The March

I finally finished reading 'The March', E.L. Doctorow's PEN/Faulkner Award winning novel about Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's infamous swath of destruction from Georgia, through South Carolina and into North Carolina during the last six months of America's Civil War.

My wife read most of it in one sitting on an eight hour plane flight from Hong Kong to Sydney. She said it was good, but she doesn't remember much about it. I chipped away at it at the rate of an hour or two a week for nearly two months. I made a point of savoring it and I'm glad I did. I didn't want it to blur on me and I think it would have if I'd read it straight through.

It was only about three years ago that I first began to suspect that I might have a Civil War ancestor. Only a few months have passed since I was finally able to confirm my hunch through correspondence generated by this blog with relatives and inlaws in upstate Wisconsin. My great great grandfather, William Lubach, enlisted a few weeks after the March to the Sea began, but he wasn't actually deployed until after the march was essentially completed.

I'm fairly certain, though, that his wife's younger brother, William Ebert, was either on the march or would have been if he hadn't been incapacitated at Bald Hill during the Battle of Atlanta which preceded the march. His unit, the 12th Wisconsin, was part of the march. He was wounded in July, 1864, and mustered out disabled in January, 1865. The rest of the 12th mustered out in June, 1865. My guess is that if his wounds were severe enough to muster out five months early, they were probably also severe enough for him to have spent the duration of Sherman's March confined to a hospital. But I really don't know at this point.

A little less than a year ago I spent several hours in the manuscript room of the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. I had a chance to examine some of the wartime correspondence between the Reverend Alonzo Miller and his wife, Mary Abbott Miller. Alonzo Miller served in my great great grandfather's unit, the 27th Wisconsin. He was 38 when he enlisted, the same age as my great great grandfather. They both enlisted at the same time in October, 1864. The letters he sent to his wife recount his activities going through training in Milwaukee, a train ride to Little Rock where the replacement troops joined up with the regiment, a boat ride from Little Rock to New Orleans and the staging area across the river in Algiers where they camped for several weeks, then another boat across Lake Pontchartrain and along the Gulf to Mobile Point where they disembarked and began their march through a dense pine forest on the forts north of Mobile, Alabama.

The letters tell about the battles of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely and about the several weeks spent in Mobile celebrating victory in those battles. A ship full of armaments hit a mine in Mobile Bay while they were there, the blast breaking windows in the shops and homes along the harbor. They heard the news of Lee's surrender, participated in parades and mourned when the news came that Lincoln had been assassinated. They spent the month of May in a few miles outside of Mobile, waiting to hear if they would be mustered out when the war officially ended or reassigned for further duty.

On the first of June they sailed for Brazos Santiago at the mouth of the Rio Grande and were stationed there for almost two months until they marched on Brownsville in the first week of August where the unit mustered out at the end of the month. But by then my great great grandfather was no longer with them. He fell ill at some point in July and was evacuated to an army hospital at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis where he died and was buried in what, one year later, became one of America's first national cemeteries.

Alonzo's wife, Mary, was also getting letters from her brother, Martin Abbott, who served with the 26th Wisconsin, a unit comprised mostly of Germans that also took part in Sherman's March. Martin Abbott had one of his thumbs shot off during the war. It didn't keep him from writing letters and his letters make clear that he was there with 'Uncle Billy'.

April, the cruelest month

Six or eight months ago I threatened in one of my posts to translate parts of several books I had then recently acquired from an antiquarian bookseller in Germany. The books concern the life and poetic works of Colonel Konrad Krez, the man who commanded the regiment in which my German immigrant great great grandfather fought and died during the American Civil War.

I am pleased to report that I have not only translated a portion of one of those books; I now have it published online. I've translated the Foreword to 'An Mein Vaterland', a slim volume that contains the collected poems of Konrad Krez. The Foreword was written by Ludwig Finckh in 1938, a point in time in which he was one of the better known living writers in the German language. He also at least appears to have been a fairly well-heeled member of the National Socialist Party.

Konrad Krez died on March 9, 1897, the same year that my great grandfather died at the age of 41 in an industrial accident. Ludwig Finckh wrote an historical novel in 1936 about Krez, the 'Forty-Eighter', who escaped from Germany to America in 1850 after the failed 1848 Revolution and rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The 'fictional' account created enough of a stir in Nazi Germany to justify publication of the Krez poems two years later and to effect a reconciliation between the ghost of Konrad Krez and Landau in the Pfalz, the city and province from which he had unceremoniously departed eighty-eight years earlier.

My unauthorized translation of Ludwig Finckh's 'Foreword' and of the title poem, 'An Mein Vaterland', can be viewed at the Wiki-En German Genealogy website, not formally affiliated with the Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia.

Schloss Sanssouci

I visited Germany several years ago and spent the better part of a day in Potsdam after a short train ride from Berlin and a much longer walk than I had anticipated. I got off the train one stop too early and walked for about an hour and a half or more, across a bridge and along a river, in what I thought must be the general direction of the Schloss Sanssouci. It took a while, but I found it, although I entered the park at a point that was nearly as far as you could get from the main buildings. I had only taken a few pictures when the battery light started flashing. If I had known what to expect I would have made sure the battery was fully charged. The pictures I did get were of some smaller buildings that were put up to house, protect and display some of the ancient Roman ruins on the park grounds. If you click your mouse on the pictures once or twice, the buildings I did shoot get quite a bit bigger.

Fredericks of Brandenburg

I don't know yet if Johann Georg Lubach was an ancestor of mine, but in investigating that possibility I've found that he led what looks to have been quite an interesting life and from what I've learned so far I don't think I'd object to having him as an ancestor. I'm not sure how he'd feel about me as a descendant.

He was born in 1672 in the town of Moeckern near Leipzig in Saxony and was apparently raised as an orphan. His status as an orphan didn't prevent him from attending the University of Halle. Completing his studies in 1697 at the age of 25, he took a job on campus straight out of college, supervising orphans and teaching at a school for them that officially opened its doors the following year in 1698. He worked there for about fifteen years, then in 1714 he moved from Halle in what is now Saxony Anhalt to Brandenburg where he settled in a town east of Berlin called Wriezen and took a job as a Kantor. He stayed there for about eight years before moving to Garlitz/Rathenow, west of Berlin, where he worked organizing churches and schools until he retired. John George Lubach eventually died in 1752, at the age of 80, in a town called Goerlitz on the Neisse in Upper Lusatia, not far from Dresden.

I don't know his wife's name or how many children he had, but it looks as if one son, Godofroy, born in 1713, had a chance to teach for awhile at the orphan school in Halle in 1736. Godofroy seems to have been a Cantor by trade. He might well have even been personally acquainted with Johann Sebastian Bach, someone who also worked as a Cantor in and near Leipzig in that era. Bach was also raised as an orphan and was about a dozen years younger than Godofroy's father.

Godofroy appears to have had two sons, Daniel, born 1741, and Gottfried, born 1744. Their father seems to have died before they attended the orphan school at Halle. They were both listed as orphans from the village of Gartz on the Oder, a little north of Schwedt, and their father's profession was listed as Cantor. They were in Halle between 1756 and 1763. One of them must have had a son at some point because another Lubach, Gotthilf, was enrolled at Halle in 1797. I don't have a birthdate or a home village for Gotthilf, but I would guess he was born around 1780 or a little after.

My ancestor, Wilhelm Lubach, was born around 1827 and he emigrated from a village in Brandenburg called Wrechow in 1856 with his wife and two small sons. Wrechow is just across the Oder about ten or twelve miles from Wriezen. A number of orphans from both villages were enrolled at the orphan school in Halle during the 18th century, so it would appear likely that the Pietists who ran the school at Halle had established churches in both villages.

One of the most interesting things about Johann Georg Lubach is that he lived to be eighty years old. Prussia was ruled by the Great Elector, Friederich Wilhelm, from 1640 up until 1688 when the orphan, Johann Georg Lubach, was sixteen years old. He died in 1752, twelve years into the reign of Frederick the Great. Between 1688 and 1740, two other Fredericks ruled Prussia, Frederick I and his son, Frederick William I, each of them for about twenty-five years.

This eighty year stretch in European history was the period in which Prussia went from being an obscure dukedom on the Baltic Sea to an empire that extended from France all the way to Russia. The orphan school in Halle where Johann Georg Lubach taught was supported by all four of these Fredericks and the students the school produced were nothing less than instrumental in making Prussia an empire.

A Rose By Any Other Name

A year or so ago I found a webpage called the Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle. I didn't know quite what to make of it at the time. But I did find it curious as there were several people listed with my surname. Those people are still listed there and, in point of fact, one more person with my surname has been added to the list.

If you click on the link you should get a long list of German surnames that start with the letter 'L'. My surname is near the bottom of the list, filed alphabetically. I won't bore you with the details of my personal concerns. The question is, what in the world is this list all about? A year ago I found it quite confusing. But the site has been updated a little in the interim and now every name on the list is a link to personal details about each of the names on the list. All of them were dead by the time America's constitution was ratified.

Halle is a city near Leipzig in the state of Saxony Anhalt, one of half a dozen or so new states established as part of the recently reunified Germany. It used to be part of East Germany and for almost half a century the information on that list would probably have been accessible to STAASI, the East German secret police.

If I had gone to East Germany when I finished graduate school during the last days of the Reagan era, someone in the state police there would probably have been obliged to consult this list. My surname is fairly unique. Simply by finding my surname on this list they would have known more about me than I know about myself.

A House On Baltic Avenue

I signed up for Blogshares a few days ago after finding out that one of my visitors had purchased 25% of the imaginary shares in my blog. I joined so I could buy up 50% of the imaginary shares and a controlling interest with imaginary money that Blogshares gives you for signing up. I figured that at 37 cents a share it was too good a deal to pass up.

The bad news is that my blog is valued at less than B$2,000.00. The good news is that some of the other Blogshares investors were so impressed by my business acumen that they have given me shares in three other blogs worth nearly B$9,000,000.00, so now I have the wherewithal to invest in other blogs.

If you think your blog might be a good investment, do let me know. I've got imaginary money to spend. Their link is at the bottom of my blogroll. I also signed up for Adsense, but so far they haven't found any ads that make sense for my blog.

Mr. Ed

I exhanged e-mails over the holidays with a third cousin once removed, a granddaughter of my great grandfather's sister. My cousin verified that she lived in the same house with her grandmother for a number of years up until her grandmother's death at age 77 in 1935, when she was twelve years old. She said that her grandmother's brother from Kewaskum came across the state of Wisconsin and stayed with her family in Chippewa county for a few days during the funeral. She didn't recall the name of her grandmother's brother, but that doesn't matter because I already know who it was that visited, but until now I couldn't prove it. It had to have been my great grandfather's step-brother, Ed or Edward Lubach.

My middle name is Edward. It is also my father's middle name and before that it was my grandfather's middle name. My grandfather, in fact, was known by his middle name and not by his first name. I can't prove it, but I have no doubt that my grandfather, my father and I all have the same namesake. We all got our middle initial from my great grandfather's brother, Ed, who at age 72 attended the funeral of my cousin's grandmother in 1935. I'm fairly certain that Ed was a brother by marriage and not by blood.

When my great great grandfather died in the Civil War in 1865 he left behind a widow and three children. His widow remarried in 1867. Her new husband's youngest son, Edward, was then four years old. By 1880 all three of her children, Charles, William and Louise, had married and moved away. Edward and his parents, his father and his stepmother, remained in Sheboygan county, a few miles north of the town of Kewaskum, for the rest of their lives. Edward adopted the surname of his stepmother's first husband who had died in the war.

When I put together my family history webpage a year and a half ago I had a vague hunch that this could be the case. I viewed it as an interesting possiblilty, one worth exploring, but now I have no doubt whatsoever.

Santa's Chimney

I spent at least part of my Christmas holiday thirty feet off the ground with my rear end in a sling.






My wife and I went to a resort in Palawan, one of the least developed provinces in the Philippines. The island is long and narrow, extending most of the way from Luzon to Borneo on the westernmost side of the archipelago.

The resort, El Nido, offered rock-climbing as one of its numerous diversions and naturally I couldn't resist. The picture was taken by one of my climbing guides, a 23 year old Filipina who was on the ground attached to the other end of my rope, patiently waiting for me to lose my grip. Somehow I managed to get back on the ground without doing any permanent damage to myself or the rock face. The painful part was hearing how impressed my guide was that someone my age, fifty-two, would attempt something so strenuous. Two or three days later I could nearly raise my right arm over my head.

Click on the pictures to see enlarged versions. I've got more if you'd like to see them.

Dock of the Bay

My German immigrant great great grandfather, who I discovered on the internet during the past two years, spent the last six months of his life on the Gulf Coast in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas in the final months and aftermath of the American Civil War. He took part in only one real battle, the assault on Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley, the forts on Mobile Bay that kept Mobile from falling into Union hands until after Robert E. Lee had already surrendered in Virginia in April, 1865.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a recent book by Andrew Ward called 'River Run Red', an account of the Fort Pillow Massacre, which took place on the Mississippi River north of Memphis in April, 1864, an event about which I knew nothing until I encountered Ward's book. To be honest, I had never even heard of Fort Pillow, an incident in which surrendering Union soldiers, mostly 'colored troops', were given no quarter and slaughtered by their Confederate captors. But I have since uncovered a few articles about the fall of Mobile which suggest that the memory of Fort Pillow figured prominently in the battle that delivered Mobile to Union occupation.

Michael Fitzgerald, a history professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, wrote an article published in 2001 in the Alabama Review entitled 'Another Kind of Glory: Black Participation and Its Consequences in the Campaign for Confederate Mobile.' According to Fitzgerald nearly one fourth of the 50,000 or more Union troops assembled for the assault on the forts defending Mobile were "colored troops", largely freed slaves from southern plantations recruited and trained specifically for the siege of Mobile.

"Remember Fort Pillow," was apparently the battle cry heard from the 'colored troops' massed along the river on the right flank at Fort Blakeley as they charged the Confederate lines a full half hour before the signal to attack was given. So many of the Confederate defenders in the trench line around the fort had moved to the flank to repel the premature charge, according to Fitzgerald, that the center of the line offered little resistance when the main attack ensued.

Another Manila Sunrise

These are a few snapshots I took a few weeks ago on a day when I got up early enough for a round of golf. The pictures were taken at about fifteen minute intervals between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m.. The view is of the Makati highrise district along the midpoint of the Epiphanios De Los Santos, more commonly known as EDSA. Click on the pictures to see enlarged versions of them.
I received several e-mails since my last post, one from a woman in Virginia with roots in Indiana who wanted permission to send copies of one of my early posts, Not Quite White, to family and friends in Indiana for Christmas. She thinks she might also have some native American ancestry from the Indiana frontier and seemed to think I must have a sense of humor.

Another e-mail was from a neighbor of someone I mentioned in a more recent post about relations and in-laws I discovered through census records and who still lives in Bloomer, Wisconsin. I plan to follow-up on that one, but I'm not yet sure how.


The third e-mail I got this week came in today.
It's from Lowell Schake, whose book about life on the Missouri frontier in LaCharrette Village has now been published. I'll have to keep an eye out to see if it turns up in any of the bookstores here in Manila.

That's about all I've got for now.

River Run Red

When I was on home leave in Seattle several months ago I finally had an opportunity to meet the author, Andrew Ward, in person. My wife taught in the same department at the university as his wife a dozen or so years ago, so I had known about him for quite some time and had read several of his books. He told me had written another one, this time a book about an incident from the Civil War. It hadn't yet been published then, but it has now and I was able to buy it at a bookstore here in Manila last week. It's not yet out in paperback (don't hold your breath), but it's well worth the hardbound price. Ken Burns himself wrote the blurb on the back cover.

Ward anatomizes a Civil War battle fought in western Tennessee in April, 1864, known as the Fort Pillow Massacre. The book deals with the efforts of the Union army to enlist what were known then as "colored troops" after the slaves in the southern states had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation early in 1863. I haven't yet read the whole book, so I won't try to review it here, but much of the story revolves around a Confederate cavalry general and local slave dealer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who many people regard as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. The reputation he developed and the methods he employed in that massacre do much to explain how the Klan came into being and has managed to persist for nearly a century and a half.

The book is particularly interesting to me because my German immigrant great great grandfather served with the 27th Wisconsin Infantry, a unit that spent most of the war in Arkansas, directly across the Mississippi River from Fort Pillow. My ancestor didn't join the unit until early 1865 as a replacement troop. He was in Arkansas for only a few days or perhaps a week or two at most before the unit went downriver to New Orleans in preparation for the siege of Mobile, but the men of his regiment had spent the previous two years in circumstances almost identical to those painstakingly described in Ward's book.

A primary mission for the Department of Arkansas under General Frederick Steele was to recruit, organize and train "colored troops" from among the many freed slaves in Arkansas. When the forts fell in Mobile in April, 1865, the fortifications there were breached by "colored troops" while my great great grandfather's unit and many others were held back in reserve.

House That Ruth Built

When I was about six years old my family drove from Kansas to South Bend, Indiana, for a summertime visit to my mother's family. Bud and Carlie Steele were the only grandparents I ever knew, as my dad's parents in Wisconsin had passed on before I was born.

The year was 1959. It was the last time the White Sox went to the World Series until just last month. My dad was a big Sox fan then, as my folks had gone to college in Chicago about ten years earlier. At age 6 I was already a Yankee fan, which my dad considered heretical. But in those days, televised baseball consisted of the Yankee powerhouse and whatever collection of bums they happened to be playing that Saturday. Dizzy Dean and PeeWee Reese provided color commentary and play-by-play every week. The Yankees had Mantle and Maris in the outfield, Kubek and Richardson up the middle, Boyer and Skowron at the corners and the battery of old Whitey Ford and Don Larsen throwing the pill to old Yogi Berra, backed up by the young rookies, Mel Stottlemyer throwing to Elston Howard.

I met my great grandparents on that trip, Ira and Stella Ruth. They were about eighty-five years old then and living independently in a three-story rooming house that my great grandfather had built back when automobiles were still a novelty item. I remember lots of wooden stairs and a living room with countless porcelain knickknacks and my mother was quite concerned that I might break some of them if I wasn't careful. My great grandparents walked with canes; they didn't hear well and their memories were going. My great grandfather had developed a habit of going out for morning walks and getting lost on his way back home and this was mostly what my mother and her mother talked about while my sisters and I eyeballed the antiques we were enjoined from damaging.

My mother passed on about six years ago and her mother died ten years before that in 1990 at the age of 90. I never really learned much from them about the Ruths except that it seemed they had always lived in South Bend, although in fact I don't think they moved there until after the turn of the century. Since joining Ancestry.com and gaining access to the census records a few weeks ago, I've already learned more than my mother or my grandmother ever told me about them. I really had no idea what their history was.

My grandmother's father, Ira Ruth, was living in LaGrange County in Indiana in 1900, which is about thirty miles east of South Bend. He and Stella and their first child, Carlie, my grandmother, lived in Van Buren Township practically on the stateline between Indiana and Michigan. My great grandmother was listed as Mary Ruth in 1910 and in 1920, but in 1900 she called herself Stella. She was born in Indiana. Her husband, Ira, called himself a farmer then. My grandmother was a newborn infant, one month old, in 1900. The family moved to South Bend between 1900 and 1910 and moved again to the 7th Ward in Portage Township in downtown South Bend between 1910 and 1920. By then Ira called himself a carpenter and I suspect he had already built the three-story boarding house I visited in 1959.

Before 1900, Ira Ruth had lived in Michigan where he was born in 1874. His parents were Augustus and Sarah (Andre?) Ruth. They were apparently both born in Lower Mt. Bethel Township in Northampton County in Pennsylvania, very close to the New Jersey stateline, about ten miles north of Easton, PA.. Augustus Ruth was the son of John Ruth, a wheelwright in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, who was born in 1817. John and Anna Ruth moved to Michigan with their sons Michael and Augustus in 1867 and the family lived in Park Township in St. Joseph County, Michigan, where they were listed as farmers in 1870.

Augustus and Sarah (Andre) Ruth were married in Michigan shortly after 1870. Both of their families had lived in eastern Pennsylvania for perhaps more than a hundred years in a predominately Swiss-German community that had settled there when the land was still occupied by Delaware Indians. The arrival of Germans in the 1750s had helped to precipitate the French and Indian War. I don't yet have a name for John Ruth's father or grandfather, but his milieu suggests that his ancestors were part of the same wave of immigration that brought my grandfather's family, the Steeles, to Pennsylvania in the 1750s.

My understanding is that the baseball player, George Herman Ruth, was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1895 and raised in an orphanage, according to a biography that I read many years ago, written by the late great sportswriter, Bob Considine. He seems to have been named after his father who was also a George Herman Ruth, but beyond that not much is known about the Bambino's ancestry. Baltimore is certainly close enough to Philadelphia that it is possible for the Babe to have been a distant relative. His father would have been born shortly after the Civil War, just at the point when my ancestors were moving west to Lake Michigan.

Heman

Well, I've had a field day with online access to the U.S. census records and I've learned a few things. One of the main things I've learned is that before 1910 my Boettcher ancestors spelled their name with one "t", as Boetcher, instead of the more usual spelling with two "tt"s.

I found my great great grandfather, John Boetcher, living in "Heman" township in Dodge County in Wisconsin in 1860, along with his wife, Minnie, and their children, Charles (Carl), Auguste, Herman and Hanna. The family immigrated in 1856, arriving in August according to my aunt, and that explains why Carl and Auguste were born in Prussia, while Herman and Hanna were born in Wisconsin. Dodge County has no records of a town or township called "Heman", but it did, like Sheboygan County, have a Herman Township that was popular with Prussian immigrants.

Their next door neighbor in "Heman" was a couple named John and Albertine Backhaus. John Backhaus was 46 and his wife, Albertine, was 24. Their oldest son was William, aged 13, which suggests that John had a previous spouse, unless Albertine gave birth at age 11. I haven't located either family in the 1870 census, but in 1880, John and Minnie Boetcher lived at Eagle Point in Chippewa County and their daughter, Hanna, was also there, married to my great grandfather, William Lubach. John and Minnie's next door neighbor in 1880 was the widow, Albertine Backhaus. I didn't find John Backhaus, which suggests he must already have passed on at that point.

More than 2,500 people lived in Eagle Point in 1880, according to the census. The town was named after "Old Abe", the war eagle who served as a mascot for the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, a part of the "Iron Brigade", easily the most celebrated of all of the Wisconsin units that served in the Civil War. Old Abe was purchased upriver from some Chippewa (Ojibwa) Indians and raised as a pet by members of the McCann clan who settled in Eagle Point shortly after the Blackhawk War of 1832. Members of the McCann family had known and worked with Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, when he was a young lieutenant and later a captain during the Blackhawk War.

The McCann clan essentially built Chippewa Falls from the ground up. They were the lumber business on the Chippewa River. During the 1870s farmers began arriving there, many of them German, Scandinavian and Bohemian or Slovakian. Tilden, where my ancestors established their homestead, Woodmohr, was not yet a township in 1880, so it appears that records for this influx of farmers were maintained at Eagle Point. The 1890 census for Wisconsin was destroyed in a fire, but in 1900 many of the families listed as living in Eagle Point in 1880 had long been settled in Tilden Township. Among the settlers listed at Eagle Point in 1880 was John Boetcher's father, Christian Boetcher, who was born in Prussia in 1794.

I mention Albertine Backhaus here because in 1860 my great grandfather, William Lubach, was living in Sheboygan County not far from Lake Michigan. He was four years old and lived in Scott Township. His neighbors on one side were the Ludwig and Henrietta Backhaus family and on the other side were Wilhelm and Maria D. Ebert and their family. The next nearest neighbors on that side were August and Sophia Heise. William's father, Wilhelm Lubach, fought in the Civil War along with August Heise in Company F of the 27th Wisconsin Infantry. August Heise returned; Wilhelm Lubach didn't.

Wilhelm Ebert's son, William, joined the 12th Wisconsin Infantry on February 22nd, 1864, when he was twenty years old. He was severely wounded at Bald Hill on July 21st, and saw some of the fiercest fighting in the Battle of Atlanta. He was discharged in January 1865 and returned to Scott Township where he was declared an invalid in February so that he and his wife, Fredericke, could receive a disability pension. According to the government he collected that pension until 1916. He and Fredericke raised a family in Scott Township. A blogpost I published in December last year, headed Gone With The Wind, details some of William Ebert's Civil War experience.

Wilhelm Lubach's widow, Maria, according to government pension records, married her next door neighbor, Ludwig Backhaus. I don't know what happened to Ludwig's wife, Henrietta, but I do know that in 1870 , a child named Edward, born in 1862 or 1863, was part of the Ludwig and Mary Backhaus household. I suspect that Henrietta may have died giving birth to Edward. The 1865 state census for Wisconsin lists only three children for the Lubach family, Carl, William and Louise. I would think Edward would have been listed as a fourth child if he was actually born a Lubach. He was listed as a Backhaus in the U.S. census of 1870.

Edward Lubach doesn't appear in the 1880 census and the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire, but in 1900 he and his wife, Catharine A. (Luhn) are living in Scott Township, along with a son, Edward, age 12, and five daughters. Also included in the household is his mother-in-law, Catharine Luhn. The 1860 census has her married to Jacob Luhn, a Prussian who was part of the same cluster with the Ebert, Lubach, Backhaus and Heise families. Catharine was from Hessen Darmstadt. The family disappears again in 1910, except for two of the children, Alexander, 23, and Ella, 19, who are listed in nearby Lynden Township as servants in the Charles Sibley household. Edward and Catharine appear again in 1920 in Scott Township with two more daughters who were not yet born in 1900. Their next door neighbors in 1920 are Alexander and Selma Lubach, who have recently blessed them with a granddaughter, Arline, and a grandson, Edward.

My great great grandmother, Marie Lubach, experienced a little trauma during the Civil War. A German emigration record suggests that Marie had a sister named Sophie and that they were the daughters of Wilhelm and Maria D. Ebert, their next door neighbors. Sophie was married to August Heise, who went off to war on the gulf coast with Wilhelm Lubach in January, 1865. A month later, William Ebert, the Ebert sisters' younger brother, returned from the war early with a severe wound and a disability pension. Two years later, Marie was a grieving widow married to her next door neighbor and raising a child whose mother, most likely, had died during the war. Her sons, Carl and William, don't appear in the 1870 census, but in 1880 Carl has married Catharine (Guth) up north in Fondulac. They will live in nearby Kewaskum for a few years before moving to Ohio where they will lose three sons to a diptheria epidemic in 1893. William has married Hanna (Boetcher) way out west in Chippewa. Marie's daughter, Louise, age 12, is still at home in Scott in 1870. She married Carl Boetcher in Sheboygan County in 1880, shortly before they also moved west to Chippewa.

Two months ago I published a post on this blog headed Bloomer Advance with a link to a letter written by Vernon Kressin earlier this year. The letter indicated that he and his wife, Lois, had visited the grave of Wilhelm Lubach, who fought in the Civil War and died in St. Louis. Vernon Kressin's ancestors are listed living in Eagle Point in 1880. Lois Kressin is the daughter of Carl and Louise Boettcher's son, Edwin, who was born in Tilden Township. If her claim to be the great granddaughter of Wilhelm Lubach is true, it virtually cinches my claim that Hanna (Boetcher) Lubach was the younger sister of Carl Boettcher and that Louise (Lubach) Boettcher was the younger sister of William Lubach.

Most of the people in America with my surname, Lubach, live in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I don't think any of them are related to me, but some of them do have an an ancestor who was raised by my great great grandmother.

The town of Kewaskum is five or ten miles south of Scott Township in Sheboygan County and ten or twenty miles east of Herman Township in Dodge County. If you visit Kewaskum do take a tour of the cemeteries. You'll see world class gothic monuments. Roughly a third of the people buried in those cemeteries are named Backhaus. I don't know yet exactly how Ludwig Backhaus (b. 1815) in Scott Township and John Backhaus (b. 1813) in Herman Township were related, but I'll bet you a hundred dollars they were.

In a Dark Time

Well, I've done it now. I finally broke down and shelled out the bucks for an Ancestry.com membership. Nearly all of the information I've accumulated and posted about my family history on my webpage in the past three years, and here on my blog in the past year, has come from the internet free of charge. So why am I now willing to part with the big bucks? Am I selling out? Do the pay sites suddenly have vital information worth more than ten dollars a month to me? I don't think so, on either count.

The main thing you get with a membership is comprehensive access to several main sets of database records, the largest and most important of these being the U.S. Federal Census Records and the Social Security Death Index. You can search these records without being a paying member; you just can't see the results. Instead all you get is an indication of the number of hits on your search item in those databases. But simply knowing that there are hits can be a very useful clue. When there are hits, the specifics can often be accessed elsewhere free of charge.

Rootsweb and U.S. GenWeb are large free database projects that make relevant portions of the federal census records and other databases available to localized free genealogy websites. Most counties in America have one or more websites that exist solely for the purpose of making records available to people whose roots are in that locality. So if you know what you are looking for and where to look for it on the web, you can usually find it. What Ancestry.com and other paysites sell is convenient and comprehensive access.

I guess what's happened to me is that I've reached the point where I've decided I don't mind paying for convenient, comprehensive access. First, I can afford it. Second, it's a worthwhile product. And third, I've reached a point where I can start to make use of some of the vast quantity of information that is related less specifically to my particular ancestors. Comprehensive access allows you to make better generalizations based on peripheral data.

I'm fortunate to have at least one fairly distinctive surname to trace. My last name is not one that you encounter everyday. If you were to canvas all of the phone books in America, you would find fewer people with my surname than you would find listed under Smith or Jones in any one small town in America. And with only a few hundred or perhaps one or two thousand total listings to draw on, it's not that hard to eliminate those that are probably not directly related to me.

While the items that I have found and posted on my webpage are not necessarily always the proverbial "smoking gun" of definitive proof, they are often enough sufficient evidence on which to base an assumption or a supposition. And when a supposition leads directly or even indirectly to a subsequent find, it indicates something about the validity of that supposition.

Now for something completely unrelated, I've added another reciprocal link to my blogroll.

In a Dark Time features some terrific wildlife photography and some excellent commentary and personal reflections on poems by many of the most significant modern American poets of the past century. I include it here because of the entries on Theodore Roethke and Nelson Bentley.

"I Shall Return"

Ruins of the Mile Long Barracks on Corregidor. The portion in the foreground had served as MacArthur's office until the Japanese Air Force redesigned it as a rock garden.















A bronze statue of the late American Caesar, General Douglas MacArthur, on a bluff above the beach at Corregidor, the island fortress he commanded at the mouth of Manila Bay. Across the water behind him is the Bataan Peninsula. His famous motto, "I shall return," is inscribed on the stone block to his left. The guns of Corregidor delayed the Japanese conquest of the Philippines for nearly six months at the beginning of American involvement in WWII. Less than three years later, early in 1945, MacArthur did return to Corregidor in preparation for the Battle of Manila.

MacArthur's father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., still in his teens, served in the 24th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War and won a Congressional Medal of Honor leading a charge up Missionary Ridge in the Battle of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. Thirty-five years later he commanded an army unit that took possession of Manila in the Pacific theatre of the Spanish-American War. The 24th was one of only a handful of regiments that trained at Camp Sigel in Milwaukee. Others included the 9th, the 26th, the 27th and the 45th. The 26th was nearly all German and served along with the 24th at Missionary Ridge. Arthur MacArthur died from a heart attack in 1912 while attending the 50th reunion of the 24th in Milwaukee.

MacArthur's grandfather, Arthur MacArthur Sr. , was a lawyer in Milwaukee. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1856, but served as governor while the outcome of the gubernatorial election was in dispute. After the Civil War he served as a federal judge in Washington D.C.. The governor of Wisconsin who was elected in 1862 drowned shortly after taking office while surveying Union casualties at Shiloh in Tennessee. His term was served out by a German, Edward Salomon, whose brothers, Charles and Frederick, both commanded Wisconsin regiments during the war.

My great great grandfather died serving in the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, commanded by Konrad Krez, a prominent German lawyer and poet from Sheboygan. Krez also commanded the 28th Wisconsin at the brigade level in the latter stages of the war.

The pictures above were taken yesterday on my second visit to Corregidor. My first visit there was five years ago shortly after I arrived in Manila. On a clear day I can look out over Manila Bay from my living room and see "the Rock" thirty miles away on the horizon.

I don't think I'm responsible for the spam barrage in the comments below.