If you're asking Translate to convert foreign language text for you, expect errors. Be patient, get creative in your thinking. If you're translating something written by a native speaker, assume they didn't intend to confuse you or insult you. Here's a good example of what I mean. Jean wrote and told me that he was giving me access to his online tree. He said I could either do "one copy to stick" or access the whole tree. I played around with that "one copy to stick" thing; did he mean copy to a USB drive? Nah. I finally found the French terms in his email (one good reason to know something of the language), entered the individual words (copier coller) in Translate and Voila! Copy-paste. "Coller" is paste as well as stick. Now it makes total sense. If you are totally perplexed, try using another translation program. My friend Jean uses Systran.
Now, if the translation is going the other way -- English to another language, my advice gets more detailed.
First, I would strongly caution you from using a translation program for anything sensitive or important if you don't know the language at all. I would NEVER try to correspond with someone in Russian, Japanese, or Dutch; I'd find someone to help me, even if I had to pay. I might use a program to say "Thank you," but that's it. There are too many ways things can go wrong; at the very least, you'll look like an idiot and at worst, start world war III. You don't need to know much; some vocabulary would help, as well as a little bit about how the language goes together. In general I'd say the more important the message is, the more you should have some acquaintance with the language.
If you're writing someone, be upfront that you're using a translation program. Your reader will assume you didn't mean to be insulting or confusing; she will blame the program, perhaps get a good laugh.
The less you know the language, the simpler your text chunks should be. Use simple sentences with simple punctuation, and translate one sentence at a time. You can put them in paragraphs when you paste into your email or whatever.
Avoid slang or specialized language. While current tech language (wifi, USB, Internet) often retains its general English spelling in Western European languages, lots of English jargon and idioms turn into gobbledegook at the other end. So for instance, I would not use the word "passing" to refer to death, or "tying the knot" for marriage. Try to read your prose with an eye out for stuff that doesn't make literal sense. (For example, I'd avoid "keep an eye out" and "stuff" in the previous sentence if I planned to have Google translate it.)
Proofread, proofread, proofread your English before you submit it. Translation programs are literal; non-words will be left untranslated, and the program won't catch your use of "piece" when you meant "peace." Don't forget to look for accidental spaces in words; that could make a mess of the translation. So triple-check everything for typos, spelling, correct pronouns (no accidental "our" when you mean "your"), and homonyms.
Finally, read through the translation for obvious errors. Yes, I know, you wouldn't be using the program if you could translate the text yourself. But a careful look will help you catch misspelled English that didn't get translated, odd characters where there shouldn't be any. In a recent instance, when I cut and pasted text from Google, I ended up with the same paragraph pasted multiple times. In another, I discovered a sentence had been cut off. In a third, an acronym (CDHF) was converted to another one entirely.
On the upside, I strongly encourage anyone with immigrant ancestors to dive into foreign research. And connect with people overseas. I have found that Europeans are gracious and helpful as long as I'm courteous and clear. My experience is they love knowing what happened to those ancestors who vanished. But if someone helps, offer help in return.
I doubt that I've covered all the bases here. I'll add as I experience yet more fun with translations. And if others have advice or experiences to share, please leave a comment.
À bientôt!
I also correspond with five people in France and Germany. While I can use English with two of these people, that is not the case with the other three. One friend writes in French, and I answer in German, another writes in German, and I respond in kind. And the third, let's call him Jean, prefers that we use a translation program, so he composes in French and lets his program translate; I compose in English and turn the translation over to Google.
I tell you this to demonstrate that my use of Google is pretty complex. I cut and paste lengthy text from foreign websites into Translate. (I can manage short stuff, but it takes a while; long stuff is overwhelming.) I compose my long emails to Jean in Translate. But I compose the German emails, and the short French ones, "freehand," meaning I use the language as I know it, using a dictionary to look up words I don't know. It's a long, arduous process, but good for my brain. However, when I'm done writing, I submit it to Translate for comparison. Translate fixes my spelling and syntax, but sometimes changes my meaning. Sometimes a LOT. So I don't always accept what Translate tells me because sometimes Translate is wrong.
So based on my pretty complicated experience, I'd like to offer some suggestions to those thinking of trying out a translation program. I'm writing about Google Translate, which I understand is one of the best, but I imagine much of this applies to other programs as well.
If you're asking Translate to convert foreign language text for you, expect errors. Be patient, get creative in your thinking. If you're translating something written by a native speaker, assume they didn't intend to confuse you or insult you. Here's a good example of what I mean. Jean wrote and told me that he was giving me access to his online tree. He said I could either do "one copy to stick" or access the whole tree. I played around with that "one copy to stick" thing; did he mean copy to a USB drive? Nah. I finally found the French terms in his email (one good reason to know something of the language), entered the individual words (copier coller) in Translate and Voila! Copy-paste. "Coller" is paste as well as stick. Now it makes total sense. If you are totally perplexed, try using another translation program. My friend Jean uses Systran.
Now, if the translation is going the other way -- English to another language, my advice gets more detailed.
First, I would strongly caution you from using a translation program for anything sensitive or important if you don't know the language at all. I would NEVER try to correspond with someone in Russian, Japanese, or Dutch; I'd find someone to help me, even if I had to pay. I might use a program to say "Thank you," but that's it. There are too many ways things can go wrong; at the very least, you'll look like an idiot and at worst, start world war III. You don't need to know much; some vocabulary would help, as well as a little bit about how the language goes together. In general I'd say the more important the message is, the more you should have some acquaintance with the language.
If you're writing someone, be upfront that you're using a translation program. Your reader will assume you didn't mean to be insulting or confusing; she will blame the program, perhaps get a good laugh.
The less you know the language, the simpler your text chunks should be. Use simple sentences with simple punctuation, and translate one sentence at a time. You can put them in paragraphs when you paste into your email or whatever.
Avoid slang or specialized language. While current tech language (wifi, USB, Internet) often retains its general English spelling in Western European languages, lots of English jargon and idioms turn into gobbledegook at the other end. So for instance, I would not use the word "passing" to refer to death, or "tying the knot" for marriage. Try to read your prose with an eye out for stuff that doesn't make literal sense. (For example, I'd avoid "keep an eye out" and "stuff" in the previous sentence if I planned to have Google translate it.)
Proofread, proofread, proofread your English before you submit it. Translation programs are literal; non-words will be left untranslated, and the program won't catch your use of "piece" when you meant "peace." Don't forget to look for accidental spaces in words; that could make a mess of the translation. So triple-check everything for typos, spelling, correct pronouns (no accidental "our" when you mean "your"), and homonyms.
Finally, read through the translation for obvious errors. Yes, I know, you wouldn't be using the program if you could translate the text yourself. But a careful look will help you catch misspelled English that didn't get translated, odd characters where there shouldn't be any. In a recent instance, when I cut and pasted text from Google, I ended up with the same paragraph pasted multiple times. In another, I discovered a sentence had been cut off. In a third, an acronym (CDHF) was converted to another one entirely.
On the upside, I strongly encourage anyone with immigrant ancestors to dive into foreign research. And connect with people overseas. I have found that Europeans are gracious and helpful as long as I'm courteous and clear. My experience is they love knowing what happened to those ancestors who vanished. But if someone helps, offer help in return.
I doubt that I've covered all the bases here. I'll add as I experience yet more fun with translations. And if others have advice or experiences to share, please leave a comment.
À bientôt!
Sunday, November 1, 2015
The romance of log cabin life
I had visitors this weekend: my genie buddy Susan and her husband came for the weekend, and on Saturday we visited the Lincoln museum in Springfield IL. It's my second trip there, and it is wonderful. If you haven't been, and Illinois isn't half a continent away, I highly recommend it.
I mention this because one of the exhibits is a replica of the log cabin that Lincoln grew up in. And it looks surprisingly like the house that Morand Bushu, Mary Ann Miller, and their 11 children lived in from about 1840 to 1870, in Somerset, Ohio.
I mention this because one of the exhibits is a replica of the log cabin that Lincoln grew up in. And it looks surprisingly like the house that Morand Bushu, Mary Ann Miller, and their 11 children lived in from about 1840 to 1870, in Somerset, Ohio.
Theirs was one room with a loft, a luxury I don't think Lincoln had, and I think it's pretty much like the dwellings that laborers in Mertzen and Strueth lived in. From what I've been reading, one large room, and maybe an attached "barn" was pretty standard in 19th century France.
The Lincoln exhibit puts the rigors of log cabin living front and center. At night the only light is from a fire and lamps burning precious oil, something I really appreciate now that night falls at 5:00. You also realize just how cramped living was: much of life must have been lived out of doors. There sure wasn't room for a child to set up a blanket fort, chase the dog, have a tantrum, or get sick without making it necessary for other functions to cease. And when I think to what extent I'm shielded from the heat, cold, humidity, bugs, vermin, and other vicissitudes of midwest life, my awe at my ancestors' fortitude balloons.
The Lincoln cabin interior contains young Abe reading by the firelight, a dog at his feet, and the remainder of the room taken up with two beds from which loud snores emanate. I assume that once Abe set aside his reading, he'd have climbed into one of the two already occupied beds. Upon rising, one bed would slide under the other and somehow the cooking, eating, and other daily indoor activities would have taken place in the scant space remaining.
As I type this on my wifi-connected iPad, with overhead lights and a sofa lamp illuminating the space, a lovely fire at my side, and my spouse out of sight and sound watching a football game on a 50" satellite-connected television, I feel preposterously over-indulged. My ancestors would have been agog. But would they be jealous, or appreciative? Would they disaprove of such hedonism, or elbow each other out of the way to take part? I think Morand might have been judgmental, perhaps his children as well. Or maybe not. Maybe they'd be thrilled that so much came from their labor. I hope they don't judge me too harshly, at least giving me credit for unearthing their stories for their descendents to share.
Death rides a pale horse: UPDATED
In 1827, Michel 1782 and Marie Anne Bourgeois packed up their children and their belongings - everything they would need to start a new life half a world away - and left Mertzen in the Haut Rhin for the US. At about the same time, in a small village four miles away, another family, the Hoffs, was getting ready to do the same thing. And just few years after that (1833), another Bourgeois family, Michel 1782's brother Morand 1785, packed up his wife, Anna, and eight of their nine children, to follow the exodus.
Records of emigration that early in the 19th century are sparse, but because Michel Bourgeois 1782 made a beeline for Somerset, Ohio, I have to assume someone else -- perhaps one of Michel's sons - had already scoped it out as the perfect place to start life over. But it could also be that someone else from the area had made their way to Ohio and wrote back, raving about good soil and cheap land. I haven't yet found an easy way to locate migrations from that particular area of the Haut Rhin for the 1820s, but what records I can locate indicate that people were moving.
Anthropologists talk about migrations' pushes and pulls, using those categories as ways of thinking about the motivation for movement among people. It's assumed that the more difficult it is to pick up and go, the stronger the pushes and pulls must have been. Migration always entailed taking with you anything and everything you could, whether it was tools of the trade, household belongings, precious possessions, or just the clothes on your back (think Irish during the famines). The Bourgeois were farmers or farm laborers, so in addition to household necessities (butter churns, milk pails, dishes, kettles, bedding, clothing), they may have tried to bring hand plows, metal-working tools, saws, axes, tools that they would need and tools to help make other tools. Taking all this down the Rhine to a port, loading it onto a ship, making the two-week (or longer) ocean journey, and then unloading and getting these things overland to Ohio sounds impossible to me. But that's what they did. All I can say is they must have really wanted to leave. So why?
The opportunities for farmers in Ohio were obviously a draw. Land was plentiful, fertile, and affordable. If there were friends or family already there to help with assimilation, so much the better. Somerset had a German-speaking community, a Catholic Church. Though Ohio at this time wasn't exactly tame, the native population was slowly being rendered powerless, and the predatory animals had been reduced in number. These factors would appeal. But given the labor involved in the move, there had to be pushes. What were they?
Lester Bushue argues reasonably that the limited land in Alsace would have been problematic for a man with four sons. After working the land for 100 years, passing land down to sons with each death (assuming they owned land, not an easy assumption), the land available for farming would been dramatically reduced in size. So Michel 1782 may have been concerned about his sons' ability to not only survive but be able to have families. And it's clear, regardless of what you read, that the tax burden on the poorest people was onerous, despite a revolution to change the way France did business.
Famine is also possible. Fr. Blaine Burkey relates that the good Burghers of Magden Switzerland paid Augustine Burkey to lead 34 people out of their starving town, across Europe, and to America. Is that the story of the Bourgeois and Hoff migration?
This is also a post-war era, and even though Alsace seems to have had an easier time than other parts of France, still there would have been issues. Villagers didn't always agree with Napolean, the monarchy, the position of the Church, or each other. Men had been conscripted into war and died in Napolean's retreat across Russia. Others had fled to dodge the draft. These men left behind women and children who would have struggled to survive. Men also migrated to the cities for work for long periods of time. While these deaths and disappearances may have opened up land, Anabaptist families fleeing oppression in Switzerland poured into Alsace in search of land. Men returned from war to discover that their land had been appropriated by migrants. Life wasn't fair, and it may have had periods of violence.
Rural France had had some crises as well, that may have made people uneasy about their fate. There had been a cholera epidemic, and the years without summer (when the volcano Mt. Tambora in Indonesia erupted and covered Europe in a dense pall) -- 1816 and 1817 -- had invited famine into their communities.
But counter these issues with the enormous cost of travel and buying land, of leaving behind a century of family and friends, of organizing for the trip. Of abandoning the devil you know for the one you don't.
I spent a good deal of time scouting for books and articles that might address life in the Haut Rhin in the early 19th century, hoping for insight. I learned a bit more about ordinary life, not necessarily in Alsace, but enough to paint a life of hard work and close living conditions. But this life was also one of close families and neighbors with a solid tradition of pulling together in times of need. So whatever drove them to leave must have been pretty big. I began to suspect disease.
I returned to my favorite set of records, those maintained online by the Haut Rhin archives. I examined the Mertzen, Strueth, and Fulleren death records starting with 1810, hoping to find clues in the numbers. I'm not sure anything I've done in genealogical research has saddened me as much as those records did.
The story in the records
Mertzen. Between 1810-1819, with the exceptions of 1811 and 1814, there were a total of 36 deaths, and these occurred at all times of the year; in general, the ages of the dead were spread from a few days old to 70. I did see more deaths of men and women in their 30s and 40s than I'd expect, but without knowing anything about life expectancy in 19th century France, the data seemed reasonable.
But what struck me the more I looked at the data were the outlier years of 1811 and 1814. In THOSE years, almost all the deaths (16 of the total of 20) were in the four winter months, late January to May. And in those two years, the majority of the dead were adults, both young and middle aged.
As I moved forward into later years, that nice pattern formed by the other years (ignoring 1811 and 1814) was replaced with a horror story that slowly began in 1820, peaked in 1826, and didn't really taper until 1827.
In 1820, all seven dead are female. In 1821, three of the five dead are under seven. Something was going on that made women and children more vulnerable.
The years 1822-23 appear to revert to normal, with the deaths spread among the ages, sexes, and time of year.
And then something happened in 1824: 6 people died, 3 of them children. In 1825, the death toll rose to 11, 6 of them under ten. And in 1826, starting at the end of January and lasting 4 months, the village of Mertzen buried 13 people, 11 of them children. Three families, families that were related through marriage to the Bourgeois (and Hoffs), lost 2 children each. Two babies died in 1827, two adults in 1828 and then we settle into the earlier pattern of 4-6 deaths, again representing the spectrum of possibilities. (In 1832, a man named Joseph Zwik died in December of cholera. Perhaps this event pushed Michel 1782's brother Morand to emigrate with his family to America.)
Strueth. Strueth is grimmer still. Keep in mind this is a larger community than Mertzen. But reading and recording the deaths year by year was incredibly sad.
In 1810, Strueth has 9 deaths; 2 are infantry men, reminding us that the Napoleanic wars were alive and well in this time frame.
In 1811, there are 18 deaths, and the situation mirrors that of Mertzen's. All but one death occur between Jan and May, and everyone is vulnerable but especially adults in their prime (15 of the 18 dead are adults in between 20 and 50). Something stalked these towns and targeted working men and women, people whose deaths would leave children in a precarious position.
As we saw in Mertzen, things seem to return to normal for 1812-1813 and then in 1814 we see 13 deaths, again among the adults. And, again, all but 3 of these deaths occur between February and June.
Between 1815 and 1823, the death rate fluctuates between 4 and 8 deaths a year, with most of the mortality striking the aging members of the community. One exception to this is what we see in 1822-1824, when more children than adults die: 4 of the 6 deaths in 1822, 3 of the 4 in 1823, and 3 of the 5 in 1824 are very young children. Are the children more vulnerable with so many adults having died? Have families taken in orphans and their resources are stretched?
And then we roll into 1825, and it's a nightmare. Thirteen of the 21 deaths (21!) are children and two-thirds of the deaths occur in the first half of the year. There are days when there are 2 or 3 deaths of children. The records become increasingly difficult to read as officials scrawl their reports.
The death rate drops in 1826 (9 deaths, 4 of which are children), but I imagine that at this point the community is staggering. Children lost both parents within a week or two, parents watched two and three of their children die, people lost spouses, two parish priests die. It must have been a nightmare.
Fulleren. Fulleren is larger than either Strueth or Mertzen, so its average number of deaths in any given year is about 10. And Fulleren's real nightmare is in 1814 when there are 43 deaths, more than 4 times the average. Half of these deaths occur in the first 4 months of the year and strike ruthlessly at old and young, male and female. It's a slaughter.
While 1814 is the worst year, 1825 and 1826 are also years when the death rate soars. In 1825, there are 17 deaths and 14 of these are between Jan and March. There were 20 deaths in 1826, three of them Hoff babies. Maurice Hoff and his wife Anne Marie Danzé lose two children that year. The number drops to 12 in 1827, but there are two stillborns, one of them belonging to beleaguered Maurice and Anne Marie. Life seems to return to normal by 1828; I'm willing to bet that by then the Hoff's were gone.
In all three towns, the years 1814 and 1825-26 seems to heartbreakers. These three towns are walking distance apart, with Strueth just down the road from Fulleren, on the west side of the Largue. Mertzen is just across the Largue from Strueth. These communities must have felt the world was ending.
Other than Joseph Zwik's death from cholera, and the two infantrymen who died of battle wounds, I have not found anything to indicate what 19th century scourge had visited them. My French genealogist friend Catherine Studer suggests typhus, cholera, dysentery, influenza, measles, as good candidates, as well starvation. Deaths during the truly horrible years occurred in Jan-April and strike the children. My naive guess is that there was an epidemic. I doubt we'll ever know what the disease(s) was, but its virulence was assisted by the particular living arrangements of the era.
Most people lived in small, one-room homes; occasionally their animals shared a space connected to the house to make caring for animals a little easier. Young marrieds (and their children) lived with parents until they were established well enough to start their own homes. There could easily be 8-10 people of all ages living, eating, sleeping, sneezing, coughing, puking in the same one room. The Largue was their water source; did human and animal waste drain into the stream? Who treated the ill, and what did they know?
These conditions would have made contagious diseases genuine scourges. We can add to the intimacy of the dwellings the close relationships among residents. Families were intricately connected through marriage and were quick to help one another in the event of need. Furthermore, the civil records reveal that continuous contact between households was the norm: when someone died, the death was reported by a witness and attested to by two more, always males. The very factor that made survival possible in an uncertain world would have accelerated the hazards of contagious disease.
Did the towns pull together, or did people avoid contact with their neighbors? Did they start hoarding resources, or did they reach out to those suffering? Did they blame the dead and stigmatize their families, or reach out in sympathy? Did they turn to the darker arts, seeking intervention from gods and devils, or did they pack St. Maurice and St. Andre, light thousands of votives, wear out their knees on the hard floors? And did they choose to stay, living in uncertainty, or scoop up their loved ones and set off to start again?
No matter which of the four horsemen decided to ride into those towns, he was a ruthless killer, especially in winter and especially of the young. I can't imagine that the carnage didn't take its toll on people's relationships with their families, the neighbors, their officials, and their God. I imagine, even after life returned to normal, that it was a long time before a cough was just cough, when bells tolled for holy days and not death, when a knock on the door wasn't death calling. In my opinion, the Bourgeois and Hoff families chose the devil they didn't know, and fled to America.
NOTE: I have posted the raw dataset of deaths in these three towns from 1810-1830 in my dropbox account. It's a spreadsheet and I'm happy to share. Just ask.
Records of emigration that early in the 19th century are sparse, but because Michel Bourgeois 1782 made a beeline for Somerset, Ohio, I have to assume someone else -- perhaps one of Michel's sons - had already scoped it out as the perfect place to start life over. But it could also be that someone else from the area had made their way to Ohio and wrote back, raving about good soil and cheap land. I haven't yet found an easy way to locate migrations from that particular area of the Haut Rhin for the 1820s, but what records I can locate indicate that people were moving.
Anthropologists talk about migrations' pushes and pulls, using those categories as ways of thinking about the motivation for movement among people. It's assumed that the more difficult it is to pick up and go, the stronger the pushes and pulls must have been. Migration always entailed taking with you anything and everything you could, whether it was tools of the trade, household belongings, precious possessions, or just the clothes on your back (think Irish during the famines). The Bourgeois were farmers or farm laborers, so in addition to household necessities (butter churns, milk pails, dishes, kettles, bedding, clothing), they may have tried to bring hand plows, metal-working tools, saws, axes, tools that they would need and tools to help make other tools. Taking all this down the Rhine to a port, loading it onto a ship, making the two-week (or longer) ocean journey, and then unloading and getting these things overland to Ohio sounds impossible to me. But that's what they did. All I can say is they must have really wanted to leave. So why?
The opportunities for farmers in Ohio were obviously a draw. Land was plentiful, fertile, and affordable. If there were friends or family already there to help with assimilation, so much the better. Somerset had a German-speaking community, a Catholic Church. Though Ohio at this time wasn't exactly tame, the native population was slowly being rendered powerless, and the predatory animals had been reduced in number. These factors would appeal. But given the labor involved in the move, there had to be pushes. What were they?
Lester Bushue argues reasonably that the limited land in Alsace would have been problematic for a man with four sons. After working the land for 100 years, passing land down to sons with each death (assuming they owned land, not an easy assumption), the land available for farming would been dramatically reduced in size. So Michel 1782 may have been concerned about his sons' ability to not only survive but be able to have families. And it's clear, regardless of what you read, that the tax burden on the poorest people was onerous, despite a revolution to change the way France did business.
Famine is also possible. Fr. Blaine Burkey relates that the good Burghers of Magden Switzerland paid Augustine Burkey to lead 34 people out of their starving town, across Europe, and to America. Is that the story of the Bourgeois and Hoff migration?
This is also a post-war era, and even though Alsace seems to have had an easier time than other parts of France, still there would have been issues. Villagers didn't always agree with Napolean, the monarchy, the position of the Church, or each other. Men had been conscripted into war and died in Napolean's retreat across Russia. Others had fled to dodge the draft. These men left behind women and children who would have struggled to survive. Men also migrated to the cities for work for long periods of time. While these deaths and disappearances may have opened up land, Anabaptist families fleeing oppression in Switzerland poured into Alsace in search of land. Men returned from war to discover that their land had been appropriated by migrants. Life wasn't fair, and it may have had periods of violence.
Rural France had had some crises as well, that may have made people uneasy about their fate. There had been a cholera epidemic, and the years without summer (when the volcano Mt. Tambora in Indonesia erupted and covered Europe in a dense pall) -- 1816 and 1817 -- had invited famine into their communities.
But counter these issues with the enormous cost of travel and buying land, of leaving behind a century of family and friends, of organizing for the trip. Of abandoning the devil you know for the one you don't.
I spent a good deal of time scouting for books and articles that might address life in the Haut Rhin in the early 19th century, hoping for insight. I learned a bit more about ordinary life, not necessarily in Alsace, but enough to paint a life of hard work and close living conditions. But this life was also one of close families and neighbors with a solid tradition of pulling together in times of need. So whatever drove them to leave must have been pretty big. I began to suspect disease.
I returned to my favorite set of records, those maintained online by the Haut Rhin archives. I examined the Mertzen, Strueth, and Fulleren death records starting with 1810, hoping to find clues in the numbers. I'm not sure anything I've done in genealogical research has saddened me as much as those records did.
The story in the records
Mertzen. Between 1810-1819, with the exceptions of 1811 and 1814, there were a total of 36 deaths, and these occurred at all times of the year; in general, the ages of the dead were spread from a few days old to 70. I did see more deaths of men and women in their 30s and 40s than I'd expect, but without knowing anything about life expectancy in 19th century France, the data seemed reasonable.
But what struck me the more I looked at the data were the outlier years of 1811 and 1814. In THOSE years, almost all the deaths (16 of the total of 20) were in the four winter months, late January to May. And in those two years, the majority of the dead were adults, both young and middle aged.
As I moved forward into later years, that nice pattern formed by the other years (ignoring 1811 and 1814) was replaced with a horror story that slowly began in 1820, peaked in 1826, and didn't really taper until 1827.
In 1820, all seven dead are female. In 1821, three of the five dead are under seven. Something was going on that made women and children more vulnerable.
The years 1822-23 appear to revert to normal, with the deaths spread among the ages, sexes, and time of year.
And then something happened in 1824: 6 people died, 3 of them children. In 1825, the death toll rose to 11, 6 of them under ten. And in 1826, starting at the end of January and lasting 4 months, the village of Mertzen buried 13 people, 11 of them children. Three families, families that were related through marriage to the Bourgeois (and Hoffs), lost 2 children each. Two babies died in 1827, two adults in 1828 and then we settle into the earlier pattern of 4-6 deaths, again representing the spectrum of possibilities. (In 1832, a man named Joseph Zwik died in December of cholera. Perhaps this event pushed Michel 1782's brother Morand to emigrate with his family to America.)
Strueth. Strueth is grimmer still. Keep in mind this is a larger community than Mertzen. But reading and recording the deaths year by year was incredibly sad.
In 1810, Strueth has 9 deaths; 2 are infantry men, reminding us that the Napoleanic wars were alive and well in this time frame.
In 1811, there are 18 deaths, and the situation mirrors that of Mertzen's. All but one death occur between Jan and May, and everyone is vulnerable but especially adults in their prime (15 of the 18 dead are adults in between 20 and 50). Something stalked these towns and targeted working men and women, people whose deaths would leave children in a precarious position.
As we saw in Mertzen, things seem to return to normal for 1812-1813 and then in 1814 we see 13 deaths, again among the adults. And, again, all but 3 of these deaths occur between February and June.
Between 1815 and 1823, the death rate fluctuates between 4 and 8 deaths a year, with most of the mortality striking the aging members of the community. One exception to this is what we see in 1822-1824, when more children than adults die: 4 of the 6 deaths in 1822, 3 of the 4 in 1823, and 3 of the 5 in 1824 are very young children. Are the children more vulnerable with so many adults having died? Have families taken in orphans and their resources are stretched?
And then we roll into 1825, and it's a nightmare. Thirteen of the 21 deaths (21!) are children and two-thirds of the deaths occur in the first half of the year. There are days when there are 2 or 3 deaths of children. The records become increasingly difficult to read as officials scrawl their reports.
The death rate drops in 1826 (9 deaths, 4 of which are children), but I imagine that at this point the community is staggering. Children lost both parents within a week or two, parents watched two and three of their children die, people lost spouses, two parish priests die. It must have been a nightmare.
Fulleren. Fulleren is larger than either Strueth or Mertzen, so its average number of deaths in any given year is about 10. And Fulleren's real nightmare is in 1814 when there are 43 deaths, more than 4 times the average. Half of these deaths occur in the first 4 months of the year and strike ruthlessly at old and young, male and female. It's a slaughter.
While 1814 is the worst year, 1825 and 1826 are also years when the death rate soars. In 1825, there are 17 deaths and 14 of these are between Jan and March. There were 20 deaths in 1826, three of them Hoff babies. Maurice Hoff and his wife Anne Marie Danzé lose two children that year. The number drops to 12 in 1827, but there are two stillborns, one of them belonging to beleaguered Maurice and Anne Marie. Life seems to return to normal by 1828; I'm willing to bet that by then the Hoff's were gone.
In all three towns, the years 1814 and 1825-26 seems to heartbreakers. These three towns are walking distance apart, with Strueth just down the road from Fulleren, on the west side of the Largue. Mertzen is just across the Largue from Strueth. These communities must have felt the world was ending.
Other than Joseph Zwik's death from cholera, and the two infantrymen who died of battle wounds, I have not found anything to indicate what 19th century scourge had visited them. My French genealogist friend Catherine Studer suggests typhus, cholera, dysentery, influenza, measles, as good candidates, as well starvation. Deaths during the truly horrible years occurred in Jan-April and strike the children. My naive guess is that there was an epidemic. I doubt we'll ever know what the disease(s) was, but its virulence was assisted by the particular living arrangements of the era.
Most people lived in small, one-room homes; occasionally their animals shared a space connected to the house to make caring for animals a little easier. Young marrieds (and their children) lived with parents until they were established well enough to start their own homes. There could easily be 8-10 people of all ages living, eating, sleeping, sneezing, coughing, puking in the same one room. The Largue was their water source; did human and animal waste drain into the stream? Who treated the ill, and what did they know?
These conditions would have made contagious diseases genuine scourges. We can add to the intimacy of the dwellings the close relationships among residents. Families were intricately connected through marriage and were quick to help one another in the event of need. Furthermore, the civil records reveal that continuous contact between households was the norm: when someone died, the death was reported by a witness and attested to by two more, always males. The very factor that made survival possible in an uncertain world would have accelerated the hazards of contagious disease.
Did the towns pull together, or did people avoid contact with their neighbors? Did they start hoarding resources, or did they reach out to those suffering? Did they blame the dead and stigmatize their families, or reach out in sympathy? Did they turn to the darker arts, seeking intervention from gods and devils, or did they pack St. Maurice and St. Andre, light thousands of votives, wear out their knees on the hard floors? And did they choose to stay, living in uncertainty, or scoop up their loved ones and set off to start again?
No matter which of the four horsemen decided to ride into those towns, he was a ruthless killer, especially in winter and especially of the young. I can't imagine that the carnage didn't take its toll on people's relationships with their families, the neighbors, their officials, and their God. I imagine, even after life returned to normal, that it was a long time before a cough was just cough, when bells tolled for holy days and not death, when a knock on the door wasn't death calling. In my opinion, the Bourgeois and Hoff families chose the devil they didn't know, and fled to America.
NOTE: I have posted the raw dataset of deaths in these three towns from 1810-1830 in my dropbox account. It's a spreadsheet and I'm happy to share. Just ask.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Bourgeois narrative now online.
Oct 21, 2015
I have written a lengthy essay, with photos, that details the Bourgeois story as I know it. It is stored in my dropbox account, and I will happily share it with anyone who asks.
There are three files:
“European Ancestors of the Bushu/Bushue/Bushur families” is the narrative with pictures. If you want the broad strokes, this is what you want to read.
“Jean Bourgeois Descendants” is the eight-generation list of Jean’s descendants, starting with Jean Bourgeois in Switzerland. This is a ten-page indented list of Jean’s children, grandchildren, etc. It lists not just our direct ancestors, but their siblings’ families as well. It’s dense.
“Record of Bourgeois BMD records” is a spreadsheet listing the details of my sources. If you want to see where my information came from, this is what you want.
If you want one or more of these files, leave a comment, with your email address, that you’d like the link.
IF YOU ARE A BUSHU: I’ve gone about as far as I can with the Bourgeois family. I’m turning my attention to the Hoff family whom I’ve found in a tiny town just north of Mertzen. I’ll be chasing those ancestors this winter. (Agatha Burkey is the daughter of Anne Marie Hoff who came to Ohio with her parents around 1827-1829).
I’m also trying to get toehold on the Muller family of Goppingen, Germany and the Hierholzers of Birndorf, GE. Johannes Muller is our great-great-great grandfather. His daughter, MariaAna Hierholzer, married Morand Bourgeois. One of their children was Frank Bushu, who married Agatha Burkey.
If any readers have information on any of these people, I hope you will share.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Agatha Burkey's parents: Hoff-Meyer ancestry
The origins of Anne Marie Meyer Hoff
October 17, 2015
For the sake of simplicity, I've used Marie and Anne throughout, even though the names are occasionally spelled as Anna and Maria.
This came together so fast I'm still reeling. Frustrated by my inability to confirm that MariaAna Müller was Mary Ann Miller, I started looking for Anne Marie Meyer Hoff whose daughter Anne Marie Hoff married Anton Burkey.* Googling random names the evening of Oct 4, I discovered the existence of The Berkey Book, which the Urbana library had, and I tootled off to the library the next morning to take a look at it. I didn't see any mention of our Burkeys, but Fr. Burkey* has said they are there; I probably skimmed too fast (as usual). But it made me curious.
When I got home, I logged on to one of my favorite international sites, CDHF.net, plugged in Hoff and Anne Marie Meyer (actually, I plugged in "Me*er" which netted me all versions of Meyer plus a few other names) and got a hit for an 1810 marriage in Fulleren, Alsace, France.* Obviously, this was just a random couple in a random community; but the Huff graves indicate they were from Alsace, this was Alsace, so I decided to pursue the name a bit.
So I went to the Haut Rhin archives (archives.haut-rhin.fr) and started looking for this couple's children in the digitized records of the Fulleren naissance. And hit gold: the names and birth years (that Fr. Burkey had) of eight children matched those in the US. There was no doubt in my mind (nor in Father's when I told him about my find) that I had located the elusive Hoff family. I chased on and was eventually able to piece together the following.
Jean Hoff married Anne Marie Meijer (or Meÿer) 10 Sept 1810 in Fulleren. (Fulleren was Villeren on the old maps, which brings the name closer to the one Fr. Burkey saw in an old German document.) The page numbers in parentheses indicate the page the document is on.
Anna Maria 27 Feb 1812 (143)
Catherine 23 Aug 1813 (152)
Jean (Baptiste) 1 May 1815 (165)
Marie Anne 22 Sept 1816 (172)
d. 19 Jan, 1817 (I think it's the 19th; hard to read. (p.104 of deces))
Marie Anne 6 Jan 1818 (182)
Antoine 13 Oct 1820 (197-198)
Madeleine 29 Apr 1823 (215)
Anne 13 July 1824 (221)
Francis Joseph 27 Sept 1826 (234)
(No babies in 1827-1830 and by mid 1830, the family is in Ohio. So I accessed the Columbus Diocese's historical society newsletter.)
Baptism transcriptions published in The Barquilla de la Santa Maria
July 4 [1830] Clara Hoof, daughter of John and Mary Hoof; spons. Elizabeth [Hierholzer] Roody. (Feb 1999, p 213)
Oct. 25 [1831] Teresa, daughter of John Hough and Mary Myers; spons. Morris Rodecker and Mary Perkey. [Burkey?](May 1999, p 238)
I have looked, several times , through all the French and Ohio records and cannot find Margaret, listed in Fr. Burkey's analysis of the family. I have a hunch that she was born around 1828, in Ohio, and I just haven't found her birth/baptism. Judging from these dates, I agree with Fr. Burkey that they came to the USA in 1826-1830. However, using multiple spellings, I can't find them in immigration or passenger records on FamilySearch or Ancestry.
Next, I began doing some background searches. I cleaned up and printed out Jean and Anne Marie's marriage record, identified their parents, and began my search.
According to the marriage record, Anne Marie Meÿer was married at 23 in 1810, so she was born about 1787; the marriage record named her parents as Joseph Meijer and Anne Marie Philipp. So I tracked down their marriage: Joseph and Anne Marie were married in Mertzen, 2 Feb 1785. Their daughter, Anne Marie, was born in Mertzen 18 Nov 1787.
Jean Hoff was 22 when he married, so he was born about 1788. The marriage document says his parents were Jean Hoff and Elisabethe Soldermann. Jean Hoff married Elisabethe Soldermann April 4, 1780. On 15 April, 1789, Jean Hooff was born to Jean Hof and Elisabethe Soldermann in Mertzen.
I ordered and received copies of the original birth and marriage documents which confirm the CDHF index.
I began looking for more information about Anna Marie Meyer and John Hoff. Neither FamilySearch nor Ancestry had anything of use. I also checked, again, with the Barq, to be sure I hadn't missed anything. And then I logged into geneanet.net, an international repository of old documents and lots of member-submitted family trees, and hit platinum. I found two family trees, with decent sources, that trace the ancestry of Jean Hoff, Elisabethe Solderman, Joseph Meÿer and Anne Marie Philipp. (I have very good reason, too convoluted to explain, to trust one of these trees. And because the second tree uses both independent sources and the first tree, I'm inclined to trust it as well.)
At this point, I was no longer able to get documents from the Haut Rhin archives, so I ended up using the CDHF index to its document holdings to confirm as much of the member-submitted trees as possible. I was able to confirm about 75%.
But every silver lining has a dark cloud, so here's the bad news. The Central Department for Family History (the English translation of CDHF, Centre Departmental L'Histoire des Familles) has closed, hopefully temporarily, so I am unable to get copies of the originals. However, the CDHF's index has never been wrong, so in those instances where I am confident I have the right people, I have data confirming the dates and places provided in the Geneanet trees. If the CDHF does reorganize and reopen, I'll order what documents I can afford. The information contained in those old records is invaluable: We get names and dates of all involved people and clues about occupations and literacy. If this was a second marriage, we learn who the first spouse was. Often they mention if parents were still alive and where they were from, and sometimes we learn that a godmother or witness was related and how. The mail I get from the CDHF informing me of their plans suggests they won't be permanently closed, but when I last requested documents, I was told my request could not be fulfilled. So we're in limbo.
I'll admit to a bit of a letdown; this was awfully easy. Other than the invisibility of Margaret, this has been a very straightforward process. I rather like the quests that have some crunch. At this point, I have John Hoff and Anne Marie Meyer Hoff's ancestry (and some collateral lines) back to the early 1600s. I'll post the full Meyer-Hoff tree on Geneanet.net in the next few days.
On the other hand, this freed me up to pursue some other questions. One, I am sure that the Hoffs and the Bourgeois knew one another. I have no idea if they traveled together, planned the emigration together, or if they were simply both impelled west by the same reasons. I'm not sure what sort of information would clarify their relationship. I haven't seen Bourgeois-Hoff baptisms but there are those Hierholzer links. And of course, Michael Bourgeois' grandson married John Hoff's granddaughter. That says something. So I'm curious about the emigration.
Second, we know that one of John's brothers, Jacques (Andrew Jacob in Fr. Burkey's materials) emigrated to the US with his wife, Marie Anne Etschman in 1833. I wonder if anyone else from the family came to the USA. I'm beginning to think that the Haut Rhin must have just emptied in the early 1800s. I would try to confirm the dates of Jacques' birth, but 1796 is a period when the French records are gibberish to me. First, they are using the Republican calendar, and second, the script is indecipherable. So I went for the marriage record and found it. Marie Anne Etschman is the 23-year-old daughter of Joseph Etschman and Anne Marie Geiger.
Third, what were the occupations? I shall have to look more closely, but at this point it appears the men for whom I have records were farmers and carpenters.
Finally, what was happening in Alsace that made leaving more attractive than staying? France has just gone through 25 years or so of war, first the revolution and then the Napoleanic Wars. But most histories that I've read rarely mention Alsace, an area closer to Germany/Prussia than to the central areas of France. Alsace got special treatment in at least one treaty so in some ways its population had it easier than the rest of France. On the other hand, there was famine in 1827; did the Hoffs and the Bourgeois foresee it and leave while they could? Did the communities in their tiny piece of France pay them to leave the way the burgers of Magden paid the Burkeys?
So although I'm now able to fill in boxes with names and dates, there are still questions that need answering. My work here is not done.
Fun Fact 1: When I was in Mertzen in April 2015, I saw Hoffs in the cemetery there. I found it interesting but had NO idea they were MY Hoffs. The birth records I perused last night include two other Hoffs in Mertzen having children at the same time as our Hoffs: Xavier and Jacques. These are Jean's siblings. Jacques emigrated as well to Ohio and became Andrew Jacob. I can't get his birth record so I don't know where the Andrew came from; it isn't included in the CDHF index.
Fun Fact 2: In October of 1829, Sebastien Hoff, son of Francois Joseph Hoff, and Marie Ursule Bourgeois, daughter of Xavier Bourgeois, have a baby boy they name Morand. They were married November 21, 1825. These folks are closely related to our Bourgeois family.
*Fr. Blaine Burkey, O.F.M. Cap., did the original research on the Burkey ancestry and descendants. His carefully documented work meant that I didn't have to start my search with Agatha Burkey and work backwards. We maintain contact; his guidance has been invaluable.
*This was a logical step for me because one of the things that has led me to believe that MariaAna Müller and Mary Ann Miller were the same person was the Hierholzer connection to John Hoff. I suspected that John, who was godfather to several of Elizabeth Hierholzer Rudy's children, was related to Anne Marie Hoff Burkey, mother of Agatha Burkey who married Francis Joseph Bushu, son of Morand Bourgeois and Mary Ann Miller. Because Frank grew up SW of Somerset and attended Holy Trinity and St. Joseph churches, while Agatha grew up in Zanesville attending St. Nicholas church, I wondered how in the world they met, Got all that? So I wanted to confirm a relationship, if there was one, thinking they could have met through the Rudys. And there is one; Elizabeth Hierholzer Rudy was godmother to Anna Marie's last child, Teresa. Anne Marie did have a younger brother John; I don't know that he was the godfather John Hoff, but it seems probable.
*Almost all the events that I found indexed at CDHF place those events in Mertzen. The documents I have say the Hoffs and their relatives came from Fulleren, Mertzen, Altkirch, Friesen, and Largitzen. However, tiny Mertzen, population today about 350, was the location for the officials of the area. My guess is that the documents referred to were filed there.
BONUS: Just because I don't think we should ever lose sight of what our ancestors did, I suggest you ruminate upon the following. Jean and Anna Marie traveled from their tiny community where they knew everyone WITH THEIR 8 CHILDREN (the oldest was at most 17) AND ALL THEIR WORLDLY POSSESSIONS, down the Rhine River to Amsterdam or Rotterdam, boarded a ship, sailed for two weeks across the Atlantic, then found passage from wherever they landed to Zanesville, Ohio, where they planted new roots. Dancing backwards in heels suddenly doesn't sound very impressive, does it?
October 17, 2015
For the sake of simplicity, I've used Marie and Anne throughout, even though the names are occasionally spelled as Anna and Maria.
This came together so fast I'm still reeling. Frustrated by my inability to confirm that MariaAna Müller was Mary Ann Miller, I started looking for Anne Marie Meyer Hoff whose daughter Anne Marie Hoff married Anton Burkey.* Googling random names the evening of Oct 4, I discovered the existence of The Berkey Book, which the Urbana library had, and I tootled off to the library the next morning to take a look at it. I didn't see any mention of our Burkeys, but Fr. Burkey* has said they are there; I probably skimmed too fast (as usual). But it made me curious.
When I got home, I logged on to one of my favorite international sites, CDHF.net, plugged in Hoff and Anne Marie Meyer (actually, I plugged in "Me*er" which netted me all versions of Meyer plus a few other names) and got a hit for an 1810 marriage in Fulleren, Alsace, France.* Obviously, this was just a random couple in a random community; but the Huff graves indicate they were from Alsace, this was Alsace, so I decided to pursue the name a bit.
So I went to the Haut Rhin archives (archives.haut-rhin.fr) and started looking for this couple's children in the digitized records of the Fulleren naissance. And hit gold: the names and birth years (that Fr. Burkey had) of eight children matched those in the US. There was no doubt in my mind (nor in Father's when I told him about my find) that I had located the elusive Hoff family. I chased on and was eventually able to piece together the following.
Jean Hoff married Anne Marie Meijer (or Meÿer) 10 Sept 1810 in Fulleren. (Fulleren was Villeren on the old maps, which brings the name closer to the one Fr. Burkey saw in an old German document.) The page numbers in parentheses indicate the page the document is on.
Anna Maria 27 Feb 1812 (143)
Catherine 23 Aug 1813 (152)
Jean (Baptiste) 1 May 1815 (165)
Marie Anne 22 Sept 1816 (172)
d. 19 Jan, 1817 (I think it's the 19th; hard to read. (p.104 of deces))
Marie Anne 6 Jan 1818 (182)
Antoine 13 Oct 1820 (197-198)
Madeleine 29 Apr 1823 (215)
Anne 13 July 1824 (221)
Francis Joseph 27 Sept 1826 (234)
(No babies in 1827-1830 and by mid 1830, the family is in Ohio. So I accessed the Columbus Diocese's historical society newsletter.)
Baptism transcriptions published in The Barquilla de la Santa Maria
July 4 [1830] Clara Hoof, daughter of John and Mary Hoof; spons. Elizabeth [Hierholzer] Roody. (Feb 1999, p 213)
Oct. 25 [1831] Teresa, daughter of John Hough and Mary Myers; spons. Morris Rodecker and Mary Perkey. [Burkey?](May 1999, p 238)
I have looked, several times , through all the French and Ohio records and cannot find Margaret, listed in Fr. Burkey's analysis of the family. I have a hunch that she was born around 1828, in Ohio, and I just haven't found her birth/baptism. Judging from these dates, I agree with Fr. Burkey that they came to the USA in 1826-1830. However, using multiple spellings, I can't find them in immigration or passenger records on FamilySearch or Ancestry.
Next, I began doing some background searches. I cleaned up and printed out Jean and Anne Marie's marriage record, identified their parents, and began my search.
According to the marriage record, Anne Marie Meÿer was married at 23 in 1810, so she was born about 1787; the marriage record named her parents as Joseph Meijer and Anne Marie Philipp. So I tracked down their marriage: Joseph and Anne Marie were married in Mertzen, 2 Feb 1785. Their daughter, Anne Marie, was born in Mertzen 18 Nov 1787.
Jean Hoff was 22 when he married, so he was born about 1788. The marriage document says his parents were Jean Hoff and Elisabethe Soldermann. Jean Hoff married Elisabethe Soldermann April 4, 1780. On 15 April, 1789, Jean Hooff was born to Jean Hof and Elisabethe Soldermann in Mertzen.
I ordered and received copies of the original birth and marriage documents which confirm the CDHF index.
I began looking for more information about Anna Marie Meyer and John Hoff. Neither FamilySearch nor Ancestry had anything of use. I also checked, again, with the Barq, to be sure I hadn't missed anything. And then I logged into geneanet.net, an international repository of old documents and lots of member-submitted family trees, and hit platinum. I found two family trees, with decent sources, that trace the ancestry of Jean Hoff, Elisabethe Solderman, Joseph Meÿer and Anne Marie Philipp. (I have very good reason, too convoluted to explain, to trust one of these trees. And because the second tree uses both independent sources and the first tree, I'm inclined to trust it as well.)
At this point, I was no longer able to get documents from the Haut Rhin archives, so I ended up using the CDHF index to its document holdings to confirm as much of the member-submitted trees as possible. I was able to confirm about 75%.
But every silver lining has a dark cloud, so here's the bad news. The Central Department for Family History (the English translation of CDHF, Centre Departmental L'Histoire des Familles) has closed, hopefully temporarily, so I am unable to get copies of the originals. However, the CDHF's index has never been wrong, so in those instances where I am confident I have the right people, I have data confirming the dates and places provided in the Geneanet trees. If the CDHF does reorganize and reopen, I'll order what documents I can afford. The information contained in those old records is invaluable: We get names and dates of all involved people and clues about occupations and literacy. If this was a second marriage, we learn who the first spouse was. Often they mention if parents were still alive and where they were from, and sometimes we learn that a godmother or witness was related and how. The mail I get from the CDHF informing me of their plans suggests they won't be permanently closed, but when I last requested documents, I was told my request could not be fulfilled. So we're in limbo.
I'll admit to a bit of a letdown; this was awfully easy. Other than the invisibility of Margaret, this has been a very straightforward process. I rather like the quests that have some crunch. At this point, I have John Hoff and Anne Marie Meyer Hoff's ancestry (and some collateral lines) back to the early 1600s. I'll post the full Meyer-Hoff tree on Geneanet.net in the next few days.
On the other hand, this freed me up to pursue some other questions. One, I am sure that the Hoffs and the Bourgeois knew one another. I have no idea if they traveled together, planned the emigration together, or if they were simply both impelled west by the same reasons. I'm not sure what sort of information would clarify their relationship. I haven't seen Bourgeois-Hoff baptisms but there are those Hierholzer links. And of course, Michael Bourgeois' grandson married John Hoff's granddaughter. That says something. So I'm curious about the emigration.
Second, we know that one of John's brothers, Jacques (Andrew Jacob in Fr. Burkey's materials) emigrated to the US with his wife, Marie Anne Etschman in 1833. I wonder if anyone else from the family came to the USA. I'm beginning to think that the Haut Rhin must have just emptied in the early 1800s. I would try to confirm the dates of Jacques' birth, but 1796 is a period when the French records are gibberish to me. First, they are using the Republican calendar, and second, the script is indecipherable. So I went for the marriage record and found it. Marie Anne Etschman is the 23-year-old daughter of Joseph Etschman and Anne Marie Geiger.
Third, what were the occupations? I shall have to look more closely, but at this point it appears the men for whom I have records were farmers and carpenters.
Finally, what was happening in Alsace that made leaving more attractive than staying? France has just gone through 25 years or so of war, first the revolution and then the Napoleanic Wars. But most histories that I've read rarely mention Alsace, an area closer to Germany/Prussia than to the central areas of France. Alsace got special treatment in at least one treaty so in some ways its population had it easier than the rest of France. On the other hand, there was famine in 1827; did the Hoffs and the Bourgeois foresee it and leave while they could? Did the communities in their tiny piece of France pay them to leave the way the burgers of Magden paid the Burkeys?
So although I'm now able to fill in boxes with names and dates, there are still questions that need answering. My work here is not done.
Fun Fact 1: When I was in Mertzen in April 2015, I saw Hoffs in the cemetery there. I found it interesting but had NO idea they were MY Hoffs. The birth records I perused last night include two other Hoffs in Mertzen having children at the same time as our Hoffs: Xavier and Jacques. These are Jean's siblings. Jacques emigrated as well to Ohio and became Andrew Jacob. I can't get his birth record so I don't know where the Andrew came from; it isn't included in the CDHF index.
Fun Fact 2: In October of 1829, Sebastien Hoff, son of Francois Joseph Hoff, and Marie Ursule Bourgeois, daughter of Xavier Bourgeois, have a baby boy they name Morand. They were married November 21, 1825. These folks are closely related to our Bourgeois family.
*Fr. Blaine Burkey, O.F.M. Cap., did the original research on the Burkey ancestry and descendants. His carefully documented work meant that I didn't have to start my search with Agatha Burkey and work backwards. We maintain contact; his guidance has been invaluable.
*This was a logical step for me because one of the things that has led me to believe that MariaAna Müller and Mary Ann Miller were the same person was the Hierholzer connection to John Hoff. I suspected that John, who was godfather to several of Elizabeth Hierholzer Rudy's children, was related to Anne Marie Hoff Burkey, mother of Agatha Burkey who married Francis Joseph Bushu, son of Morand Bourgeois and Mary Ann Miller. Because Frank grew up SW of Somerset and attended Holy Trinity and St. Joseph churches, while Agatha grew up in Zanesville attending St. Nicholas church, I wondered how in the world they met, Got all that? So I wanted to confirm a relationship, if there was one, thinking they could have met through the Rudys. And there is one; Elizabeth Hierholzer Rudy was godmother to Anna Marie's last child, Teresa. Anne Marie did have a younger brother John; I don't know that he was the godfather John Hoff, but it seems probable.
*Almost all the events that I found indexed at CDHF place those events in Mertzen. The documents I have say the Hoffs and their relatives came from Fulleren, Mertzen, Altkirch, Friesen, and Largitzen. However, tiny Mertzen, population today about 350, was the location for the officials of the area. My guess is that the documents referred to were filed there.
BONUS: Just because I don't think we should ever lose sight of what our ancestors did, I suggest you ruminate upon the following. Jean and Anna Marie traveled from their tiny community where they knew everyone WITH THEIR 8 CHILDREN (the oldest was at most 17) AND ALL THEIR WORLDLY POSSESSIONS, down the Rhine River to Amsterdam or Rotterdam, boarded a ship, sailed for two weeks across the Atlantic, then found passage from wherever they landed to Zanesville, Ohio, where they planted new roots. Dancing backwards in heels suddenly doesn't sound very impressive, does it?
Thursday, October 8, 2015
The Miller's Tale: Is MariaAna Müller Mary Ann Miller? UPDATED
The Millers’ Tale
No, this isn’t an ancient essay I’ve resurrected from a long ago literature class. It’s the tapestry I’ve created about the Rivers’ great-great grandmother. Some of it is my imagination at work; it should be clear when I’m speculating about how things might have been. But the framework is based on documents whose accuracy is not questioned.
In telling this story I have two goals. One is pay homage to our ancestors. The other is to successfully argue, using evidence, that the woman who married Morand Bushu was in fact Maria Ana Müller, daughter of a German immigrant and his wife. I do have one huge caveat for the reader: while the odds against Maria Ana Müller being Mary Ann Miller Bushu are incredibly small, they are not zero. I do not have a document that unequivocally names Mary Ann’s parents.
The principle actors in this drama were identified in an 1822 will written by a 25-year-old man who was dying. He was widowed and had an infant daughter for whom the will made provisions. In his will he named his parents, his guardian, his in-laws, and his daughter. The dying man was Johannes Müller; the infant was Maria Ana. This will gave me my first break in the search for Mary Ann Miller. Here is the story, as best as I can determine.
Let me preface this narrative with two small tales. The first is mine. At some point while I was still living at home, mother told me that one of her ancestors was the daughter of a duke/count/nobleman in Europe (I think she said Germany but my memory of this is very fuzzy), that she had fallen in love with the chauffeur and run off with him. Her father cut her out of her will.
The second tale is reported in a brief biographical piece on James Bushu, Herbert Bushu’s uncle. James reported that his mother (Mary Ann Miller Bushu) was the orphan granddaughter of a German count and that she had been swindled out of her inheritance.
The two tales, if you ignore the absurdity of the chauffeur in the 1800s, seem to share an underlying theme: someone was born into wealth but didn't inherit it.
Our story starts in Göppingen, Wurttemberg, Germany on January 9, 1797 when a baby boy is born to Johan Leonhard Müller and Eva Maria Ott. The baby is named Johannes (spelled Johanes in the will), and because he is raised by a court administrator named Ludwig Schafer, I assume that his parents died when he was young. There is evidence that suggests the family was wealthy, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful finding them. Johannes emigrated to America in March of 1817, with the permission of Herr Schafer. UPDATE: I have found German records for both Johan Leonhard and Eva Maria Ott, confirming the birth of their child and their early deaths. Their story will be another essay.
We don’t know why he left, especially since he enjoyed some wealth in Göppingen, but a look at the history of the area gives clues. Johannes was born during the Napoleanic Wars, which caused upheavals throughout the region. At the time of the French Revolution (1789), Württemberg was a duchy in the Holy Roman Empire; when Württemberg threw in with Napoleon in 1806, it became a kingdom. It also saw its population reduced by over 15,000 men who were sent to fight with the French in Prussia and Russia. In 1813, Frederick II, king of Württemberg, abandoned Napoleon and joined the German Confederation. I can't imagine this was met with sanguinity by many people. Militarily and politically, this would have been a volatile region; leaving may have been more like escape.
It's also worth noting that 1816-1817 were the years without summer. Mt. Tambora blew in 1815 and the consequence for agriculture was dramatic. Famine was wide-spread. In Switzerland, families were paid to leave, reducing the strain on the towns for feeding the starving. I know that in the Haut Rhin, deaths sky-rocketed, which may have driven people to emigrate.
Meanwhile a little girl named Anna was baptized on May 18, 1799 in Birndorf, Waldshut, Germany, a small town about 120 miles southwest of Göppingen, also part of the kingdom of Württemberg. She was the first child born to Joseph Herholzer and Helena Reinhardt Herholzer. She was followed by Elisabeth in 1801, Magdalena in 1806, Johannes Baptista in 1808, Marie Ursule in 1812 and an infant who died at birth in 1815. Sometime between the death of the last child and 1819, perhaps responding to the pressures of war and famine, Helena and Joseph packed up the family and left for America.
It doesn’t appear that Joseph was a man of means; in 1819 he bought 15 acres of land (contrast this with Michael Bourgeois’ land purchase a month after arrival of 80 acres). In 1828 his 15 acres and the house were worth $83. Even by 1820 standards, he was not a wealthy man.
And now it gets messy. We know that on August 22, 1820, Johannes Müller and Anna Herholzer got married (they Americanized their names for their wedding: They were John Miller and Ann Harhalsey). We know that in September of 1822, when Johannes wrote his last will, he was a widower with an infant daughter, Maria Ana. And we know that in the 1820 census, Jacob Hesholser had in his household one female under 10, one female 10-15, one male 10-16 and two adults, Joseph and his wife. (I don’t know for sure that Jacob Hesholser is Joseph. However, no Jacob ever appears in later censuses, and we KNOW Joseph is in Perry County in 1819 because he buys land then. In the absence of anyone else, it looks like Jacob and Joseph are the same man.) One person in the family is a naturalized citizen which means someone was born in the United States. Huh!
We also know that Anna was married in August of 1820, and that Elisabeth Herholzer married her first husband, John Downhour in 1821 (exact date unknown). Finally, we can’t find Marie Ursule at any point after her birth; I think she probably died, perhaps before leaving Germany (I doubt this; I think it would have appeared in the German church records. But I don’t know for sure.) Assuming this is Joseph Herholzer, how are we to read this census?
The 1820 census had multiple problems, starting with a delay in completing the enumeration until September 1821. Enumerator training varied widely in thoroughness and accuracy. And we know that Joseph and his family were recent immigrants who spoke German. It would have been good if the enumerator could speak German, but the Irish were also a huge ethnic group in the area, and it would take serious organization skills to ensure that the enumerator and respondent languages matched. To complicate this more, many of the area's German speakers were from Alsace, where the language was Alsatian, a dialect of German. I think understanding all the new settlers was pretty challenging. And Perry County was newly settled with limited amenities. The enumerator's job could not have been easy under any circumstance, but under these? Oy!
Perhaps when the census-taker appeared at the Herholzer household, he didn’t arrive until well into 1821. He got the name wrong. The respondent didn’t understand, or wasn’t told, that he should be counting people in the household as of Aug 7, 1820. So the record shows the people who were in the household when the enumerator showed up. John Baptiste and Magdalena were unmarried; they would have been there. Elizabeth has married and is gone. Marie Ursule is dead. And Anna? She is married, probably dead as well, and her infant daughter is the "under ten" female in the house. Maria Ana was born in the US; she's the naturalized citizen.
I don’t like having to manipulate the data this much, so I’m not happy with this explanation, though I must admit it is both plausible and reasonably parsimonious. I am saved by the fact that in the larger scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. We don’t need the census to confirm the people, their children, or the locale; we have an extensive trail of official papers to tell us that. The census won’t get me the information I badly need: Maria Ana’s birth, Anna’s death, Marie Ursule’s fate, Johannes’ death, and clear data that tell me who the parents of Mary Ann Miller Bushu were.
Back to our story.
Joseph’s fifteen acres were on the edge of Somerset. According to the 1820 census, he worked in agriculture. I don’t know if this means he actually farmed or if he worked in a supportive role. Part of his household in 1820 were five 14-21 free males of color. Who they were and why they were there is a mystery to me. However, every household in Reading township in 1820 had at least two young men of color.
Johannes Muller, with or without Anna, is invisible in the 1820 census. We know he was THERE; he got married, had a baby, lost his wife, wrote his will, and died. But I don’t know if he was in a rooming house, living with a relative, in his own place (though I should be able to find tax records or a property deed; he doesn’t mention any local property in his will so I’m guessing he’s living with some family. But it doesn’t appear to be the Herholzers.)
In his will, Johannes placed Maria Ana in the care of his in-laws, Joseph Hierholzer and Helena Reinhardt Hierholzer. Maria Ana was to have all his property in Europe, property that he did not own but had a right to for his lifetime. I’m not sure just how property that he had a right to in his lifetime could be conveyed to his daughter, and this could explain how she was “swindled” out of her inheritance.
It appears that the terms of his will were met. In 1830 there was a 5-10 year old male living with the Herholzers. Since there was no child of theirs or of their married daughters who would meet this description, my presumption is this was Maria Ana. In the next seven years, as Elizabeth Herholzer Rudy and John Baptiste Herholzer had children, Mary Ann Miller appeared as godmother in the children’s baptisms. In the last one, that of Eleanor, daughter of John Baptiste Herholzer and Hester Snook, Mary Ann Miller’s co-sponsor was “Morant Burschuas.” Six months after the baptism of John and Hester’s child, on Feb. 28, 1838, a woman named Mary Ann Miller and Morand Bushu marry. I'm convinced this was Johannes Müller's baby girl.
In 1843, after having two sons, Mary Ann and Morand finally had a daughter. She was Emily in the baptismal record, but the date and the names of the parents tell us this was undeniably Ellen. Ellen’s godmother was Helen Reinhardt Herholzer. In many old naming traditions, babies are named for the baby’s grandparent. It is fitting that Mary Ann’s first daughter was named for the woman who was her “mom," if, in fact, Mary Ann is MariaAna.
One other small hint: When Morand's daughter Cecilia takes her vows as a Sister of Providence the name she chooses is . . . Helena.
What I love about this series of baptisms is the powerful sense of a close family. All three of the Herholzer children, as well as Joseph and Helena, served as godparents to one another’s children. And this closeness extends beyond family. I have read almost all the baptisms performed in St. Joseph and Holy Trinity churches; Elizabeth and her parents appear over and over again in the lives of their neighbors. Magdalena, who married Samuel Dean and became Mary, appears less frequently and then disappears entirely. I think they move away. But Elizabeth and her second husband Rudolph Rudy stay put, along with John Baptiste and Hester, having children and celebrating the milestones of their lives.
Shortly after Mary Ann and Morand were married, Joseph Herholzer died (1839). In his will and a codicil, both written before Mary Ann married, he mentions his beloved granddaughter Marie Anna, daughter of his beloved daughter Anna. In his will he leaves Mary Ann a half share of his estate. In his codicil, he says that that inheritance has been fulfilled. He did not provide any specifics so we are left wondering if he removed her from his will because he was unhappy with her (thus explaining James’ contention that she was “swindled). Or perhaps he settled some money on her in anticipation of her marriage. I doubt we’ll ever know.
John Baptiste Herholzer died in 1845 (I assume his wife Hester predeceased him) and his five children were scattered among relatives; two of them were living with Helena in the 1850 census. At seventy something, she was still raising her grandchildren.
In the 1860 census, Helena Herholzer was living with Michael Bushu who was Morand’s first cousin. I’m not sure why Helena was not with her granddaughter, but we can ask the same question about why she wasn’t with her daughters. Perhaps Michael had more room (there were 11 people living in Morand’s very small log cabin), or lived near people she was close to or lived near the church. Perhaps she changed homes every six months and happened to be with Michael when the enumerator appeared. Regardless, all the evidence strongly suggest the Herholzers and the Bushus were close.
In September 1865 shortly after the birth of her eighth daughter and eleventh child, and the marriage of her first daughter, Ellen (to Samuel Mattingly), Mary Ann Miller Bushu died. She was 44. She lost her mother and father in infancy, married at 17, lost her grandfather (who helped raised her) at 18, bore eleven children in 27 years while living in one of the smallest houses you can imagine. As a farm wife, her responsibilities, shared with her children I’m sure, were enormous: the family’s food, clothes, and health depended upon her. Her days would have been long and hard, tending the fires, gardens, milk cows, chickens; sewing, fixing wounds, emptying slop jars, canning, pickling, and otherwise preserving food for the winter, cooking, cleaning, wiping noses and butts. And she did this while either pregnant or nursing. I know these early pioneer families drew strength and solidarity, as well as good times, from the church and community. I hope that was true for Mary Ann.
Everything in this document is supported with strong, unquestionable evidence, everything, that is, except the names of Mary Ann Miller Bushu’s parents. It is my belief that the material presented here showing repeated family connections over a long period of time is powerful argument that her Mom and Dad were Johannes Müller and Anna Herholzer. I hope my readers agree.
No, this isn’t an ancient essay I’ve resurrected from a long ago literature class. It’s the tapestry I’ve created about the Rivers’ great-great grandmother. Some of it is my imagination at work; it should be clear when I’m speculating about how things might have been. But the framework is based on documents whose accuracy is not questioned.
In telling this story I have two goals. One is pay homage to our ancestors. The other is to successfully argue, using evidence, that the woman who married Morand Bushu was in fact Maria Ana Müller, daughter of a German immigrant and his wife. I do have one huge caveat for the reader: while the odds against Maria Ana Müller being Mary Ann Miller Bushu are incredibly small, they are not zero. I do not have a document that unequivocally names Mary Ann’s parents.
The principle actors in this drama were identified in an 1822 will written by a 25-year-old man who was dying. He was widowed and had an infant daughter for whom the will made provisions. In his will he named his parents, his guardian, his in-laws, and his daughter. The dying man was Johannes Müller; the infant was Maria Ana. This will gave me my first break in the search for Mary Ann Miller. Here is the story, as best as I can determine.
Let me preface this narrative with two small tales. The first is mine. At some point while I was still living at home, mother told me that one of her ancestors was the daughter of a duke/count/nobleman in Europe (I think she said Germany but my memory of this is very fuzzy), that she had fallen in love with the chauffeur and run off with him. Her father cut her out of her will.
The second tale is reported in a brief biographical piece on James Bushu, Herbert Bushu’s uncle. James reported that his mother (Mary Ann Miller Bushu) was the orphan granddaughter of a German count and that she had been swindled out of her inheritance.
The two tales, if you ignore the absurdity of the chauffeur in the 1800s, seem to share an underlying theme: someone was born into wealth but didn't inherit it.
Our story starts in Göppingen, Wurttemberg, Germany on January 9, 1797 when a baby boy is born to Johan Leonhard Müller and Eva Maria Ott. The baby is named Johannes (spelled Johanes in the will), and because he is raised by a court administrator named Ludwig Schafer, I assume that his parents died when he was young. There is evidence that suggests the family was wealthy, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful finding them. Johannes emigrated to America in March of 1817, with the permission of Herr Schafer. UPDATE: I have found German records for both Johan Leonhard and Eva Maria Ott, confirming the birth of their child and their early deaths. Their story will be another essay.
We don’t know why he left, especially since he enjoyed some wealth in Göppingen, but a look at the history of the area gives clues. Johannes was born during the Napoleanic Wars, which caused upheavals throughout the region. At the time of the French Revolution (1789), Württemberg was a duchy in the Holy Roman Empire; when Württemberg threw in with Napoleon in 1806, it became a kingdom. It also saw its population reduced by over 15,000 men who were sent to fight with the French in Prussia and Russia. In 1813, Frederick II, king of Württemberg, abandoned Napoleon and joined the German Confederation. I can't imagine this was met with sanguinity by many people. Militarily and politically, this would have been a volatile region; leaving may have been more like escape.
It's also worth noting that 1816-1817 were the years without summer. Mt. Tambora blew in 1815 and the consequence for agriculture was dramatic. Famine was wide-spread. In Switzerland, families were paid to leave, reducing the strain on the towns for feeding the starving. I know that in the Haut Rhin, deaths sky-rocketed, which may have driven people to emigrate.
Meanwhile a little girl named Anna was baptized on May 18, 1799 in Birndorf, Waldshut, Germany, a small town about 120 miles southwest of Göppingen, also part of the kingdom of Württemberg. She was the first child born to Joseph Herholzer and Helena Reinhardt Herholzer. She was followed by Elisabeth in 1801, Magdalena in 1806, Johannes Baptista in 1808, Marie Ursule in 1812 and an infant who died at birth in 1815. Sometime between the death of the last child and 1819, perhaps responding to the pressures of war and famine, Helena and Joseph packed up the family and left for America.
It doesn’t appear that Joseph was a man of means; in 1819 he bought 15 acres of land (contrast this with Michael Bourgeois’ land purchase a month after arrival of 80 acres). In 1828 his 15 acres and the house were worth $83. Even by 1820 standards, he was not a wealthy man.
And now it gets messy. We know that on August 22, 1820, Johannes Müller and Anna Herholzer got married (they Americanized their names for their wedding: They were John Miller and Ann Harhalsey). We know that in September of 1822, when Johannes wrote his last will, he was a widower with an infant daughter, Maria Ana. And we know that in the 1820 census, Jacob Hesholser had in his household one female under 10, one female 10-15, one male 10-16 and two adults, Joseph and his wife. (I don’t know for sure that Jacob Hesholser is Joseph. However, no Jacob ever appears in later censuses, and we KNOW Joseph is in Perry County in 1819 because he buys land then. In the absence of anyone else, it looks like Jacob and Joseph are the same man.) One person in the family is a naturalized citizen which means someone was born in the United States. Huh!
We also know that Anna was married in August of 1820, and that Elisabeth Herholzer married her first husband, John Downhour in 1821 (exact date unknown). Finally, we can’t find Marie Ursule at any point after her birth; I think she probably died, perhaps before leaving Germany (I doubt this; I think it would have appeared in the German church records. But I don’t know for sure.) Assuming this is Joseph Herholzer, how are we to read this census?
The 1820 census had multiple problems, starting with a delay in completing the enumeration until September 1821. Enumerator training varied widely in thoroughness and accuracy. And we know that Joseph and his family were recent immigrants who spoke German. It would have been good if the enumerator could speak German, but the Irish were also a huge ethnic group in the area, and it would take serious organization skills to ensure that the enumerator and respondent languages matched. To complicate this more, many of the area's German speakers were from Alsace, where the language was Alsatian, a dialect of German. I think understanding all the new settlers was pretty challenging. And Perry County was newly settled with limited amenities. The enumerator's job could not have been easy under any circumstance, but under these? Oy!
Perhaps when the census-taker appeared at the Herholzer household, he didn’t arrive until well into 1821. He got the name wrong. The respondent didn’t understand, or wasn’t told, that he should be counting people in the household as of Aug 7, 1820. So the record shows the people who were in the household when the enumerator showed up. John Baptiste and Magdalena were unmarried; they would have been there. Elizabeth has married and is gone. Marie Ursule is dead. And Anna? She is married, probably dead as well, and her infant daughter is the "under ten" female in the house. Maria Ana was born in the US; she's the naturalized citizen.
I don’t like having to manipulate the data this much, so I’m not happy with this explanation, though I must admit it is both plausible and reasonably parsimonious. I am saved by the fact that in the larger scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. We don’t need the census to confirm the people, their children, or the locale; we have an extensive trail of official papers to tell us that. The census won’t get me the information I badly need: Maria Ana’s birth, Anna’s death, Marie Ursule’s fate, Johannes’ death, and clear data that tell me who the parents of Mary Ann Miller Bushu were.
Back to our story.
Joseph’s fifteen acres were on the edge of Somerset. According to the 1820 census, he worked in agriculture. I don’t know if this means he actually farmed or if he worked in a supportive role. Part of his household in 1820 were five 14-21 free males of color. Who they were and why they were there is a mystery to me. However, every household in Reading township in 1820 had at least two young men of color.
Johannes Muller, with or without Anna, is invisible in the 1820 census. We know he was THERE; he got married, had a baby, lost his wife, wrote his will, and died. But I don’t know if he was in a rooming house, living with a relative, in his own place (though I should be able to find tax records or a property deed; he doesn’t mention any local property in his will so I’m guessing he’s living with some family. But it doesn’t appear to be the Herholzers.)
In his will, Johannes placed Maria Ana in the care of his in-laws, Joseph Hierholzer and Helena Reinhardt Hierholzer. Maria Ana was to have all his property in Europe, property that he did not own but had a right to for his lifetime. I’m not sure just how property that he had a right to in his lifetime could be conveyed to his daughter, and this could explain how she was “swindled” out of her inheritance.
It appears that the terms of his will were met. In 1830 there was a 5-10 year old male living with the Herholzers. Since there was no child of theirs or of their married daughters who would meet this description, my presumption is this was Maria Ana. In the next seven years, as Elizabeth Herholzer Rudy and John Baptiste Herholzer had children, Mary Ann Miller appeared as godmother in the children’s baptisms. In the last one, that of Eleanor, daughter of John Baptiste Herholzer and Hester Snook, Mary Ann Miller’s co-sponsor was “Morant Burschuas.” Six months after the baptism of John and Hester’s child, on Feb. 28, 1838, a woman named Mary Ann Miller and Morand Bushu marry. I'm convinced this was Johannes Müller's baby girl.
In 1843, after having two sons, Mary Ann and Morand finally had a daughter. She was Emily in the baptismal record, but the date and the names of the parents tell us this was undeniably Ellen. Ellen’s godmother was Helen Reinhardt Herholzer. In many old naming traditions, babies are named for the baby’s grandparent. It is fitting that Mary Ann’s first daughter was named for the woman who was her “mom," if, in fact, Mary Ann is MariaAna.
One other small hint: When Morand's daughter Cecilia takes her vows as a Sister of Providence the name she chooses is . . . Helena.
What I love about this series of baptisms is the powerful sense of a close family. All three of the Herholzer children, as well as Joseph and Helena, served as godparents to one another’s children. And this closeness extends beyond family. I have read almost all the baptisms performed in St. Joseph and Holy Trinity churches; Elizabeth and her parents appear over and over again in the lives of their neighbors. Magdalena, who married Samuel Dean and became Mary, appears less frequently and then disappears entirely. I think they move away. But Elizabeth and her second husband Rudolph Rudy stay put, along with John Baptiste and Hester, having children and celebrating the milestones of their lives.
Shortly after Mary Ann and Morand were married, Joseph Herholzer died (1839). In his will and a codicil, both written before Mary Ann married, he mentions his beloved granddaughter Marie Anna, daughter of his beloved daughter Anna. In his will he leaves Mary Ann a half share of his estate. In his codicil, he says that that inheritance has been fulfilled. He did not provide any specifics so we are left wondering if he removed her from his will because he was unhappy with her (thus explaining James’ contention that she was “swindled). Or perhaps he settled some money on her in anticipation of her marriage. I doubt we’ll ever know.
John Baptiste Herholzer died in 1845 (I assume his wife Hester predeceased him) and his five children were scattered among relatives; two of them were living with Helena in the 1850 census. At seventy something, she was still raising her grandchildren.
In the 1860 census, Helena Herholzer was living with Michael Bushu who was Morand’s first cousin. I’m not sure why Helena was not with her granddaughter, but we can ask the same question about why she wasn’t with her daughters. Perhaps Michael had more room (there were 11 people living in Morand’s very small log cabin), or lived near people she was close to or lived near the church. Perhaps she changed homes every six months and happened to be with Michael when the enumerator appeared. Regardless, all the evidence strongly suggest the Herholzers and the Bushus were close.
In September 1865 shortly after the birth of her eighth daughter and eleventh child, and the marriage of her first daughter, Ellen (to Samuel Mattingly), Mary Ann Miller Bushu died. She was 44. She lost her mother and father in infancy, married at 17, lost her grandfather (who helped raised her) at 18, bore eleven children in 27 years while living in one of the smallest houses you can imagine. As a farm wife, her responsibilities, shared with her children I’m sure, were enormous: the family’s food, clothes, and health depended upon her. Her days would have been long and hard, tending the fires, gardens, milk cows, chickens; sewing, fixing wounds, emptying slop jars, canning, pickling, and otherwise preserving food for the winter, cooking, cleaning, wiping noses and butts. And she did this while either pregnant or nursing. I know these early pioneer families drew strength and solidarity, as well as good times, from the church and community. I hope that was true for Mary Ann.
Everything in this document is supported with strong, unquestionable evidence, everything, that is, except the names of Mary Ann Miller Bushu’s parents. It is my belief that the material presented here showing repeated family connections over a long period of time is powerful argument that her Mom and Dad were Johannes Müller and Anna Herholzer. I hope my readers agree.
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