Heimchen Brazos Santiago

I translated this poem more than a year ago. I wanted to be certain that my great great grandfather was actually with his unit in Texas before I put it online. It was my first attempt to translate a Krez poem from German into English. Click on the image to enlarge the German text.

Copied courtesy of Wolfgang Diehl,
Konrad Krez: Freiheitskampfer und Dichter
in Deutschland und Amerika


Pfalzische Verlagsanstalt Gmbh, Landau Pfalz
1988


From a Camp on Brazos Santiago

Come in my tent, you unfeathered singer of the waste.
Hop fearless inside! Gladly I offer you refuge
From the scorching heat of the Mexican sun.

When in the evening the gulf breeze has finally cooled
The burning sand, and on the ocean the stars twinkle
And the barren solitude covers itself with darkness,
And you with your knowing song compensate me for the shadows,
Then I will gladly endure the day's hardships.

Your chirp overheard, I think of the crickets
That I heard in my youth on evenings at home by the fireside
And I hear again the bubbling and gurgling of the waters,
Flowing from the fountain's pipes, as melting ice,
Inexhaustible, perpetually replenishes the cistern,
Quenching the thirst better than the costliest wine.

Unforgettable Pfalz! Whose beauty drips in abundance,
From the southern heat and the chill of the north
Equally remote! Where the poorest freely eats
What the richest, even with gold, has no power to obtain.

I will think of you then in this lake of quicksand,
Your blooming fields, wrinkled with brooks,
Your chestnut forests at the foot of the mountains
And your grape-laden vineyards, where in April
The almond trees bloom, arrayed in bouquet,
Your resplendent orchards with succulent fruit,
Full of cherries and apricots, of apples and pears,
Where twittering hummingbirds nest in the treetops.

All this you become, my tent, for my soul calls me.
How the sun feeds the fantasy of streams and lakes
Appearing here as a vision in the afternoon sand.
And I forget for awhile that only a few
Spare tufts of grass grow in the sand,
That the only fruit, the pear of the thorny cactus,
Uncharitably arms itself with protruding prickles,
That every single droplet of drinkable water flowing
On the surface of this island sinks at once into brine.

And your plain song brings the evening's stillness alive,
And as the northern constellations wheel above me,
My homesickness praises this naked strip of earth
Which the creator, indeed, produced, but forgot to dress.

June, 1865

From the collection 'Aus Wisconsin', first published in 1875.

Last Train To Clarksville

I exchanged e-mails a month ago with a direct descendant of the German-American poet-general, Konrad Krez, who organized and led the regiment in which my Civil War ancestor served. The first message arrived within a day or two of the records I requested from the National Archive. He had taken a look at my online translations of two Krez poems and the foreword by Ludwig Finckh that accompanied the volume of Krez poems published in Germany in 1937. His comments were quite encouraging, so I may try to do a few more translations in the future.

My great great grandfather's service record shows that he was first hospitalized on June 8, 1865 on the island of Brazos Santiago, just south of South Padre Island in Texas at the mouth of the Rio Grande. It's clear that Wilhelm Lubach made the trip on the Clinton with the rest of his unit on June 2, 1865, from Mobile to Brazos Santiago. The date of his hospitalization suggests that he fell ill on the ship as it occurred only two days after June 6, the date the ship arrived. It's not clear how long he stayed there or exactly when he was put on another ship and transferred up the Mississippi to the hospital at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, but I would guess it was within a week or two at most. The port there was a busy place at that time. The unit was moved upriver on the Rio Grande to the town of Clarksville on the 13th of June. One of the documents from Mark Knipping's book about the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment provides a fairly detailed account of the unit's arrival at Brazos Santiago. Click once on the text to enlarge it.

The account was written by the regiment's adjutant. My great great grandfather officially died of pneumonia and it appears in the records that he spent the last eight weeks of his life in a hospital bed. An e-mail from my aunt a year ago indicated that she thought he died of yellow fever, a mosquito borne disease similar in some respects to dengue or to malaria. The incubation period is about ten to twelve days. Swamps, such as those found around Mobile, are a likely place for contracting it and death from pneumonia is not unusual for those who don't rebound when the fever snaps. Treatment usually involves rehydration with an IV drip as the extended high fever often results in acute dehydration.

The only personal effect listed as returned to his widow was the army issued shirt he'd worn. Nearly fifty dollars was deducted from his pay for that shirt and whatever other items of clothing he was issued.

Price Family Reunion 1902

I heard from a third cousin, Kim in California, in response to a post I wrote in November headed Earl of Great Grandpa Price. I mentioned in that post that my mother had shown me a picture of my great grandmother, Laura Steele, and one of her sisters, Emma, and that in the picture it looked to her as though they might have been part Native American.

My cousin sent me these pictures of a Price family reunion and 50th wedding anniversary that took place in 1902 in North Liberty near South Bend, Indiana, my mother's hometown. She said that she thinks Emma does have features that could be Native American, but that their other sister, Angie, definitely looks Native American.

If you click on the reunion photo to enlarge it and slide to the upper right hand corner of the picture, you can see three of the seven Price sisters grouped around their brother, Frank. My great grandmother, Laura Price Steele, is in the back row to Frank's right. Her sister, Emma, is in the back row at the far right of the frame. Angie is the woman with the dark hair directly in front of Frank.

My cousin's great grandmother, Elsie or Elzira, is near the middle of the photo and one would never guess from her appearance that she also had Native American ancestry. If you look at the picture at the bottom of my great great grandparents, Alexander H. and Lydia Anne Cordray Price, it should be fairly easy to spot them near the middle of the group photograph. The occasion was their 50th wedding anniversary, attended by all ten of their children and their twelve grandchildren.

The young fellow standing in front in the sailor suit is my grandfather, Cleon Virgil Steele. He was three years old at the time. The man in the back row near the middle with his head tilted at a twenty degree angle is my great grandfather, Ira Steele. The man to his right is my cousin's great grandfather, Michael Klopfer.

Many thanks, Kim, for passing this along to me and for your permission to post it online.

National Archives

Back in December I filled out some forms and mailed off a record request to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C., better known as NARA. I requested military service and pension application records for three soldiers from Wisconsin, my great great grandfather, William Lubach, his wife's brother, William Ebert, and the husband of his wife's sister, August Heise.

The records arrived in early February. I included a note in my request indicating that I thought the three soldiers were brothers-in-law, related to each other by marriage. The records don't mention specifically that they were brothers-in-law, but they might as well have, as it's clear from other records that they were. The pension application serves to verify my conclusions drawn from those other records.

When my great great grandfather failed to return from the war, his widow, Maria, applied for a pension. She had to prove that she was, in fact, married to my great great grandfather and that the four minor dependents she listed were, in fact, his children. On December 18th, 1865, she presented as witnesses for these facts William Ebert and August Heise who swore "that they have known the parties above described to have lived together as husband and wife for ten years previous to and up to the time of deceased going into the aforesaid service of the United States, and that they have every reason to believe, from the appearance of the applicant, and their acquaintance with her, that she is the identical person she represents herself to be, and that they have no interest in the prosecution of this claim." Their names are signed below the cited legal verbiage.

My great great grandparents, William and Maria Lubach, were married "in the Kingdom of Prussia on the 6th day of July, 1852;" but beyond four children, it's not clear if she had any other evidence to present that this was in fact the case. Her pension application was never acted upon. On March 15, 1866, she had to file another form, a Widow's Claim for Pension in addition to the Declaration for Widow's Army Pension that she had filed three months earlier.

On this form the date of her marriage to William Lubach has changed from "the 6th day of July, 1852" to "the 6th day of June, 1852" and she also specifies that the wedding took place "at Zehden in Prussia" and that it was performed "by one Rev. Meletz, a Minister of the Gospel;" and that "her name before her marriage was Maria Ebert." She also deposed "that she believes there is a public record, in the above mentioned place, of her marriage, but the same can only be obtained at considerable expense and delay and offers herewith the testimony of two disinterested witnesses to said marriage."

This form isn't signed by William Ebert and August Heise, but it would seem likely that if William Ebert was her brother and August Heise was married to her sister, Sophie, they would probably have been in attendance on the occasion of her wedding. If her statement does not refer to them, it could perhaps refer to her parents, Wilhelm and Dorothea M. Ebert, her next door neighbors in Scott Township and the parents of her brothers, William and August. I think it might be difficult to maintain, as she did, that her brother, William Ebert, and her sister's husband, August Heise, were "disinterested witnesses to said marriage." The wedding might have been boring and it might have been difficult to recall fifteen years later if it took place in June or July, but 'disinterest' doesn't really apply when a federal pension is riding on what you remember about your sister's or your wife's sister's wedding.

Maria Lubach was apparently never granted a widow's pension, but she did remarry and her second husband, Ludwig or Lewis Backhaus, filed a Declaration of Minor Children for Pension on the 19th of May, 1868. Maria married her neighbor, Lewis Backhaus on January 20, 1867, and by virtue of that marriage and his Declaration he became guardian of her pensionable children. Maria's marriage to William Lubach in Prussia was recognized in the declaration Lewis Backhaus made requesting a pension for his wards. The pension was apparently paid at the rate of $10 monthly until February 13, 1879, which nearly coincides with the date of my great grandfather's marriage to Hannah Boettcher at Eagle Point in 1879.

Now the question might be reasonably asked, why is all of this so important? It isn't really, except to me. Maria listed four children, Charles, age 12, William, age 10, Louise, age 7, and Edward, age 3, on her declaration for a widow's pension. My webpage , written three years ago, presents the status of these children as an abiding mystery. The State of Wisconsin conducted a census in 1865 in which William and Maria Lubach were listed as the parents of three children, with ages and gender corresponding to Charles, William and Louise, in agreement with the 1860 federal census. Edward appears, at least on paper, to have been part of the Backhaus household.

In 1860 Ludwig Backhaus was married to a woman named Henrietta with most of their children fully grown or in their teens. I don't know what happened to Henrietta, but my suspicion has long been that she may have died giving birth to Edward. And I suspect that with Henrietta's death, Maria may have stepped in and raised Edward as though he were her own.

So when William failed to return from the Civil War, it was a fairly natural progression to marry the father of a son she had already essentially adopted, despite the substantial difference in their ages. And it appears that Maria gave birth to another son by Ludwig Backhaus in 1868, so the marriage was not simply a matter of pensionable federal record keeping.

I wrote a post about two years ago concerning William Ebert, who served in the 12th Wisconsin and was wounded in the Battle of Atlanta. I mentioned then that I did not know if this William Ebert was in fact the younger brother of my great great grandmother, but that I considered it a distinct possibility. The records received from NARA greatly enhance the probability of that supposition. William was shot in the upper portion of his left arm and spent the major portion of his military career recuperating from that wound in a military hospital.

Scott Union Ranger

I've discovered that my great great grandfather's unit in the War of the Rebellion now has a more or less official history. The book is called A History of the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the War of the Rebellion, 1862-1865. It was written in 2001 by Mark H. Knipping, a descendant of a soldier from that regiment. The manuscript is still technically unpublished, although I've learned that it has been part of the State of Wisconsin's Digital Collection now since November, 2006.

Company F, the unit of the regiment in which my great great grandfather served, was one of the first companies recruited in 1862 and they called themselves the Scott Union Rangers. The soldiers in that company came from the townships of Scott, Mitchell and Abbott in Sheboygan County. My great great grandfather enlisted as a replacement troop in October, 1864.

The book is nearly two hundred pages in length. It includes extended quotations from newspaper accounts published during the war of many of the events that took place along with statements issued by the regiment that often provided the basis for news reports.

While the book does contain an enormous amount of carefully documented information, I wasn't able to find any specific information concerning my great great grandfather's death from disease in July, 1865.

Military records also make it clear that Company F was reorganized during the spring of 1864, in between the regiment's two main combat engagements that year. The company's captain was court-martialed in 1864 and his first lieutenant resigned a week later. None of the book's narrative, or its primary or secondary sources, makes any reference that I could find to any incidents resulting in disciplinary action.

Even so, it's a fascinating account, replete with enough verifiable facts so that the regiment's location and activity on almost any given day can be clearly ascertained. I know I'll be spending some time doing just that now that I've received military service records and pension applications from the National Archives for my ancestor and his soldier in-laws.

Lima News

I've been reading up on the doings of my grandfather's cousin, Walter, who was born in Lima, Ohio in 1894. It's not that hard to do. His name appears in some ninety different editions of the Lima News between 1915 and 1972. And all of those papers are archived online. You click on the entry and the whole page appears. The hardest part is trying to decide which news item on the page is most likely to mention the indexed name.

It's not that my grandfather's cousin Walter was particularly famous or important or anything of that sort. He was a solid citizen, active in his church and in the local business community as a sheet metal inspector, apparently a veteran of WWI, but he wasn't especially prominent. In the good old days, newspaper editors put your name in the paper at the drop of a hat. He married a girl who wasn't German. Their picture was in the paper when they celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1968.

One of the earliest entries was from 1915. Walter played on a church league basketball team for Trinity Methodist Episcopal when he was 21 years old. His team lost to the South Side team, 16-2. He was responsible for scoring Trinity's lone bucket in that game. The team got better as the season progressed. They had three wins and four losses at one point.

Two years later in 1917 Walter was drafted into the National Guard along with quite a few of his buddies from the church basketball league. Later that year, shortly after Walter had passed his physical and completed basic training, his father, Charles, died suddenly at the age of 63 from a heart attack he suffered at the bakery where he worked. I don't know whether or not his father's sudden demise was sufficient to keep Walter from getting sent 'over there', but I'm sure the idea of his only son going to Europe to fight Germans couldn't have helped Charles' blood pressure readings any.

Charles was born not far from Berlin and grew up speaking German. He emigrated to America one hundred and fifty years ago at the age of three when his brother, my great grandfather, William, was still an infant. They grew up in a little village called Beechwood outside of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Their sister, Louise, was born in Wisconsin in 1858. Charles was twelve and William nine when their father, Wilhelm, died in the Civil War in 1865. Their mother, Maria, re-married two years later to their next door neighbor. Their stepfather had a relative who became a prominent businessman in nearby Kewaskum and the boys were apprenticed in the construction trade.

Charles became a millwright. He married Kate in 1877, the daughter of another local German businessman, a business partner of his stepfather's relative. War orphans were quite fashionable during the Grant administration and good for business if you owned a lumberyard. Charles worked for awhile in Kewaskum before moving to Fondulac where he and Kate started a family, three boys and two girls. They moved back to Kewaskum for a few years and then around 1890 they moved to Findlay, Ohio, not far from Lima.

A few years later, in April, 1893, a diptheria epidemic swept through the Lima area and all three sons, Charles, Edward and Elwood, died in the space of less than two weeks. The two daughters, Lena and Tolinda, survived the epidemic. A year later Charles and Kate had another son. They named him Walter.

My great grandfather, William, moved to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, not far from Minnesota, and got married in 1879. His sister, Louise, married his wife's older brother, Carl or Charles. I don't know if William and Louise stayed in touch with their brother, Charles, in Ohio. William died in a sawmill accident in 1897 when my grandfather was thirteen years old. It's quite possible my grandfather never met his Uncle Charles or his Cousin Walter. But he did have a younger brother named Walter, born the same year that Uncle Charles lost all three of his sons.

Earl of Great Grandpa Price

My mother's father, Cleon Virgil Steele, first appeared in the U.S. Federal Census in 1900 when he was ten months old. He lived in Liberty Township in South Bend, Indiana with his parents, Ira and Laura Steele, his grandparents, Alexander and Lydia Anne Price, and his cousin, Earl Price, Alexander's eight year old grandson.

Laura Steele was the youngest daughter of Alexander and Lydia Anne Price. According to the 1880 census she had two older brothers, John F. and Albert, and four older sisters. The two oldest sisters were born in Ohio during the Civil War. The oldest son, John F., was born in Indiana in 1866 right after the war. This indicates to me that the Price family moved from Ohio to Indiana either during or very shortly after the Civil War.

Ira Steele's family moved from Ohio to Indiana in 1864 during the Civil War. Alexander's wife, Lydia Anne Cordray, also moved from Ohio to Indiana during the Civil War. The Cordrays lived in Crawford Township in the northeast corner of Coshocton County in Ohio. Lydia Anne's father, Nathan Cordray, served as enumerator for Crawford Township for the 1860 census. The Steele family lived in Mill Creek Township in 1860, adjacent to and west of Crawford Township. The two families lived within ten miles of each other.

The Price family doesn't appear in the 1850 or the 1860 censuses for Coshocton County. But in 1850 two Price households were listed in Salem Township in Tuscarawas County, immediately adjacent to and east of Crawford Township. One was headed by William Price, a farmer, and the other by Alexander Price, a boatman in Port Washington on the Tuscarawas River, which flows west through Crawford Township to Coshocton where it merges with the Walhonding River to become the Muskingum, flowing south to Marietta on the Ohio. I suspect that Alexander H. Price may have belonged to the William Price household in Tuscarawas County, as William had a son named Alexander born in 1834. Alexander H. Price listed his age as forty-eight in Indiana in 1880 which would mean he was born in Ohio in 1832.

Just east of Salem Township in Tuscarawas County the river flows through a town in Clay Township called Gnadenhutten, the site of an infamous massacre that occurred during the American Revolution. Nearly all of the inhabitants at that time were Native Americans resettled from Delaware who had converted to Christianity and were making earnest efforts to adopt the white man's ways.

I found an item on the web a few days ago concerning the Price surname in the history of Pennsylvania Dutch culture. I thought it was interesting as my mother always attributed our Native American ancestry to her grandmother, Laura Steele nee Price.

Strike The Tent ....

Great news! I've been blogrolled again!

So I've taken the liberty of adding a reciprocal link to Andy's Civil War Blog aka Strike The Tent ..... Andy's blog is dedicated to his great great grandfather, who fought with the 5th New York Cavalry and died at Andersonville Prison during the Civil War. The blog is regularly updated with news about Civil War history, battlefields, monuments, museums, archives, reenactments, documentaries and history books. His blog is all Civil War all the time, so I feel honored and privileged to be included on his blogroll.

I haven't updated in quite some time, more than a month, in part because I've been traveling lately. I went to the U.S. for a week or two and I brought back some forms I had ordered that should allow me to obtain copies of my great great grandfather's military service records and of his widow's pension application which should be on file at the National Archives in Washington D.C.. I'll get the forms sent off and should have a reply of some sort within the next few months.

I also brought back two family trees that my grandmother gave to my mother some time ago. I found them while poring over some old photo albums. The trees are blank except for three or four strategically placed penciled in notes, clues, if you will, that only make sense to someone like me who has filled in some of the blanks around them. I now have part or all of more than thirty names from my mother's line, extending back three, four and sometimes even five generations. My mother died seven years ago and my grandmother more than fifteen years ago, so it's almost like getting a postcard from the Great Beyond.

White Eyes

The only grandparents I ever knew were my mother's parents, Bud and Carlie Steele. I remember my grandfather as someone who was almost always physically attached to a camera of one sort or another, more often than not a movie camera. He had seventeen grandchildren and I'm sure that quite a bit of what little time I spent with him is now part of some massive home movie archive in the hands of my mother's younger sisters.

Bud Steele was the only son of Ira Steele. The Steele line is easy to trace because of a genealogy called The Descendants of George Steele, put together by William Welfley in 1909. That genealogy contains precious little information about the women married to this long line of Steeles.

Bud wasn't really my grandfather's name. He was born in 1899 and all of the census and other official records list his given name as Cleon Virgil. He sometimes used his initials, C.V., but mostly people called him Bud. He had a younger sister named Gladys. His father, Ira, described himself as an "Evangelical Clergyman" in the 1930 census, although I think he earned his living as a carpenter. The name Gladys makes good sense for the daughter of a 'clergyman' I guess, but I think it's difficult to make a case that Cleon Virgil really qualifies as a Christian name.

I did some research into the name Cleon and I find it a little hard to believe that many people at the dawn of the 20th century were all that familar with the history of Athens during the Pelopponesian War. I got out a battered old copy of the plays of Shakespeare and looked up Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Cleon had a good-sized part in that play. He was Pericles' main rival, a fairly light-weight villain, seriously overshadowed by his wife, Dionyza, the sort of woman who hires a hitman to rub out her daughter's competition for a spot on the cheerleading squad.

Ira, the Evangelical clergyman, married a woman named Laura Price. Laura was the youngest daughter of Alexander H. and Lydia Anne Price. The Price family, like the Steeles, appears to have moved from Ohio to South Bend, Indiana during the Civil War. My mother, who passed on seven years ago today, was always convinced that she possessed some small portion of Native American ancestry and she used to have a picture that was taken of her grandmother, Laura (Price) Steele, along with Laura's older sister, Emma. She showed me that picture a number of times. The complexion and bone strucure of the Price girls was such that they could easily have passed as perhaps half Native American.

My mother and her older brother, John, both had dark hair, brown eyes and complexions with enough melanin to tan quite readily during Indiana summers spent swimming in Lake Wawasee where the family owned a lakeside cottage. Their younger sisters have brown hair and much lighter complexions, taking more after the blue-eyed Swiss Germans on my grandmother's side. The story my mother would often tell about Grandma Steele was of returning to South Bend after a summer on the lake. Grandma Steele took steel wool to the skin on my mother's elbows, back and neck, trying to remove all of that 'dirt' she'd accumulated over the summer.

I've recently learned quite a bit more than I had expected to know about my great grandmother, Laura Steele nee Price, thanks to online census records. Her mother's maiden name was Lydia Anne Cordray and she was born in 1834. According to the 1850 census, she appears to have been the oldest daughter of Nathan C. and Mary Cordray, who lived in Crawford Township in Coshocton County, about twenty miles north of Zanesville, Ohio. She was sixteen in 1850. Her father, Nathan, was born in 1799 in Upper Old Town, Allegany County, Maryland. His parents were Isaac and Mary Cordray, who resided in Coshocton in 1850 with Nathan and his family. Census records for 1800 in Upper Old Town, Allegany, Maryland, list Isaac as an inhabitant between 30 and 40 years of age. He was born in 1769 and his wife, Mary, was born in 1772.

It's not clear when the family first arrived in Upper Old Town or when exactly they moved from Maryland to Ohio. Up until 1803, when it entered the Union as a state, Ohio was a place where you and your friends could paddle your canoe instead of carrying it. Upper Old Town, near present day Cumberland, was where the Potomac narrowed enough so you could cross without getting your moccasins wet. George Washington established a fort there and used it as his headquarters while he and General Braddock tried to persuade the French army to abandon their forts in western Pennsylvania and Ohio during the French and Indian War. The Potomac at Upper Old Town marked the border with West Virginia, though it was only a handful of miles from there to Pennsylvania. Bedford, PA, where the Steele family settled originally, is on the Juniata River about twenty miles north on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line.

Coshocton, Ohio, is where two smaller rivers join to form the Muskingum River which flows south through Zanesville into the Ohio at Marietta, the first permanent American settlement in the Ohio Territory, established by the Northwest Ordnance of 1787. The fort at Marietta gradually extended its reach up the Muskingum to Coshocton. Many, if not most, of the original settlers in this area were people who were promised land grants in the Northwest Territory as compensation for military service in the Revolution and later in the War of 1812. The entire Muskingum basin was initially designated as Washington County, not to honor George Washington, but because the development of that region was his personal project.

By 1850 Washington County had been subdivided a number of times and the area around the town of Coshocton had become Coshocton County, which was divided into about 24 separate townships. The census of 1860 shows Nathan Cordray and his wife, Mary, were still there in Crawford Township along with their youngest daughter, Mary B. Cordray, age 10. Grandpa Isaac and his wife, Mary, were no longer part of the household. Isaac would have been 91 in 1860 if he had lived that long. Lydia Anne, at age 26, had long since met and married Alexander Price in 1860. They, along with Lydia Anne's three brothers were all living elsewhere. And Crawford Township had grown to more than 1,500 inhabitants, many of them newly arrived German immigrants. By 1870, Nathan and Mary were living with their oldest son, Edward, in South Bend.

Something else is noteworthy about the 1860 census. If you look carefully at it you'll notice that the person listed as the enumerator for Adams, Crawford, Mill Creek, Oxford and White Eyes Townships is someone named Nathan C. Cordray, my great great great grandfather. The document I've linked is a mortality table. Part of the enumerator's job was to compile a list of everyone in the township who died within the previous year. If you look real carefully, you'll notice that Nathan Cordray's task was perhaps complicated by the fact that Lucius Howard, the doctor over in Keene Township, was murdered in January by a jealous husband. Nathan recorded 42 deaths in the five townships he enumerated, all from natural causes, although one poor child, a three year old, did die from burns suffered when he was scalded by an overturned pan of boiling water on the stove.

One of the townships Nathan Cordray enumerated was called White Eyes. The township was named after George White Eyes, a Delaware Indian, who founded Coshocton as an Indian village during the French and Indian War. Coshocton was White Eyes' name in the Delaware language. George was one of the very few chiefs who sided with the Americans during the American Revolution. Most of the chiefs favored the British. The Continental Congress thanked White Eyes for his efforts in 1778 after he proposed that Ohio should enter the Union as its 14th state, reserved exclusively for native Americans.

Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum

My mother's great grandfather, Michael Steele, married a woman named Charlotte Stradley, the daughter of a man who described himself as a "physician" in the 1850 census for Wabash, Indiana. That would be my great great great grandfather, Dr. Daniel W. Stradley. His grandfather came to America from England around the time of the Revolution and settled in Baltimore. Charlotte Stradley is the first ancestor I know of who was not either of German or Pennsylvania Dutch descent.

I recently located biographical records for her brothers, Dr. Ayres Stradley and Dr. Daniel N. Stradley, who both practiced medicine in and around Denver, Colorado at the dawn of the 20th century. The brothers attributed much of their expertise in medicine to training they had received from their father while growing up in Wabash. But they also cited lectures they had attended at established medical schools and apprenticeships they had served under the tutelage of other respected medical practitioners.

I try to imagine the frontier medicine practiced by this ancestor of mine, first in Zanesville, Ohio and then at age 35 in Wabash from 1849 on, where he spent the last forty-five years of his life, but I find it's quite a leap. Medical science made huge strides in his lifetime.

Born in 1815, it's not clear from his sons' accounts if he began life on the eastern seaboard in Baltimore or if his parents had by then already moved west to Ohio. Dr. Stradley's wife was also of English descent. Ayres Stradley III described his mother's father, Abner Bell, as a "hero of the War of 1812" and as a "minister of the gospel" .... "connected with the Methodist Episcopal Church." Ohio was certainly still very much life on the frontier in 1815, but much less precariously so after the War of 1812.

The Stradleys couldn't have picked a more interesting or exciting time to move to Wabash. The town was the last stop going up river before the series of more than a dozen locks along the Wabash and Erie canal connecting the headwaters of the Wabash with the headwaters of the Maumee in Fort Wayne. By 1850 a few of the packets and liners plying the canal were already powered by steam instead of mule drawn as they all had been when the canal first opened for business in 1835.

The Wabash and Erie meant that cargo and passengers could be moved entirely by boat between Lake Erie and any of the cities on the Mississippi, the Ohio or the Gulf of Mexico without braving the waves of the Atlantic. Canal boats could travel from Toledo on Lake Erie to Evansville on the Ohio near the junction with the Mississippi in about eight days. The canal era was to American transportation what the word processing and fax era is to the internet. Wholly obsolete in only four decades, the canal was George Washington's great dream of American progress. As a federally funded public works project, it was the 19th century's Hoover Dam.

The information concerning my great great great grandfather is a story in itself. I ran a Google search on the name Stradley shortly after writing my previous post about the death of Michael Steele's brother, Abraham Steele, at Andersonville. I knew that Michael Steele had married a woman whose maiden name was Stradley. The search led me to a site called Portraits and Biographical Records of Denver and Vicinity 1898. It was one of a number of books owned by Pam Rietsch, who transcribed and put them online as part of something she calls the Mardos Collection. She and her associates are active proponents of USGenNet, which apparently has made quite a bit of genealogical and historical information freely available online.

If Michael Steele's brother, Abraham, had survived his incarceration at Andersonville, he might very well have fulfilled his ambition to become a doctor. His father, Elias Steele, was married to a woman named Elizabeth Bickel. Her brother lived next door to Dr. Stradley in Wabash. When the Steele brothers moved from Ohio to South Bend, Indiana in 1864, their mother, Elizabeth, directed Michael and his oldest brother, Jeremiah, to go to Wabash and build a barn for her brother. They did. Dr. Stradley saw the barn, admired their work and asked the boys to build him a house. Michael had work to do in South Bend and couldn't stay, but Jeremiah remained in Wabash long enough to build the house for Dr. Stradley. A few years later, Charlotte moved to South Bend and married Michael.

Chattanooga Choo Choo

My mother's great grandfather had a brother who died at Andersonville Prison during the Civil War. I know because my grandmother told me so nearly forty years ago, around the time that my grandfather died. I didn't know any of the details so it really didn't mean much to me at the time. Today on the internet so much more information is readily accessible than at any time in the past and what I've found so far is fairly fascinating, at least to me.

The census of 1850 shows Abraham Steele living on a good-sized farm in the Mill Creek township of Coshocton county in Ohio with his parents, Elias and Elizabeth Steele, his older brother Jeremiah, four younger brothers, including my great great grandfather, Michael Steele, and a younger sister. Abraham was fifteen years old in 1850. The family had moved to Ohio from western Pennslyvania a few years before he was born. According to my grandmother, Abraham had planned to become a doctor. He enlisted in 1861 at the age of 26 as a private in Company H of the 80th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

Abraham Steele died at Andersonville in Georgia in April, 1864, and is buried there. Diarrhea was listed as his cause of death. He was taken prisoner at Missionary Ridge on November 25, 1863. A soldier in the Union army for more than two years, he spent most of that time as a prisoner of war. He was first captured in 1862 at the Battle of Corinth in northern Mississippi, shortly after the Union victory in nearby Shiloh. When Vicksburg fell in 1863 prisoners were exchanged and he was released and returned to his unit following a full year in captivity.

The 80th Ohio was transferred from Mississippi to Tennessee in the autumn of 1863 and became part of Sherman's "veteranized" Army of the Tennessee a month or two before Missionary Ridge, the dramatic climax of the Battle of Chattanooga. Many Civil War buffs consider Missionary Ridge to have been a major strategic turning point in the entire war. Union forces led by Grant and Sherman won the Battle of Chattanooga and took more than six thousand rebel prisoners. The Confederate forces under Braxton Bragg successfully retreated into Georgia from their key position in control of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the prize for their victory at Chickamauga, but they took less than 500 Union prisoners with them when they withdrew, one of them Abraham Steele.

Accounts of the battle from a number of different sources indicate a limited number of Confederate opportunities for taking Union prisoners at Missionary Ridge. The fact that Abraham Steele was captured means that he must have been at Tunnel Hill, a railroad tunnel at the northern end of the ridge where the main thrust of the assault was launched by Sherman's forces. That assault was repelled by the brilliant generalship of Patrick Cleburne, whose account of the battle describes several surprise bayonet counter charges by his Texan defenders at Tunnel Hill that resulted in the capture of nearly five hundred Union soldiers.

Cleburne was winning his end of the battle, but the southern end of the ridge was also under attack from General Hooker's men who had captured Lookout Mountain a day earlier. The assaults at opposite ends of the ridge weakened the defense of the western slope in the middle portion of the ridge, where Grant's forces, led by the men under General Thomas, were able to advance in a frontal assault against withering fire from three tiers of trenchline, eventually securing the top of the ridge. Once the center of the ridge fell, the Confederate forces at either end were caught in a deadly crossfire and could only retreat down the eastern slope of the ridge.

I visited Atlanta about five years ago, a month after the collapse of the World Trade Center. I saw the Stone Mountain monument there and I think that visit piqued my interest in the Civil War. But it doesn't become real for you until you've located a few ancestors, relatives and in-laws and tried to make sense of the part they took in that conflict.

Living in Manila in the enormous shadow cast by the figure of Douglas MacArthur, it's easy to forget that much of MacArthur's reputation as a soldier was a product of his efforts to live up to the legendary exploits of his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr, who siezed his unit's regimental flag from a fallen soldier halfway up the ridge and planted the colors of the 24th Wisconsin at the crest of the hill during the frontal assault on Missionary Ridge.

I don't know if any of Abraham Steele's five brothers participated in the Civil War, but I do know that the year he died, 1864, was the same year that the rest of his family moved from Coschocton, Ohio to South Bend, Indiana.

New Orleans -- February 1865

I've translated another poem by Konrad Krez. This one was written during the two or three weeks when the poet-general and my great great grandfather's unit, the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, were stationed in Algiers, directly across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter of New Orleans, a staging area where thousands of Union troops were massed, awaiting transport to the battles planned for Fort Blakeley and Spanish Fort near Mobile, Alabama.



The poem wasn't published until 1875, so I don't think he gave away any military secrets by jotting a few impressions of his surroundings. It's possible that my translation is the first time this poem has ever been rendered in English.


Illustrious city, daughter of the sea by the father of waters,
As the goddess her love, so wash your waves on the shore
Where you lodge praying in the lap of eternal youth.

As a fairy-tale you appear to the northern foreigner,
Who arrives from the news-hungry, snow-bound lands,
Where a gloomier heaven with smoking cities is stored,
As bewitched he gazes above through the silvered clouds,
To the blue of heaven's secret, and glimpses an earth
Where the sun heaps its gold on the land and the water.

Midway in winter he greets the dark leaf of the oranges,
And marvels at the glorious tree with the golden apples,
Whose unfurled blossoms the ripe and ripening fruit adorns.

Astonished, he considers those from these houses with such planted elegance,
And out of the leaves stalks the refined stem of the banana with blades
Like fluttering fans cradled by the breeze.

Joyful and serene, these people delight in their fortunate ease,
As the bird in the forest volunteers heaven's gifts.

Lovely it is to live here, and tied with no strings
Stronger than the earth's girdle, mine on the cold Wisconsin,
Where the cedar grows and the sap seeps from the sycamore.

I could gladly in the sunny fields of Louisiana
Build a cottage in the country, where the roses
Never weary to bloom, where the figs and the myrtle grow,
And the mocking bird nests in the pomegranate bush.

Fertile soil here richly rewards manly labor;
A few handfuls of maize, with modest effort early in the year,
After planting the summer before, springs up wild corn,
Giving me bread enough; the forest's flying bees
Lead me lightly to the hive, where their honeycomb lies;

My kitchen supplies the hunt, a single shotgun round
In the drunken clouds where sunshine besotted pigeons
Lay in abundance about the feet, both wild and tame
Teem in the woods, where quick as a shadow, scurrying turkeys
Follow an alluring call, to the black-watered bayou
The thirst of the evening conducts the languishing stag,
And the opossum tricks its pursuer with the semblance of death.

Far from life's sorrows and far from torturous labor
I wander in the shadows of always green oaks,
Tall cypresses and lovely beloved magnolias, whose blooms
The color of snow, shed a fragrance to shame the lindens.

Meanwhile the men of the north, who toil in halved years,
Arrive to defend their misery and coldness.


I consider this a provisional translation. Comments or suggestions for ways to improve it would certainly be welcome, especially from readers whose first language is German.

Jefferson Barracks

One hundred and fifty years ago my great great grandfather left his home in East Brandenburg and brought his wife and two small sons on a ship to a new life in the new world in a farming community near Sheboygan in the state of Wisconsin. Less than ten years later he was buried at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. He was thirty-eight years old when he fought and died in the American Civil War.

A week ago I visited a website called Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. I looked up a volunteer in St. Louis who had offered to take photographs of tombstones in the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. I don't know much about Karen Kuhlman beyond the fact that she got back to me quickly, asked to know exactly what I wanted and then picked a beautiful day to take her pictures of my great great grandfather's grave.


I know of only one relative who has actually visited this grave. Lois Kressin, a granddaughter of my great grandfather's sister, Louise, went on a pilgrimage to St. Louis with her husband, Vernon, to see the grave. Their trip was mentioned in a letter Vernon wrote last year to his local newspaper, the Bloomer Advance. Vernon passed on a few months ago at the age of 84. The information in his letter helped to confirm my theory that his wife's grandmother was in fact my great grandfather's sister. It also demonstrated to my satisfaction that my great grandfather's wife and his sister's husband were also brother and sister.


The marriages of William Lubach to Hannah Boettcher in 1879 and of Louise Lubach to Hannah's older brother, Carl Boettcher, in 1880, appear to have been an integral part of their move across the state of Wisconsin from Sheboygan County on the shore of Lake Michigan to Chippewa County near the Minnesota stateline. All four of them are buried in the Tilden Emanual Cemetery in Chippewa County.

According to my dad's older sister, Carl and Hannah's father, John Boettcher, settled in Chippewa County during the Civil War. I suspect that the two families may have met crossing the Atlantic aboard the same ship.

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.