Height and Depth of Everything

A little more than two years ago on a Google search I came across a cemetery near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, that had been transcribed and posted online. Virtually everything I have been able to discover about my father's family in those two years has now been posted on this blog or on my website and none of it would have been possible without the online transcription of the Tilden Emanuel Cemetery where my great grandparents are buried. That cemetery was my point of departure, the solid lead I needed to find more leads and to confirm or verify other possibilities.

The person who transcribed that cemetery, Katherine Haake, is thanked and credited on my website for her effort. I also wrote a personal e-mail thanking her and I received a fairly prompt reply from her. She told me I could thank her by passing it forward, doing something with the information she had provided that might in turn be useful or helpful to someone else. I hope my website qualifies.

I didn't think to ask her who she was or why she might have been inspired to transcribe and post the Tilden cemetery. But I am fairly certain that she is the same Katherine Haake who is mentioned in a Rain Taxi review article written in 2002. I've read the review, but I haven't yet read her book, The Height and Depth of Everything. I plan to have a copy of it waiting for me in Seattle when I visit home a little more than a month from now.

Me on my webcam. 

Row Row Row Your Boat

I haven't been getting enough comments on my blog lately, so I've decided to do something a little more interactive this week. Two years ago I found a site for a cemetery with a listing for someone I thought might be my great great grandfather. A little more than a year ago I was able to confirm that that listing was in fact my great great grandfather. Nearly all of the research I have done has involved information from sites I was able to locate and access via the internet.

Prior to finding these digital records of my ancestors I knew who my grandparents were, but I had only the vaguest idea who their parents or grandparents were and I had very litle interest in learning anything more about them. Despite the alleged popularity of online genealogy, I suspect that most people don't really spend much time thinking about who their ancestors were and what they did or didn't do while they were alive here on planet earth.

So I've got a proposition to make. If you know the name of one of your great great grandparents and can tell me where exactly they are buried, leave a comment and let me know. It's alright, you can tell me. I won't go to the cemetery and dig them up. But if you have a blog I will visit your blog and add your blog to my blogroll.

If you don't know the names of any of your grandparents' ancestors and haven't a clue where they might have been buried, you can still leave a comment. Tell me why you think it is that you don't know. Was that information deliberately withheld from you? Were your parents or grandparents careless, inconsiderate or absent-minded? Or is there some other reason they might not have been able to pass that information along to you. Please let me know. If you do, I promise, I'll visit your blog and leave a comment on your current post.

Is Blogging A Liberal Art?

I once had a Greek landlord, a few decades ago, one who had a penchant for suing people. His litigiousness, in fact, knew few if any bounds. He never sued me because I was usually far enough in arrears on my rent as to be useful on an ongoing basis as an unremunerated property manager, occasional paper server and blue moon propagandist. My extended exposure to the liberal arts had revived feudal notions of noblesse oblige that added value to my worth as a mere tenant.

One of the parties sued during my vassalage was a law firm, whose fee for a suit my landlord won was more than twice the amount of the settlement. He lost the suit against the law firm that had represented him, but appealed the ruling to the state supreme court and won, claiming that the state's consumer protection act could and should be applied to the practice of the state's legal profession.

I mention the suit here because the case established a legal precedent and I'm inclined to wonder if the basis on which it was argued might not have some implications for bloggers to the extent that blogging may be construed as a "liberal art or learned profession". The state supreme court asserted exemption from consumer protection provisions on the basis of the federal Sherman Anti-Trust Act as a "learned profession" with the prerogative of establishing and maintaining standards and discipline for its own practitioners, but it held that certain aspects of legal practice, particularly advertising, consist in the sale of services that do constitute "trade or commerce" and may require consumer protection when issues of "public interest" are at stake.

I'm certainly no lawyer, but as bloggers everyday are becoming more and more viable in purveying information that does impact the public interest and, to the extent that it is consumed by the public, one must wonder, do consumer protection rules apply and do those bloggers fortunate enough to make blogging their livelihood need Sherman Anti-Trust protections if consumers can demonstrate they've been misled?

News From The Front

This summer I'll be visiting the U.S. again, and the trip, as usual in odd-numbered years, will include a few days in Milwaukee to see my mother-in-law. I'm looking forward to it. Seeing my mother-in-law again is, of course, always a joy. She's 84 now and still gets around pretty well, but the reason I'm really excited is that about a year ago I googled up an item on the net that I've been wanting to have a look at, just to see what I can see. We're talking documents here that are even older than my mother-in-law.

My great great grandfather served in the Civil War with the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. He didn't make it back from the war and by the time my great grandfather died in 1897, nearly all living memory of my great great grandfather had vanished into the mists of time. Twenty years ago a collection of letters, written before, during and after the Civil War, were donated to the library at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. A minister's wife in Sheboygan, named Mary Abbott Miller, apparently carried on a lively correspondence during the war with both her husband, the Reverend Alonzo Miller, and her brother, Martin Abbott.

Alonzo Miller served in Company B of the 27th along with my great great grandfather, who served in Company F. They enlisted at the same time and would have gone through training together at Camp Randall in the last months of 1864 and joined up with the regiment in Little Rock, Arkansas in the first few months of 1865. They would have traveled together from Little Rock to New Orleans and from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama and taken part in the sieges of Fort Blakeley and Spanish Fort in April and gone from there in June to the supply depot at Brazos Santiago at the mouth of the Rio Grande where they marched on and captured Brownsville in July and August. There probably won't be any specific mention of my great great grandfather's tragic demise in late July that year. But then again, there might be. Who knows?

The wartime correspondence between Mary Miller and her brother, Martin Abbott, should also be fairly fascinating. Martin Abbott signed on early in the war with the 26th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. It was essentially an all German unit and one of the first regiments organized in Wisconsin. They took part in the battles at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in a division commanded by Carl Shurz, a German immigrant regarded by Mark Twain as one of the truly great Americans of the 19th century. The unit also took part in the battle at Lookout Mountain and ended the war under Sherman in the capture of Atlanta and his famous march to the sea. Schurz had close ties to Lincoln, so the 26th had a high profile and was often embroiled in controversy.

Mainly I'm hoping that the wartime letters will provide me with some new leads for researching the first decade my immigrant ancestors spent in America. I'll let you know how it goes when I've got the goods.

The Big Town

I didn't find time to surf member blogs on Blog Explosion this weekend so nearly all of the visitors to my blog the past two days have been the result of people hunting up terms on search engines like Yahoo and Google. One visitor who Googled in was searching the terms "Wawasee+country+kennel". I can't imagine what they were looking for, but my blog was the fifth listing on the first page of their search. I mentioned Lake Wawasee a few weeks ago in a post about South Bend, the town in Indiana where my mother was born and raised.

The fourth listing on that search was headed 'The Big Town'. It's either a long story or a short book by Ring Lardner. The subtitle, "How I and the Mrs. go to New York to see life and get Katie a husband," tells what the story is about. Katie is the younger sister of the Mrs. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but from what I've seen so far it doesn't seem fictional enough to be a novel and there's too much story in it to call it an essay. It's mostly just Ring Lardner being Ring Lardner.

What I hadn't realized is that Lardner was born and raised in Niles, Michigan, a few short miles north of South Bend, just across the Michigan state line. He actually began his career as a journalist on a paper in South Bend and if 'The Big Town' is as autobiographical as it seems to be, then the resort on Lake Wawasee where my mother worked summers in high school as a lifeguard, not far from where my grandfather was born, was a favorite haunt of Ring Lardner's in the early days of Prohibition.

I'm not sure yet if F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were actually part of the life he and the Mrs. saw on their trip to the big town. The leaders of The Lost Generation were still youngsters then, in their early twenties, but I understand both of them did acknowledge reading and being influenced by Lardner early on in their careers.

Lardner is often quoted on the subject of genealogy for having said that "the family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have." Some people think that Ring Lardner Jr. was a good illustration of that principle. He wasn't quite as famous, but he sure lived a lot longer than Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His one-liner to the HUAC during the Hollywood witchhunts, "if I did, I'd hate myself in the morning," earned him two years in prison and ten years on the blacklist, but it also brought down the House.

I don't have any kids, but if I did I think I'd recommend that they read Lardner's book I do have a niece and later this year she'll be going off to school in The Big Town.

On The Blink

I have two television sets. One of them is on the blink. It has been that way for about six months. It's a Sharp 14" Multi-System that we bought about ten years ago and we only use it now on those rare occasions when there are two worthwhile things on television at the same time. We keep it in the bedroom and pay for a second cable connection, so I figure it might as well be hooked to a television that works.

The Master's, live from Augusta, Georgia, will no doubt be aired here in the Philippines a week from now and, golf nut that I am, I'll want to watch every minute of it. The live coverage will air between midnight and six a.m., but the replays from the previous day's rounds will be shown in primetime. So last week I went to the appliance store at the mall, found a salesperson where the new Sharp flat-screen models are on display and obtained a telephone number for the Sharp repair center. They have telephone books here in the Philippines, very thick ones, but they're utterly useless.

The technician came out to look at the set wearing a blue nylon jacket that was three sizes too big. It did say Sharp on the back which was reassuring. Yes, here in Manila television repairmen do indeed make house calls. He opened it up and pulled out three big circuit boards and went to work with his makeshift voltmeter, testing the solid-state circuitry. He spent most of his time cleaning and re-soldering some of the dodgier connections. After about half an hour he came up with his diagnosis. Two parts, he said, IC unit, capacitor. I had tried earlier without success to establish some dialogue, but until that point he hadn't uttered a word. And that was when it occurred to me that my tech's grasp of English was limited almost entirely to the jargon of solid-state technology and kitchen electronics. Tagalog does not contain words for these things, so there is no point in translating the technical manuals. How in the hell did he learn this stuff?

Tomorrow he'll return with the parts and fix it in about five minutes. A week from now my wife can sit on the couch in front of the Trinitron in the living room and watch dramas on the Hallmark channel while I try to follow the flight of Tiger's tee shots on that little fourteen inch screen in the bedroom. I paid the tech his 250 pesos, the front end of his housecall fee. In American money that's less than five bucks. He'll collect the other half when the set is working again.

Black Duck

I only met my Great Uncle Leonard once that I can recall. He was married to my grandmother's younger sister, Aunt Ethel. My father's mother died the year I was born so I never met my grandmother. And by then my grandfather had been dead for twenty years. He had been an Evangelical minister in lower Wisconsin during the Prohibition era. His parishes were in several small towns in south central Wisconsin, towns like Lomira, Jefferson and Juda, Wisconsin, where my father was born. My grandfather wrote his sermons in German and delivered them twice, first in German then in English.

My grandmother was raised in a small town called New Richmond, near the stateline between Wisconsin and Minnesota. I'm not sure where Aunt Ethel met Leonard, but I suspect that the fact that my grandfather was a minister had an influence on Leonard's career choice. He had driven a truck for my grandmother's brother, Aaron, during the Prohibition era. Leonard was German, of course, a Markwitz, so it would have seemed natural for him to hook up with German Evangelicals like my grandfather, but for some reason Leonard decided he would rather be a Presbyterian minister. I'm not sure I've ever heard of any other German Presbyterians.

When I met Uncle Leonard about forty years ago he was recently retired. He'd been serving the church in a small town in Arizona where they lived then and he and his wife were touring the west coast to see some things while they could still get around well enough to visit their various relatives and in-laws. They visited my Uncle Roy and his family in Moses Lake and then crossed the mountains with Roy and his wife in tow to visit us in western Washington. Uncle Roy owned a Mayflower moving van then and our family was seriously contemplating a major move from Washington to the Texas gulf coast.

I learned then that Uncle Leonard had spent much of his ministerial career with my grandmother's sister in a small town in upstate Minnesota called Black Duck. I hadn't thought about my Uncle Leonard for quite awhile, but last week when I heard on the news about the shooting on the Indian reservation at Red Lake High School, he came to mind. I ran a Google search on Black Duck and sure enough, it's about fifteen miles southeast of Red Lake. I imagine it's the sort of place where families from the Twin Cities like to go for a weekend or maybe even a week or two or a month during the summer to rent a cabin for some fishing on Black Duck Lake. Red Lake is a much bigger lake and quite close by, but all of the lakeshore on that end is on the reservation. Black Duck is as close as you can get to the reservation without being on it.

Readers who have visited my homepage know that my father's family settled near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, not far from the Minnesota border about ten years after the American Civil War. They were Germans from the area around Berlin who came to America shortly after the failed 1848 Revolution. Some people view German participation in the American Civil War as an attempt to realize the aims of the 1848 Revolution in America. If that Revolution had succeeded, Germany would have been established as a nation-state operating on the principles laid out in the Communist Manifesto, written specifically for that purpose in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But events unfolded a little differently so that Germany didn't became a nation-state until two decades later under Bismarck. The ideology Marx developed for Germany went east and finally took hold in Russia early in the 20th century.

Now when I heard on CNN about a teen-age Chippewa Indian with a German surname shooting his grandparents and going on a rampage at his high school ala Columbine before killing himself, I was in the process of writing my previous post. In fact, I mentioned it in that post as it fit right in with the train of thought I had meant to pursue. I gather that the boy who did the shooting got his German surname, Weise, from his mother who was injured in an automobile accident that happened a year or two after the boy's father, who had a French surname, Lussier, committed suicide following some kind of stand-off related to his duties as a law officer on the reservation.

I have not heard any reports indicating if the boy's mother is white or part-Indian or why the boy had his mother's surname and not his father's. If, as it seems, the couple had planned to raise their son in the Twin Cities, an Indian with a German surname might have been thought to sound a little more mainstream among all of the countless German surnames in downstate Minnesota. I suspect, however, that a German surname may have proved less advantageous when circumstances placed him under his grandfather's care in school on the Red Lake reservation.

Be that as it may, the boy acted out his darkest fantasy, committing suicide but not before taking with him a number of people he perhaps viewed as contributers to his state of torment. He needed help and didn't get it. None of his victims deserved to be the object of his wrath. The anguish and the grief of their families and friends must surely be unbearable. The community has become the focus of unwanted national and international attention for an incident that doesn't reflect what that community is about anymore or less than the incident at Columbine, which happened in the prosperous white middle-class suburb of Littleton, Colorado.

Much has been made of the shooter's 'Goth' getup and posts he placed on neo-Nazi websites where he vented some of his distresss and attempted to express the feelings of alienation he experienced. What is sad is that even with the powerful tool of the internet at his disposal he wasn't able to establish any real sense of connection with the outside world and to find enough glimmers of hope to overcome his sense of alienation.

I figure that through my mother I'm roughly about three per cent native American by volume, but so far I still can't prove it. Her family never acknowledged the fact that we have Indian blood, although my mother was quite certain of it. I am still hopeful that some day I will find proof. I'm fifty years old at this point and still trying to come to terms with what it means to have a German surname in America. That's what my blog is about and I do it hoping to overcome some of the same kind of alienation Jeff Weise was dealing with, but at a much more manageable level of intensity.

How is a Chippewa Indian teenager supposed to sort out his German heritage when German-Americans, the mainstream of American culture, have gone to such great lengths to subsume their ethnic identity into the myth of the American melting pot so that all that remains is a few pretzels and polka bands at one end and neo-Nazi skinheads at the other? Aren't Christmas trees a German tradition? Halloween? Walpurgisnacht? And all those fairy tales by the brothers Grimm? America's holiday calendar is laced with German paganism. Even the English language itself is predominantly Anglo-Saxon which is essentially a bastardized low German. The Germanic tribes that invaded Europe three thousand years ago and brought the Roman Empire to its knees also invaded North America. The Spaniards wanted gold, the French came for fur and the English found their contentment in tobacco, but the Germans, they wanted land.

When you look at American history from the perspective of the Native Americans, you find that the Indians, despite being almost constantly at war, managed fairly well for a century and a half, negotiating their differences and conducting trade with representatives of the French, English and Spanish crowns. Germans who came to America in the 18th century, however, were a bit unwieldy. Those who settled in Pennsylvania had to anglicize their names and swear allegiance to the governor of the colony and to the British or in the case of Penn the Dutch crown, but because they spoke German and generally lived on the frontier among the outlaws and the Indians, they played by a different set of rules. They didn't come to America to make a quick fortune so they could go back to England and take a seat in the House of Lords. They came to stay, permanently. And they kept coming until there were enough on hand so that the colonial rebels could field an army, one substantial enough to send the Redcoats running, all the way to the Straits of Molucca.

My dad tells me he went to Black Duck once on a bus when he was ten years old. That would have been 1937, shortly before Hitler invaded Poland. He went there with his mother to tell Uncle Leonard about her plans to manage a motel down in Pascagoula, Mississippi. She planned to go with my dad and her brother, Aaron, who wanted to start a trucking company there. They needed to know if Uncle Leonard could take a few weeks from his busy schedule as a Presbyterian to drive them down to Pascagoula in his truck.

The first moving picture my father ever saw was a Shirley Temple movie. The second one was the classic 'Gone With The Wind'. Both were movies that he saw in Mobile, Alabama, with his mother and his uncle during the two years they spent in Pascagoula. Strangely enough, he didn't learn that his great grandfather died in the Civil War and took part in the siege of Mobile until I told him about it within the past year. People in the south remember the Civil War like it happened the day before yesterday. By the time Grant got elected, Germans from up north had already learned that for them it was better to try and forget that the Civil War had ever happened.

Wabash and Erie

Some readers may have noticed that not all of the sites listed on my Blogroll are actually blogs. A few are websites that I think are particularly worthwhile and might be of interest to people who aren't totally bored by the things I write about. Lately I've been checking out my mother's family tree, also known as the 'Descendants of George Steele', and trying to make some sense of the massive amount of information it contains.

When you have a relatively large family tree, some 20,000 individual names grouped among more than a thousand different surnames, one way to make sense of it is to look at the surnames on the list with the most entries. More than 800 entries are found on my tree with the Steele surname. After Steele, the surnames that occur most frequently are Conner, Hoover, Puderbaugh and Studebaker. While I am a distant relative of both Herbert Hoover and John Studebaker, the relation is distant enough so that neither of them are among the descendants of my great great great great great grandfather, George Steele.

I had not been aware of a relation to anyone named Conner until I examined the tree in this way. And I didn't know of anyone with the name Conner who was in any way famous. But that changed abruptly when I Googled up the name Conner a few weeks ago. I found a site called Conner Prairie - History Online which is now listed on my sidebar. The site has a tremendous amount of information on the early history of Indiana and the role William Conner played in it. I have no doubt that I am related to William Conner, but I can't say how exactly on the basis of my family tree alone. One thing that is clear, though, is that without William Conner, the Hoovers wouldn't have reached Iowa where Herbert was born and John Studebaker would have had to build cars in Pennsylvania instead of Indiana.

William Conner was quite directly involved in the process of removing Indians from Ohio and Indiana to reservations farther west so that pioneers pushing west from the eastern seaboard could settle in those states and beyond. He did so by raising two families, the first by his Indian wife and the second by a white woman who he married after his first family had been removed to the reservation. The article on William Conner is a must for anyone interested in knowing how the west was really won. Other articles on that site I find fascinating are those on the building of the National Road from Wheeling, West Virginia nearly to the Mississippi and a series of articles on the other half of the Erie Canal known as the Wabash and Erie, which opened vast tracts of densely forested land to settlement along the Wabash River between Fort Wayne and Lafayette. Those were America's first great public works projects and they aren't often mentioned these days because they are so closely associated with the process of Indian removal.

Another site I've added to my sidebar is the 'wea-indian-tribe', a site put together by Brenda Lindley with amazingly detailed recollections of American history and genealogy passed down by oral tradition among the tribes that were removed from Ohio and Indiana.

I suppose what I'm offering is just a little something to think about when the news media starts to square the events at Columbine High School in Colorado a few years ago with a more recent incident on a reservation in upstate Minnesota.

Yankee Doodle Dandy

My mother was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Her family had lived there since the Civil War, but they also had holdings downstate in Fulton County between the Wabash and the Tippecanoe where my grandfather was born. While not rich by any means, her family had been reasonably prosperous until the Great Depression, which began before my mother reached school age. All four of my grandparents were college graduates, as were both of my parents.

I've been to Indiana several times, but only twice that I remember. We went there on family summer vacations when I was six for about a week and again when I was thirteen to visit my grandparents and numerous aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws, but I haven't been back since. The last time I was there was almost forty years ago. My grandparents had a house in South Bend where my grandmother had run a nursery school for many years, on a street lined with elm trees that led directly to the golden dome at Notre Dame. They also had a cottage out in the country at Lake Wawasee where we went fishing with grandpa and waterskiing with my uncle. We also pulled mussels out of the creek, ate watermelons, shot B-B guns with my cousins up at the gravel pit and went swimming at the old hotel where my mother had worked summers as a lifeguard years earlier.

My grandparents came to visit us a number of times, once or twice while we were still in Kansas and several times in the '60s in western Washington. One of those visits was shortly after my grandfather died and that's when my grandmother told me about Welfley's Steele family genealogy. But I had never actually seen the family tree until just a few years ago when I found it online. The link to it is on my sidebar. If you'd like to have a look you can pull it up, but you have to fill in a few blanks to see it. Just type Steele on the surname line, George on the first name line, Bedford County PA for place of death and 1801 for year of death. Hit search and a page will come up. Scroll down to the George Steele posted by PA State Genealogy and click enter.

When I was nine years old we lived out in the country in the Skagit Valley, a mile or two from a mental hospital where my father worked as a project administrator. The nearest road was a quarter of a mile away, but shortly after we moved in my mother thought she saw someone peeking in a window at her through the curtains one evening. Probably just a harmless Peeping Tom, but my folks decided it was time to get a watchdog. So we went shopping for a German shepherd. We found one through a local dog breeder, a six-week old pup that we named Schar von Regental. My father claimed it meant Star of Rain Valley, but my New Cassell's tells me now that Schar was probably short for 'der Scharwaechter', which is German for sentry. Scharr with a double r means scratcher or scraper, which was aptly descriptive as our fierce guard dog would urinate and scratch furiously at the screen door anytime a visitor approached. But selecting a name was important as she was a pedigreed pooch, a direct descendant of Rinty von Rin Tin Tin, and the purchase price from the kennel was contingent on obtaining a pedigree and making her available for breeding at the kennel's request. Schar developed hip displasia, a genetic defect common in overbred shepherds and had to be destroyed. We exchanged her at six months for another pup from the same litter. The story I was told was that she'd chased after a bear one day and never returned. All I remember now is how fascinated I was by the extent of her very detailed pedigree.

I've never been to Ohio or to Pennsylvania. In fact, I haven't been to any of the states east of Michigan and north of Virginia. But I've been to all the rest except for Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee. I flew over Ohio on a flight from Detroit to Atlanta three years ago, less than a month after 9-11. I drove from Georgia through both the Carolinas to Virginia and back on that trip. All the pick-up trucks on the highway still had shotguns mounted in their cab windows, but they were flying Old Glory instead of the Southern Cross. I visited the monument at Stone Mountain, a place that I've since learned was where someone wounded in battle one hundred and forty years ago may have been my great great grandmother's brother. Union sacrifices, though, aren't usually associated with Atlanta. For those you have to go to Pennsylvania.

I spent some time today looking at Pennsylvania. But I wasn't looking at Gettysburg or even at the Civil War. When you aren't from the east coast and haven't ever been there, the battlefields of the American Revolution seem pretty remote. You learn in school about the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill, "one if by land and two if by sea" and "don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes", but when you come from the western U.S. the landscape and the timeframe of the revolution is all just a blur. At least it is until you start looking at the pedigree and realize that one of those ancestors may have fought in one of those countless battles in one of those obscure places that can't be found anymore because the landscape has been so drastically altered over the past 230 years and the names of all the places have been bent, twisted, stretched and mangled into so many other times and places that it is all just a hopeless tangle. But then perhaps it's not all that hopeless after all. Nowadays we have computers.

My pedigree, 'The Descendants of George Steele', says quite plainly, "George served as a private under Captain Charles Maclay in the 1st Battalion of Cumberland County, Pennylvania Militia during the Revolutionary period." Nothing beyond that or at least not much. But how much more do you need with a computer at your fingertips. Who was Captain Charles Maclay? Google him up. His brother, William, was the first U.S. senator ever elected from the state of Pennsylvania. His other brother, Samuel, was also a senator. Charles didn't get involved in politics because he got killed along with many of the men in his company at the Battle of the Crooked Billet, fought near Hatboro, Pennsylvania, on May 1, 1778, about halfway between Philadelphia, then occupied by General Howe's Hessian mercenaries and his British regulars, and Valley Forge, where General Washington and his troops were recovering from a long, hard, cold winter by doing close order drills under the the expert tutelage of our new 'Old Europe' allies, the Marquis de Lafayette of France and the Baron von Steuben of Prussia.

On A Roll

Last week I threatened all of my reader(s?) with the possibility that I might start rolling my blog. Picture me rolling a tire down an empty highway on my way to repair and/or replace a tire that has left my vehicle stranded miles from nowhere along the shoulder of the road. This, in fact, was the second time I have leveled this threat, so lest readers start to suspect that I am all bluff and no bite, I made an effort to follow through. Pasting the code onto my template took a dozen tries before I met with even limited success and I still haven't figured out how to give it a proper heading with 'Blogroll' written out in that snazzy Verdana cursive script as I had wanted to do, but at least it's functioning. Hubcaps are overrated. The links are there and they work.

Some of the links are to bloggers who have posted comments on my blog. Others are to blogs on which I've been known to leave comments. Several links are resources I visit frequently and make use of as a mine for materials to fashion posts for my blog. A few are sites that inspired me to begin writing my blog or have contributed in some way to the shape it has taken.

Last week I began looking at the family tree on which I am listed only as 'Living Lubach'. My mother's brother, John Steele, was the last in my branch of the Steele tree to carry the Steele surname. He was the seventh generation in the Steele line to carry that name, directly descended from George Steele, colonial era immigrant and Son of Liberty . An English teacher at a military academy, my uncle was an only son's only son, who never married and suffered the progressively debilitating effects of MS throughout the latter half of his life. A church organist for many years and a chaplain's aide on a supply ship in the navy during WWII, his middle name, Richard, became my youngest brother's middle name. Needless to say, the past half century has not boded well for American males whose chief inheritance is an incumbent, unspoken onus to find a way to preserve the family line.

Families now are much smaller than they were a century ago when most Americans were farmers and farmwork was nearly always a viable option. A family then couldn't have enough sons to handle all the chores. Fathers who were still alive and able to work productively at age 50 were not yet the norm, so oldest sons often owned or had primary responsibility for the family homestead by the time they were old enough to need a spouse. Creating possibilities and opportunities for younger siblings was part and parcel of managing the farm.

Family trees are inherently conservative and thus able to nurture the excesses of liberalism. They are an engine for maintaining a sense of continuity between the past and the future by means of the present. My mother's line has dead-ended and my branch of my father's line faces extinction as well, though both names through other lines will continue well into the future. No matter how much I might like to think that the collective gene pool needs what I could contribute, the fact is the gene pool will get along just fine without my seed. But I feel as though one thing I do have to offer the future is a sense of history. It may be that my sense of history, and its capacity for embracing diversity, is enough at odds with the official version to have compromised my willingness to make my genes available for future use.

Puterblaugh or Bloggerbaugh?

I've been blogging for nearly six months now. Generally I've maintained my focus on online genealogy and the Civil War and so far I haven't generated much of a following, despite the fact that after pornography, music downloads and, more recently, blogging, those subjects are among the most popular uses for the internet.

So far only one other blog has bothered to list my blog on their blogroll. It's occurred to me that the reason for that may be that I haven't gotten around to putting a blogroll on my blog, something which probably tends to discourage reciprocation. Today I signed up with Blogroller.com and I now have the 'code' to modify my 'template' for blogrolling, but I still don't have a clue where exactly I should paste it and I'm worried that if I paste it in the wrong spot I'll permanently deform my glorious blog, so I'm waiting patiently for the e-mail with expert assistance from Blogspot support.

I mentioned in last week's post that my maternal grandfather was born in Akron, Ohio. On closer inspection of the family tree I've discovered that he was actually born in Akron, Indiana, a small village a little north and mostly east, ten or fifteen miles up the Tippecanoe, from Logansport. Until today I hadn't realized Indiana has an Akron and the entry I had seen just said Akron, so I had assumed it meant Ohio as my grandfather's family came to Indiana from Pennsylvania by way of Ohio. They lived in Coshocton County in Ohio for about three decades before moving farther west to Indiana. But Coshocton is more than a hundred miles from Akron, Ohio, so it occurred to me to check. Sure enough, Indiana has its own Akron and that's where he was born.

Writing about my father's line is fairly easy because there are a quite limited number of facts that I've been able to establish and build upon. My mother's line is actually much more challenging as the family tree was put together originally in 1909 by a fellow named William Welfley and published as a book called the 'Descendants of George Steele'. Welfley was deaf during his later years and I suspect that may have helped his concentration. I don't have a copy of the book itself, but sometimes I'm able to access it online. It's hosted by Pennsylvania State Genealogy, which I assume is the university, but when I link to it the links often go dead. The site seems to be in a sort of twilight zone between Rootsweb, a project that tries to make genealogical information freely available to the public online, and Ancestry.com which is a private paysite that likes people who subscribe in order to get access.

Welfley's book was published in 1909, just as the Studebaker Company was successfully making the transition from producing horse-drawn wagons to producing automobiles. It was the only American company to make that transition. The genealogy has more than 20,000 entries, including more than 800 people with the Steele surname. Nearly 300 Studebakers are on the tree. The only other surnames with more than 200 entries are Hoover, Conner and Puderbaugh, a name which is sometimes rendered as Butterbaugh.

The problem for me, as a strictly amateur genealogist, lies in trying to reconcile such a glut of information. I haven't really looked at it carefully for the past two years as I've been working more on my father's line. I like to think that progress I've made on that line and things I've learned about drawing inferences will enable me to make more sense of all of the information on my mother's line.

Not Quite White

The Negro, who earnestly desires to mingle his race with that of the European, cannot do so; while the Indian, who might succeed to a certain extent, disdains to make the attempt. The servility of the one dooms him to slavery, the pride of the other to death.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
1832


My mother's family had been in America for a hundred years when my father's family arrived. George Steele (Johannes Georg Staehl), my great great great great great grandfather, got off the boat in Philadelphia in 1754 as a young man in his early twenties. He came on a ship called the Friendship with 120 other young men who had German names. They were all described as French Protestants. France had recently annexed a German border area they called Franconia and young men who spoke German there were apparently considered a liability. They arrived just in time for the French and Indian War, although it's not clear what part, if any, they took in it.

Twenty years later, during the American Revolution, George fought for independence. Family lore has it that he was promised a homestead in the Northwest Territory as compensation for his efforts, somewhere in a place called Indiana. They called it that because that's who lived there then. While waiting for the tenants of their new abode to vacate the premises, they settled in Bedford County in Pennsylvania which was about as far west as you could go then without getting your insurance cancelled. George died in 1801.

George had a son named Phillip who was born in about 1756. He was reputedly a wagonmaker. He and his wife Susannah were still in Bedford PA when their son, Elias, was born in 1811. That was the year that the War of 1812 was fought, at least the part of it that was fought in Indiana. That part came right after the part that was fought in Illinois. Apparently there was a fort near the southern tip of Lake Michigan called Fort Dearborn and some intrepid settlers had decided to build a little town around it. But they forgot to obtain a building permit with a valid fire inspection sticker attached and duly stamped. When they learned that their dwellings posed a serious fire hazard the settlers agreed to go to Fort Detroit to get their paperwork properly notarized, but somehow the guide they hired to lead them to Detroit got lost and they never arrived. Apparently there was another fort they should have gone to in Indiana that was much closer than the one in Detroit. And that's when Benjamin Harrison decided to check the fort in Indiana to see if the settlers might have gone there instead. But when he got there the fort with the funny French name he was looking for had been turned into a religious theme park called Prophetstown and it was unmistakably clear that the Indians running the place, some Potawatomi, some Shawnee, some Miami, some Cherokee and even a few Kickapoos, were selling liquor without a license. So he butchered every last one of them except for the ones that hightailed it off into the woods. It took a few months before news of all this reached Washington D.C., but when it did, the shit really hit the fan.

Eventually the folks in D.C. got things sorted out with Britain and France and a few years later Phillip and Susannah and their son, Elias, and the rest of the kids put all of their stuff on a wagon that Phillip had built and they hauled it over to Pittsburgh, put it on a raft and poled their way down the Ohio River. It wasn't the choice bit in Indiana that the Continental Congress had promised to Grandpa George, but at least they were across the river and in the Old Northwest, although by this time Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had all been declared states even though nobody lived there yet. They moved to a place that didn't even have a name so at first they called it New Bedford, but now they call it Akron, Ohio, the place where the rubber meets the road.

The family seems to have done some traveling back and forth between New Bedford in Ohio and their family and friends still back at Old Bedford in Pennsylvania, and they also seem to have made a few trips out west to look around and try to locate Grandpa's land. But it wasn't until 1861 when Elias finally pulled up stakes at the age of 50 and settled in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife Elizabeth and their five sons and who knows how many daughters. It was a good time to move to South Bend. One of their cousins had moved there a few years earlier, a blacksmith named John Studebaker. The Studebaker family had been making Conestoga wagons during the 50s and shipping them by boat down to St. Louis for people going west to California on the Oregon Trail. But it turns out that that was small potatoes because in 1861 they landed a government contract to make wagons for the Union army.

Elias settled his family in Liberty Township in South Bend that year. His oldest son signed up to fight for the Union army and it seems he was taken prisoner and died at Andersonville. The second son, Michael Steele, was my great great grandfather. One account I've seen refers to him as the family teamster which would seem to suggest that his work involved wagons in one way or another. He married a girl named Charlotte Stradley, who was born in Liberty Township in 1844. South Bend was a pretty small settlement up until 1840. Before that most of the people living there were either Catholic priests or Potawatomi Indians. The Treaty of Chicago was signed in 1833 and the terms of that agreement were that the Potawatomi would move within five years to a reservation next to the Shawnees just north and east of Topeka, Kansas. In 1838 there were still nearly a thousand Potawatomi living between the Tippecanoe and the Wabash rivers. They were rounded up at gunpoint in 1838 and marched nearly a thousand miles on foot across the plains of Illinois and Iowa to their new home on the reservation, an event still remembered as the Trail of Death.

I don't know much about Charlotte Stradley. I suppose she might have been part or even all Potawatomi. There were a few white settlers there before 1840 who were tolerated because they had married into the tribe. Michael and Charlotte Steele had a son named Ira Steele who was born in North Liberty in 1874. He married a woman named Laura Price who was born there in 1876. I've seen pictures of Laura Price, my great grandmother. My guess, based on her picture, would be that she was at least half Potawatomi. She died in 1916 at the age of forty. Ira lived until 1932. My grandfather was born in 1899 in Akron, so at the turn of the century it seems they were still in contact with family back in Coshocton County in Ohio and probably with family back in Bedford County in Pennsylvania as well. Ira and Laura had quite a few relatives in South Bend, but they also had a farm down on the Wabash River near Logansport, just a few short miles up the river from Prophetstown.

I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, on the same date as the signing of the Treaty of Chicago 120 years earlier. The kid in the incubator next to mine was a full-blooded Shawnee Indian. My mother used to call me Chief Hiawatha because she was never quite sure if she'd brought home the right kid.

Sex and the Single Girl?

I've found more information about the Godeffroy family and their shipping dynasty. It's relevant to me not only because I lived in the South Pacific for nearly a decade, but also because finding the ship on which my ancestors crossed the Atlantic to America may require learning a bit more about international shipping in the middle of the 19th century. I've included a link to a chapter from a book I found online called 'War and the Private Investor', written in 1935 by a University of Chicago political economist named Eugene Staley.

Staley's book seems to have carried a fair amount of clout until quite recently when it was apparently superceded by disciples of one of Staley's distinguished University of Chicago colleagues. Chapter 5 presents Samoa as a case study in the dynamics of investment and diplomacy, but it also provides a nice thumbnail sketch of the J. C. Godeffroy & Sons shipping empire which endured for more than a century from 1755 until 1880. The Godeffroy's were Huguenots who left southern France before the end of the 17th century and eventually resettled in Hamburg. Longfellow fans will recognize 1755 as the year in which the Huguenot colony in Nova Scotia was uprooted and scattered to the winds. Investing in ships then was undoubtedly a practical expedient.

Two weeks ago I mentioned finding what looks to be a Huguenot named Toussaint in the 1910 U.S. Census for upstate Wisconsin, a young woman who seems to have served as a caretaker for a geriatric friend of my great great grandfather. She spoke German, not English. She was born in 1884, the same age as my grandfather. She arrived in Wisconsin in 1909, the same year my grandfather went away to seminary in Illinois. The old man she looked after, Ludwig Meyer, died in 1915, the same year my grandfather was ordained.

The most famous Toussaint in the history books was the Founding Father of the Republic of Haiti, the first former colony in the Americas to follow the trail blazed by the United States in its quest for independence.

Freiheitskaempfer und Dichter

I mention on my webpage that my great great grandfather's unit in the Civil War, the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, was commanded by a German immigrant, Colonel Conrad Krez. In addition to being a colonel (and during the siege of Mobile a brevet brigadier general), Krez was also a well established lawyer and a fairly renowned poet. He was described by Wolfgang Diehl, his most recent biographer, as a "freiheitskaempfer" or freedom fighter, as well, mostly on account of his participation in the failed 1848 Revolution and for inciting a war between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig Holstein, which resulted in his imprisonment, exile and emigration to America in 1851.

Diehl's biography of Krez was published in 1988, just as a former host of the television series 'Death Valley Days' was exhorting the then leader of the now defunct "evil empire" to "tear down that wall". The wall came down shortly thereafter, but it's still not clear that the Soviet Union really did much to bring it about. A previous biography of Krez by Ludwig Finckh was published fifty years earlier, shortly prior to the attack on Poland which plunged Europe into WWII. A bookseller's son and a noted writer of historical romances, Finckh's reputation now rests largely on his "relationship" with Herman Hesse, a contemporary whose works were translated into English and have enjoyed worldwide popularity and literary acclaim.

Neither of the biographies of Conrad Krez have, to my knowledge, yet been translated into English. Finckh's book, 'Ein Starkes Leben'; was published in Germany a year or two after the publication of 'An Mein Vaterland', a volume of the collected poems of Conrad Krez. Finckh's biography of Krez may have been written chiefly to promote sales in Germany of the Krez poems.

My German really isn't very good, but it's all I have and both of the biographies are written in German, so in the absence of a published translation, I've decided to offer my own. The opening chapter of the Diehl biography begins as follows:

Origins and Youth in Landau

"John Baptist Krez, my father, was born in Unterfranken in Wolfsmuenster, in the same village as his
schoolteacher father. He died in Athens of pneumonia far from his family, which he left in poverty.

My mother, Louise Henrietta Krez nee Naas, is from Landau on the Queich. Through long hours of
work, both day and night, a son was allowed to study and this son am I, her first born. I first saw the light of the world on April 27, 1828, in my grandparent's house in Landau. From her other four children only my brother, Paul, survived, who made his living as a salesman. I attended the Latin school in Landau until Class 3 and at age 12 I began writing poems, which at first barely rhymed, then afterward came counted syllables and finally measured lines of varied length and shortness, which I learned from a book that came to hand by accident.

In the last month of 1841 I found an opening at the religious seminary of Speyer where I attended the gymnasium. After a residence of two and a half years I was dismissed, despite my exemplary comportment. Apparently my audacious defense of Schiller's poetry offended some of my superiors."

Diehl notes in German that the last paragraph of this excerpt, quoted from a short Krez autobiography, was originally written in Greek. Conrad's father, John Krez, was conscripted from his schoolteaching duties to serve in a European army that took part in a war to liberate Greece from Turkey, a conflict that is now remembered chiefly through Lord Byron's scathing satire of it in 'Don Juan', certainly the longest if not the best poem in that corpus.