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.

Upstate Huguenot?

Visitors to my webpage will be aware that my interest in genealogy began about two years ago when I found a cemetery transcription online that included my great grandparents and several other German immigrants, who moved with them in the 1870s from Sheboygan County near the shore of Lake Michigan to Chippewa County near the Minnesota stateline. The cemetery transcript led me to some 1910 census records for Chippewa County. The record for Tilden Township shows my Great Aunt Louise, who was then boarding with her Uncle August and his wife, Minnie Boettcher. It also shows their neighbor, Mikel Meyer, and his family.

The oldest person in the Meyer household then was Mikel's father, Ludwig, who was 91 years old in 1910. Directly below Ludwig's name on the census is that of Kata Toussaint. She was 26 years old and listed on the census as a "servant". Her job appears to have involved looking after old Ludwig Meyer. The census record indicates that she spoke no English, but did speak German, and she arrived in Wisconsin only one year earlier in 1909.

Kata Toussaint is of interest to me because in recent months I've been looking for evidence that would support my hunch that my great great grandparents may have originated in a part of Germany known as the Uckermark. I hadn't given much thought to Ms. Toussaint until recently when I became aware that the Uckermark was colonized by French Huguenots at the end of the 17th century. I've since learned that Toussaint is the name of one of the Huguenot families that were given refuge in the Uckermark by Frederick the Great following the Thirty Years War, which along with the plague had severely depopulated that region. Frederick considered the religious views of the Huguenots compatible with the outlook of the few Germans who had somehow survived one of the most brutal religious conflicts in recorded history.

Her presence in the Meyer household in 1910 doesn't really answer any of my questions, but it has raised some new ones I hadn't previously considered.

Bethania

A ship called the 'Susanne Godeffroy' sailed from Hamburg in September of 1863 and arrived a few months later in Queensland, Australia, becoming the nucleus of the first German colony in Queensland, a settlement that its numerous descendants now refer to as the Bethania Colony. Two years later another ship, the 'Wandrahm' arrived there, significantly expanding the original settlement.

One of the founders of that colony was Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ebert, who arrived on the 'Susanne Godeffroy' along with his wife, Johanne, and their two daughters, Bertha and Auguste. They were from the village of Stegelitz in the Uckermark. According to the history of the colony, Carl Ebert was one of the five men who purchased the land that became the colony. August Wilhelm Flesser from Warnitz, and his wife, Marie Christine (Lubach) from Schmiedeberg, arrived two years later on the 'Wandrahm' with their eight children. The ship arrived bearing a typhoid fever epidemic that killed twenty-two passengers and kept the ship in quarantine for a full year before the three or four hundred surviving passengers could disembark and join the colony. Eventually, one of their sons, Wilhelm Friedrich Flesser, married Auguste Wilhelmine Ebert. One of their daughters, Wilhelmine Friedericke Justine Flesser, eventually married Jurgen August Haack, a young man who had worked as a deckhand on the 'Wandrahm' and was apparently quarantined along with the passengers. Descendants of Jurgen and Justine Haack have assembled a Haack Family genealogy which is available online.

Close scrutiny of the surname list for the Bethania Colony reveals that sometime around 1880 another ship arrived in Queensland carrying the family of Johann Christian Friedrich Lubach and his wife, Marie (Flatow), from the village of Grunberg in the Uckermark. They were married in Marie's home village of Schmoelln which is only a handful of miles from Schmiedeberg. Their sons and daughters naturally intermarried with other German settler families in the colony, among them descendants of August and Marie (Lubach) Flesser.

Cousins marrying cousins is less of a tip-off to me, that these Australian pioneers might be distant relatives, than the names of some of the other settlers. The founder of the Bethania Colony was Christian Berndt. My grandmother's maiden name was Bernd and family lore has it that the 't' at the end was dropped. My grandfather's sister in upstate Wisconsin, married a Kurth. Again, a close look at the Bethania surname list shows a significant number of Kurths in Queensland.

Global Village

I'm posting a link for a website about Schloss Wartin, a Pomeranian manor house originally built three centuries ago in the days of Frederick the Great. I mention it because it's quite close to several villages in the Uckermark that I'm told have church records listing the Lubach surname as among their inhabitants as far back as that period. I doubt that any of my ancestors spent much time at the schloss, except perhaps to deliver goods or provide services to the eminences whose occasional presence graced their community. Since reunification the manor has been leased for restoration purposes and community outreach enterprises, among them serving as a WiFi hotspot compliments of Hewlett Packard. Two other short essays about the Schloss are linked at the top of the page, detailing East German Stasi and Nazi Luftwaffe activities at Schloss Wartin in bygone eras.

A nice map of the vicinity can be found on the German version of the site. If you read German you can probably find pictures of the garden, the library and the guard dog. The lower portion of the map shows the area where my ancestors were last seen in East Brandenburg in 1856, a few kilometres south of Chojna (Koenigsburg) and a little north of where it says Moryn (Mohrin). My theory is that they lived in one of several villages near Wartin, but were sent south and east across the Oder River after the 1848 Revolution. Quite a few villages had manor houses at one time, but not many were still standing after the Red Army came through.

Another Civil War Ancestor?

I've been looking at the Civil War rosters for Wisconsin recently and am beginning to wonder if perhaps I have more than one great great grandfather who fought in the war. My great grandfather, William Lubach, was married to a woman whose maiden name was Johannah Boettcher. Those who have visited my webpage will know that they are both buried in a small cemetery in Tilden township near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and it is fairly clear that Hannah was the daughter of August and Henrietta Boettcher. August was born in 1835 and died in 1898, which would mean that he was thirty in 1865. Civil War rosters for Wisconsin show only six men named Boettcher enrolled in Wisconsin regiments during the war and only one named August Boettcher, who served in Company B of the 45th Wisconsin. He listed his home in October, 1864, as Mosel, Wisconsin, which is a small suburb on the shore of Lake Michigan in Sheboygan County. Is it the same August Boettcher? The name Boettcher is a German word that essentially means 'barrel maker' and the English equivalent would be something like Cooper which also means barrel maker, so it's a very common German name. The earliest confirmed record I have of any of my Boettchers is Hannah's marriage to my great grandfather, but it stands to reason that the daughter of a veteran would have married someone whose father had also fought in the war, rather than, for instance, a newly arrived immigrant just off of the dock. I'm thinking it's a good bet and one I should be able to confirm fairly easily once I've found someone who will search census records for me in that part of Sheboygan County. If the names and ages of the spouse and children correspond with those in the Tilden graveyard, the evidence would be pretty incontrovertible. Another Boettcher named Charles also served with the 45th as a commissioned Commisary Sergeant. Could he have been August's brother? Nearly 90,000 men were enlisted in Wisconsin during the war, only six were named Boettcher and these two served in the same unit. Looks like a distinct possibility to me. The 45th was formed at the beginning of 1865 and the men of the 45th only served for the first six months of that year. They were assigned to guard duty in Nashville. More than half of the men in Company B were listed as having been drafted into service and as such were not volunteers, although August Boettcher was listed as a volunteer..

Happy New Year

I spent Christmas on a beach on a small island near the large island of Palawan, which separates the Sulu Sea from the South China Sea, and was windsurfing on the 26th in the hours immediately following the tsunami. We didn't learn about the wave until we arrived back in Manila on the 27th. Reaching our resort required a four engine propeller plane to get us to an unpaved landing strip in a clearing in the jungle, and a ten minute jeepney ride from there to the Verde River which is called that because it's green. Then a hike along the river to the launch which took us across the river to the outrigger or "bance" for an hour long ride down to the rivermouth and across the bay to the resort. The distance from the beach to a sheer limestone cliff was only about sixty feet, so all of the units were on stilts and built out over the water above the reef. A twenty or thirty foot wave where we were would have left noone alive to tell the tale. Several years ago the Abu Sayaf kidnapped guests from another resort in Palawan and it took nearly a year to rescue the victims, some of whom were killed in the battle with the kidnappers, so security was a bigger concern for us than tidal waves. A 24/7 squad of soldiers wearing combat fatigues and carrying M-16s was assigned to guard the resort, but they were very low profile. We really only saw them when we took boat trips to or from the resort. I think we were the only Americans there as the owner and most of the guests were Japanese.

I haven't yet figured out how to set up a blogroll, but when I do I'm sure I'll list the absent.canadian
who often writes posts concerning the American Civil War. I mention him now because of a link I found on his page for a site called Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. It's a network of online genealogy enthusiasts who volunteer to do lookups on request in the not yet virtual places where they happen to live. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure I will.

Gone With The Wind

I've done some more reading and found additional details concerning William Ebert, the soldier with the 12th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry who I think may have been my great great grandmother's younger brother. The Regimental History for the 12th includes a fairly detailed account of the Battle of Bald Hill outside of Atlanta on July 21st and 22nd, 1864, and William Ebert is specifically mentioned as one of the ten men from Company D who were wounded in that battle on the 21st. Ten more men from that company were killed that day making it the single bloodiest day in the war for Company D. Two regiments, the 12th Wisconsin and the 16th Wisconsin, attacked the outer perimeter of the rebel defense for the city of Atlanta, gaining for the Union a foothold in the series of trenches that had been dug by rebel defenders on the eastern outskirts of the city. Once ensconced inside the defense works, Sherman's army was able to gradually extend its control of the networked trenches over the next two months until the city fell into Union hands.

The 12th had seen very little combat during its first two years in the war, which were spent mostly in the vicinity of Vicksburg as part of an extended siege and subsequent occupation. The rebels there had preferred surrender to starvation. The 12th was apparently "veteranized" in the spring of 1864 for the Army of the Tennessee's push from Kentucky through Tennessee and Alabama into Georgia and the Carolinas. This meant that a number of soldiers with considerable combat experience whose units had completed their three years of service were able to reenlist and transfer into the 12th Wisconsin, a well-seasoned but not yet combat-hardened outfit, rather than start from scratch with a newly formed regiment consisting mostly of green recruits. The men of the 12th in 1864 were in the last year of their three year enlistment and many were counting the days until they could go home having done their stint. Men in the unit who were willing to reenlist were given furloughs that spring so they could visit their families and help recruit replacements for those who didn't plan to reenlist. One of the soldiers in Company D, Charles Waldo, had been a young newspaper editor for the West Bend Post before the war and had regularly published letters in that paper throughout the first two years of his enlistment. His letters didn't glorify the war by any means, but they did make it clear that for a great many infantrymen the war was perhaps not a grand adventure but certainly something different and a bit more interesting than a life of hard labor on the family farm. His accounts of daily life in the army made it abundantly clear that a thousand men from the next county had spent far more time cleaning their guns than shooting them. So it's not that hard for me to imagine a twenty-year-old younger sibling of one of my ancestors joining up, probably in defiance of his elders, a father pushing around a sixty-year-old German beer gut , and the husbands of his older sisters, who were almost forty and couldn't go because they had kids to raise.

Signing up as he did on George Washington's birthday, William Ebert might have had perhaps six or eight weeks of boot camp to learn the basics of soldiering before he was sent off by train to join up with the remainder of the regiment at the end of April in Cairo, Illinois. More than three hundred new recruits joined the regiment that spring and they perhaps had a chance to share their barracks at Camp Randall in Madison for a few days with the five hundred or more "veterans" who had earned furloughs by extending their enlistments. From Cairo they apparently went by boat on the Tennessee River to Clifton, Tennessee, where they arrived on the 14th of May, then they marched 300 miles across northern Alabama through Huntsville to Decatur and on to Rome, Georgia before arriving in Ackworth on the 8th of June as part of "the Atlanta campaign under General Sherman." .

According to the record, twenty-five men from each of six companies from the 12th, comprising a force of 150 men, were assigned the task of storming a rebel entrenchment at Kennesaw Mountain on the 15th of June after a means was found to get past a dense thicket not far from the entrenched position. They managed to dislodge the entrenched rebels and hold their position for a short period of time before rebel reinforcements arrived to drive them back beyond the thicket. The short-lived success of this maneuver seems to have established the blueprint for the plan of attack employed a little more than a month later at Bald Hill. Only one man from Company D was killed at Kennesaw Mountain and a small handful were wounded in the encounter, but the fact that this strategy was repeated suggests that it was viewed as a workable one, albeit potentially quite hazardous. At Bald Hill the battle lasted two days instead of fifteen minutes. The casualty count was much higher, but they were able to establish control of the position and from that foothold in the enemy trenches they carried forward a two-month siege with quite limited losses for their unit.

My guess is that William Ebert, the green recruit, had a good chance to see what soldiers are expected to do at Kennesaw Mountain and a chance to do it himself a month later at Bald Hill, where he suffered a wound that probably put him in a hospital for about six months before he was told in January, 1865, that his services to the Union army were no longer required. He probably returned to Scott Township in mid-January just as my great great grandfather and his brother-in-law were completing whatever training they received at Camp Sigel in Milwaukee in preparation for their great adventure in Mobile Bay and on the Texas gulf coast at the mouth of the Rio Grande.

A retrospective view of Sergeant Charles Waldo, the embedded reporter with the 12th Wisconsin, is provided in a student essay written in 1967 by Herbert Neeck, who had access to an extensive diary maintained by Waldo in addition to the steady stream of letters posted in the West Bend Post. The string of newspaper accounts ends just as my ancestor's probable sibling was undergoing his basic training in Madison. It may be that the trenches on the outskirts of Atlanta weren't real conducive to successful warblogging, but I think we all know that few accounts of what transpired there could really compete with the panoramic view later provided by Margaret Mitchell in 'Gone With The Wind'.

This Just In

I received a few e-mails this week in reply to e-mails I sent. Nothing unusual about that. But I do have some news as a result. I heard from The American Civil War Homepage and am informed that later this month my webpage and I will be listed as their contact for descendants of Civil War soldiers who served in the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. More than a thousand men served in the 27th and three-fourths of them survived the war, so after four or five generations the number of potential descendants of those survivors is now quite large if not yet astronomical. Needless to say, I don't really expect to hear from all of them.

I also heard from the managing editor of the Kewaskum Stateman, a small, family-owned, weekly newspaper that has been in business now for 109 years. I'm told that for a small fee they will be happy to track down an obituary from their archives which may help to resolve one of the enduring mysteries raised on my webpage, the meaning of my middle name. Ordinarily all of my genealogical research is done free of charge, but in this case I'll make an exception as I know what it is I'm looking for and they know how to find it. I don't belong to Ancestry.com or to any of the other big genealogy sites that charge monthly or annual fees for membership. It may be that the paysites are well worth the expense, but I can't vouch for them personally as I've never joined any of them. My experience has been that an amazing amount of material is already freely available on the internet. One of the main purposes of my webpage is to demonstrate just how much information can be gleaned from close reading of only a few key, freely available documents.

My Niche

I signed up with Blog Explosion about a month ago and this is only my third or fourth post as a BE member. Belonging has greatly increased the amount of traffic I get which I guess is the main idea, but the vast majority of those visitors have been of the thirty seconds and out variety. I've gotten a couple of encouraging comments from a few people who have read my blog and managed to find their way to my webpage, but so far I don't really feel like part of an online community. The most important effect of belonging is that my page has had enough visitors so that it now registers on the search engines and I am starting to get the occasional visit from Google searchers for whom my site may be a bit more relevant. Family history enthusiasts, German genealogy researchers and Civil War history buffs occupy related spheres that are separate but have significant overlaps. Blogging is for me a way to look at some of the overlaps and try to find ways to make those separate spheres interesting to outsiders who are not actively involved in any of them. So far I haven't had a great deal of luck, but as a project I think it's one that will take some time to gain momentum and I suspect it will require some patience and persistence.

A day after last week's post appeared I went to lunch at a local Sbarro's, one of my usual haunts. Usually I dine alone as the Filipinos tend to give expats an amount of personal space rarely extended to other Filipinos. But on this occasion an elderly Filipino saw me eating alone and asked if he could share my table. He told me he was eighty-eight years old. That means he was in his mid-twenties when the Japanese began their invasion a few days after Pearl Harbor. He told me that the Japanese were harsh, but that things were very orderly and people felt safe and secure during the Japanese occupation of the country. This man would have been not yet thirty when MacArthur restored American rule to the Philippines. I've read books about the Battle of Manila, some of which estimate the causalties in my immediate neighborhood at far in excess of 100,000 lives, so I knew enough to be able to ask questions that would trigger a few memories. He was especially impressed by last month's elections in the U.S., marveling that Kerry could concede defeat only one day after a poll decided by only a few hundred thousand votes in southern Ohio. Vote-counting in the Philippines routinely takes a month or more to determine an outcome, even when the exit polls suggest a wide margin of victory. Bush-Gore in 2000 is the kind of post-election politicking Filipinos expect from their elections, but usually with a few more shootings than we're accustomed to seeing.

My seatmate from Hong Kong to Manila, the last leg of my recent 30 hour transit from the mid-Pacific via Auckland on an Airbus owned by Cathay Pacific, was a forty-year-old remodeling contractor from Cincinnatti. He'd never been out of the continental U.S. before, but apparently had struck up a romance with a Filipina on the internet. His fiance' was planning to meet him at the airport. Immigration rules say that marriages arranged over the internet don't include a green card unless an in-person, in-country relationship prior to the marriage can be documented. So he planned to spend a week or two in Manila as the guest of his bride-to-be. He seemed fairly content with the role Cincinnatti played in the outcome of the recent U.S. election.

I Have Returned

I've returned feeling refreshed after a two-week travel break with very limited access to the internet. If you must know, I spent a week on Rarotonga and a night on Aitutaki Lagoon. Perhaps at some point I'll post a few pictures. Having just returned to Manila, perhaps it's appropriate to mention a link I found concerning the whereabouts of the son of the late General Douglas MacArthur, who remains an American icon here in the Philippines despite the fact that the generation here who still remembers him with fondness is rapidly dying off. I bring it up because I've begun to suspect that my ancestry is linked in some obscure way with that of the MacArthur clan and may somehow account for some of the circumstances that have brought me here at this point in time. It's all still quite mysterious to me, but I am beginning to think there may be something to this hunch. Douglas MacArthur's father, Arthur, was a Civil War hero, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, where as a teenager he served as a first lieutenant with the 24th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Nearly forty years later, as a lieutenant general, he commanded the U.S. Army forces that captured Manila during the Spanish-American War. Arthur MacArthur's father, Arthur MacArthur Sr., was a lawyer, politician and judge in Milwaukee and in Madison, Wisconsin throughout the Civil War era before accepting a position as a federal judge in Washington D.C. during the Grant administration. Visitors to my webpage might take note of the chain of command I outlined, extending from the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry upward to the command of the VII Army Corps. Arthur MacArthur Sr. was elected lieutenant governor of Wisconsin in 1855 and served briefly as governor in 1856. During the Civil War my great-great grandfather's commanding officer served under and alongside two fellow German officers who were brothers of Edward Salomon, a German immigrant who was elected lieutenant governor of Wisconsin in 1861, but served as governor of the state during the Civil War from 1862 to 1863..

Brazos Santiago

I mentioned that my great-great grandfather's final posting in the Civil War was on the island of Brazos Santiago at the mouth of the Rio Grande. The terrain of that locale was well described when American troops were first stationed there during the Mexican War. Links on that page include an enlargeable map, a more recent photograph of the remains of CampBelknap and a sketch from 1846 of the town of Camargo on the Mexican side of the river. The channel of the Rio Grande is at the far left edge of the map. French troops still occupied that town when Germans from the 27th Wisconsin visited at the end of the war, a rare chance for European grandsons of troops who once fought at Waterloo to get acquainted. A severe hurricane destroyed all of the facilities on the island of Brazos Santiago in 1867 and they were never rebuilt, so it was only used by the military in that brief historical window of twenty years from the birth of the Republic of Texas until the alleged demise of the Confederacy. Another Civil War site has a Harper's Weekly cover from 1863 that featured Brazos Santiago. A map of the Confederacy linked on that page looks strangely reminiscent of last week's red and blue electoral map. I haven't yet found an occasion for mentioning Robert E.Lee, but I'm told that a link to his portrait will earn a reciprocal link and a snappy salute from the sons of the South.

To Hell and Back

Here's another link, one I came across yesterday in my surfing, that I bring up because we are now within forty-eight hours of the 2004 election, the only poll that counts. I think it's fascinating that according to polls the predicted blue and red state outcomes in the electoral college are again following, with only a few exceptions, the old Mason-Dixon line. Indiana is solidly red; Maryland is solidly blue; otherwise the election comes down to the Union versus the Confederacy. Florida, like the Left Coast, is filled with transplanted Yankees, so it's a swing state. Eight states that fought to keep Old Glory in one piece, including New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, are reputedly in danger of becoming Dixie-Cans this year. If half of them do, we're looking at four more years instead of three more months. And if that happens it will be because the alleged losers of that struggle 140 years ago have more enduring memories of it than their northern counterparts. Majorities in Congress have always relied on the Dixie vote for their edge. When fully half of Democratic representation consisted of Dixiecrats, the party was terribly split, especially on issues like civil rights, and southern emphasis on state's rights tended to temper Yankee federalism. Lincoln's party won the ideological war, but lost the peace when it's view of Reconstruction, "malice toward none", failed to hold sway. So the Republicans became the party of big business and didn't really move to the right until FDR, out of necessity, put a lock on leftward leanings in America by turning the union movement into tax-paying businesses.

As to the topic at hand, I don't own a gun and I tend to favor gun control. I don't think that another disputed election outcome is apt to trigger a second Civil War, largely because I'm pretty well convinced that the first one is still going strong. If it is four more years, I think it's likely that in the next four years voters in the northern tier of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, the states from which most of the Union troops were drawn, will regret trusting their welfare to the Dixiecans because in their chagrin it will occur to them how much of their past they have unwittingly forgotten. But I think they have had some help in that regard.

My great great grandfather came to America from East Brandenburg, Prussia in 1856. He lived in America for less than a decade and the last six months of his life were spent as a volunteer, sacrificing his life on the border between Texas and Mexico to preserve the union. He crossed an ocean to come to America and died making sure that his children would inherit the dream of America he had pursued. I only learned who my great great grandfather was within the past two years and the information I used to rediscover his life came via the internet from a country that for most of my life has been two countries. One of the issues raised in this year's electoral campaign is whether there are now really two Americas, just as only a few years ago there were two Germanies.
I live overseas and I'm often asked what country I am from. If it is four more years, I won't have any problem telling people that I come from the "other" America, the one Prussian soldiers died fighting to preserve.