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Another Door Opens

In preparation for our trip to Germany to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, we reviewed the parish records of the Bavarian village of Röckingen, where our Schrotzberger ancestors hailed from.

The Schrotzberger clan appeared in the parish records from 1736 through the time when our great-great-grandfather left to pursue his career as a butcher in Hamburg in 1845.

That was as far back as we could trace the family . . . until I noticed a comment in Karl Schrotzberger’s booklet History of Röckingen. He wrote about the effect of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648)*see note  on the area, and mentioned that “the records and property of Lentersheim minister Andreas Schrotzberger (an ancestor of the author) also burned.”[1]

With those words, another door opened into the past. Based on Schrotzberger’s remark, I turned to the parish records from the neighboring village of Lentersheim. And sure enough, another three generations of Schrotzbergers popped up, extending the history of the clan as far back as  1613. For a genealogist, that’s as exciting as it would be for a miner to find a vein of ore and following it underground with pick axe in hand.

But there was more … the ore turned out to be gold. As we were digging around we found a book that gave an account of  Pastor Schrotzberger’s experiences during the Thirty Years’ War that put flesh on the newly unearthed Schrotzberger bones.

Here’s the enlightening, and somewhat amusing, story of the woebegone Pastor Andreas Schrotzberger and his experience during the war, as related in the Geschichte von Kloster Heilsbronn book:

During the Thirty Years’ War, Lentersheim, like neighboring Dambach, was severely afflicted, but not completely burnt down like this one. The then pastor Schrotzberger (since 1613 in Lentersheim) reported the following about the first major tribulations in late autumn 1631: “As soon as I read out the Gospel from the pulpit on Sunday, November 6th, 1631, everyone rushed out of the church  expecting nothing else than what had happened to Dambach. One crawled here, the other there. Towards evening, after numerous warnings from the officials, I went to Wassertrüdingen.”

An 1887 map of the Lentersheim / Röckingen area of Bavaria

Schrotzberger fled with his wife and children without having seen an enemy. He stayed in Wassertrüdingen until the troops left. He reported what had happened during his absence and how he found it after his return:

“On November 9, Lentersheim fell into enemy hands for the first time. The well-kept church door was smashed open, the chests, of which there were more than 50, were chopped up and plundered ; but the sacristy remained unstormed for this time. The next day, when the enemy attacked Wassertrüdingen violently, but was driven off again by the grace of God, he turned straight to Lentersheim, vented his anger there, hewed and beat for two hours, opened the sacristy, and from it the great chalice, a silver sponsors, a small silver chalice together with sponsors, 6 pairs of wax candles, also my new surplice…

“Between November 9th and 23rd various roaming gangs invaded, foot soldiers, cavalrymen, soon both at the same time. Once five, another day ten, or even fifteen plunders were held in one day. On November 15, 1,000 soldiers lay here overnight; on the 16th, 2,500 cavalrymen, including a whole company in the vicarage. These cavalrymen kept 200 fires in the village all night, burning 200 new fences, 150 field sticks, 2 cords of wood, countless shafts, chairs, tables, chests, etc. When, on November 24th, I dared to turn again in the name of God to the church and housekeeping entrusted to me, I found such misery in my vicarage that I cannot describe it enough. The feathers from the newly made beds for my daughters lay rummaged about in the yard; house, barn, stable and other doors, windows, shutters, chests smashed, partly burned, the water cauldron gone, as well as 29 sheep, 25 chickens, the rooster, a capon, a pig, 20 geese, my church tunic, which was spun by my previous wife, the clothes of my 4 sons and 3 daughters, a chest full of all kinds of white stuff, knitted in all kinds of ways, drilled, diced, striped, which I’d bought or inherited, a few pieces of money buried under the kitchen container, a big sack full of flour, etc., everything torn apart. It is impossible to describe the confusion and displeasure I found in my bound books of sermons.

“That the foreign and public enemy did such a thing would still be tolerable. But one cannot get over the fact that the local secret enemy has done even greater damage and has thirstily committed his outrage and wantonness. Because every time after a looting, men and women of the village would break into the vicarage in broad daylight and carry away flax, linen and other things. What the riders leave behind, the neighbors have taken up. If I arrived to do a house search, they wouldn’t allow it. It is a great miracle that the house and both haystacks were not destroyed in the fire.”

Pastor and community appear here in an unfavorable light. Neither of them got better as a result of the tribulations of war and neither learned nor forgot anything. Even before the war, Schrotzberger complained about his congregation’s defrauding of tithes, refusal of turnips, cabbage, fruit, chickens, etc. He also sued his tithe holders immediately after the war. His successor Lemmerer characterized himself and his community in the same way as Schrotzberger did.

Most of the Lentersheim parish records had been taken to the rectory in Ehingen, where they went up in smoke with the house. Hence Lemmerer’s complaint about the loss of the register of tithes and the reduction in his income.

In the final years of the war, Lentersheim was not burned down by the Swedes, but was “very dilapidated”, especially the parsonage, for the repair of which, as well as for the maintenance of the pastor, the community refused any help, “since Heilsbronn owns everything.” [2]

We’ll be visiting the villages of Lentersheim (population about 400) and Röckingen (pop ~ 850) while we’re in Germany, and gaze at the houses where our families lived, and the churches they attended . . . and in Pastor Schrotzberger’s case, gave sermons which apparently went largely unheeded. As we roam the area we may feel the ghosts of ancestors past — a hair-raising experience, albeit not as scary as those of our good ancestral pastor’s.

* Note: The web site Britannica states, “The principal battlefield for all these intermittent conflicts was the towns and principalities of Germany, which suffered severely. During the Thirty Years’ War, many of the contending armies were mercenaries, many of whom could not collect their pay. This threw them on the countryside for their supplies, and thus began the “wolf-strategy” that typified this war. The armies of both sides plundered as they marched, leaving cities, towns, villages, and farms ravaged.”[3]

Footnotes:
[1] Karl Schrotzberger, Die Geschichte Röckingens und seiner Umgebung: The History of Röckingen and Its Environs (Röckingen: Karl Schrotzberger, 1975), p 5.
[2] Georg Muck, Geschichte von Kloster Heilsbronn (Germany: C.H. Beck’sche Buchhandlung, 1879), pp 513-518.
[3] Britannica, “Thirty Years’ War,” https://www.britannica.com/event/Thirty-Years-War.

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Just Ask a Librarian

Librarians are my favorite kind of people.

They are exceptionally helpful … and altruistically so. Not motivated by profit, pride, or power, they offer their services with a generosity that’s, well, frankly, uncommon today.

Combine that with their intelligence and resourcefulness, and you have a cadre of bookish people who are your best friends when you’re in need of information.

I mention this because of two instances this year in which I turned to librarians with positive results. I’ve already mentioned the help I got from the Detroit Public Library when seeking the naturalization papers of my great-grandfather.

The second instance came a couple of weeks ago when I was seeking the locations of a village house and neighboring farm field of my great-great grandfather’s family in rural Bavaria. Although I had the house and field numbers of their 19th century property from a church death register, I couldn’t find a way to relate those numbers to locations today in Röckingen, Germany, which I’m visiting in July.

Last year I wrote the mayor of Röckingen to request assistance, with no tangible results. So this year I figured … ahem … I’d contact a librarian.

Wassertrüdingen lies to the southeast of Röckingen

The nearest town with a library is Wassertrüdingen. I sent the librarian, Ms. Claudia Knauer, an email requesting her help in finding old maps or documents that would show the exact locations. After a few day’s silence, I figured it was a lost cause.

But as I said, librarians are resourceful, and Ms. Knauer forwarded my request to citizens in Röckingen who might have an answer. About a week later, I got an email from the mayor of Röckingen with an old map and the string of correspondence from people in town who kept the question alive until someone found the answer. Voila, a librarian came through again!

In July we’ll be able to stand in the courtyard where my great-great-grandfather Johann Schrotzberger was raised: the house on one side, and the barn on the other … undoubtedly the same barn where he, a master butcher later in life, learned about raising animals and butchering them from his mother’s father and brother, the Rau family butchers of Röckingen,

As TV’s Mr. Rogers famously advised, when in trouble “look for the helpers.” In my experience, those helpers are frequently the librarians in towns and cities across the globe. When you’re stuck, “just ask a librarian.”

The Schrotzberger family lived at house number 100 in Röckingen. This map identifies the location, near the church at the center of the village, and Google maps shows the area appears unchanged.

Map of Röckingen
The Schrotzberger house was number 100 near the center of the map. Click to enlarge.
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DNA: Did we pass the test?

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that we decided to take a DNA test.

For one thing, I’m a private person, and exposing our DNA isn’t exactly the height of privacy. At best we open ourselves — if we allow it — to share our results with other researchers. At worst, we leave a digital fingerprint for law enforcement to track us or our kin. And somewhere in between is a concern as to whether health insurers or others can buy (or hack) their way into our private lives.

Nevertheless, it seemed like a risk that was worth the potential benefits . . . those benefits being validation of our genealogical research, and testing some assumptions about our forefathers.

And . . . the results are in.

Ethnicity

If our research was thorough, we could expect that Ancestry DNA’s Ethnicity Estimate and ranges would closely align with our own calculated ethnicity.

Based on the percentage of DNA we got from our ancestors (parents, grandparents,  great-grandparents and great-great grandparents) and where they came from, we calculated our heritage as shown in the first two columns below. Ancestry DNA’s analysis is shown in the remaining three columns.

Our Calculated Heritage DNA Ethnicity Estimate and Range
Scottish 37.50% Scotland 43% 28-43%
German 25.00% Germanic Europe 33% 26-57%
English 25.00% England & N.W. Europe 7% 0-31%
Irish 6.25% Ireland 7% 0-15%
Misc U.K. & W. Europe 6.25% Wales 4% 0-7%
Total 100.00% Sweden & Denmark 3% 0-12%
Baltics 1% 0-2%
Sardinia 1% 0-2%
Basque 1% 0-1%
Total 100%

It appears the Ancestry DNA test estimates rather closely align with what we’d calculated in our own genealogical research. The small percentage of the Swedish and Danish estimate is intriguing but not definitive, and the trace percentages of the Baltics, Sardinia, and Basque regions are interesting, but most likely flukes given their extremely low figures. By and large, the DNA estimates were what we would have expected.

Lost Kin

The other benefit of DNA testing is finding unknown relatives in the family.  Our DNA report showed ten “close family” matches with from 3% to 16% shared DNA. All but one of those were known cousins (and the 16% was a first cousin), so no surprises there. The single unknown match, on our maternal side, uses the cryptic handle of “Su918” and has no family tree; they could be someone we do or don’t know. At a 4% match they are probably a distant cousin.

The remaining matches are “extended family” or “distant family.” There are two extended family matches (1-2% shared DNA) who also have an ancestor in their family trees in common with us. All of the rest are “distant” family matches, sharing less than 1% of our DNA.

In short, here too the DNA results were largely what was expected.

No Skeletons in the Closet

And unlike some families, ours don’t seem to have any “skeletons in the closet” — surprise brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or cousins born outside of known long-term partnerships. Perhaps that’s a testament to the marital fidelity of our forefathers and mothers.

Traits

Lastly, we included the test for genetic traits in our DNA package. The results were mixed, leading me to think this testing was more parlor game than science. Whereas I’ve always considered myself an introvert, the DNA results pegged me as likely to be more extroverted. My endurance fitness puts me in the “commonly found in elite endurance athletes” camp . . . laughably funny. I supposedly like cilantro, even though I frequently ask my wife to go easy on it in her meals. Some things, such as “morning person” and “risk averse” are true. And “more sensitive to sweets” was proven yet again this Easter season with jelly beans and chocolate candy consumption. But on the whole I didn’t find this part of the DNA test particularly useful or insightful.

Summary

For me the Ancestry.com DNA testing was more a confirmation of what we’d already found in our research rather than a breakthrough insight into our family past. It’s still early days, though. Some potential “extended” or “distant” family member match may contact us in the future with more information about our clan. We can only wait and see.

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The Story “Behind” the Photograph

One of my favorite family photographs[1] is of Friedrich Hermann Schütze (1851-1909), my great-grandfather. In the photograph he looks so intense, yet contemplative; a young man who knows where he’s going in life and has the ability and ambition to get there. (As it turned out, the “there” was America.)

The bottom of the photograph shows it was taken in Hamburg, Germany. Since I’m going there this summer to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, I thought it would be nice to visit the place where this picture was taken. And thus began a journey of another sort … an exploration in time and space.

The starting point of this exploration was the back of the cardboard-mounted photograph, which had a note written by my father, Leonard, as to the subject of the photo. Equally helpful, the name and address of the photo studio was imprinted there. Should be easy to find the place, right?

Well, sort of.    Except, where the heck is “St. Pauli. Langereihe 69” in Hamburg?

Modern-day maps don’t show a Langereihe street in the St. Pauli district. That’s to be expected — the city has evolved over the 140-odd years since the picture was taken. But perhaps there’s another clue on the back? How about the phrase “Carl Schultze’s Theater gegenübuer”?

Gegenüber means “across from,” so we needed to find the Carl Schultze theater in the St. Pauli district. And here’s where an 1890 and a 1911 map of the city[2] came to our rescue.

A detail from a 1911 map of Hamburg. The yellow oval shows the theater, the rectangle shows an abbreviation of the former street name, and the triangle shows the St. Pauli church where Hermann married in 1879. The blue “X” marks the spot where the photo studio stood.

Aha, we found the place, on the south side of the current-day Reeperbahn, between Lincoln and Silbersack streets. (The original 3-story building, of which the studio was on the second floor, is long gone, unfortunately. So is the theater across the street.)

That’s the Where … How About the When?

But wait … there’s more. We wanted to confirm the location using the Hamburg city address books,[3] and sure enough, the street listings match what we found on the old map. But surprisingly, the address books also hinted at the time that the photograph was taken. The 1879 book[4] shows Aug. Noack as located at Langereihe 13, and the 1880[5] book shows him at Langereihe 69. That explains the “alte No. 13” line on the back of the photograph: formerly at Langereihe No. 13. And since Noack moved in 1879 (to show up at the new address in the 1880 book), the photograph was likely taken that year. My speculation is that the photo was taken around the time of Hermann’s wedding, July 4th, 1879. However, the photo could also have been taken as late as the spring of 1880, prior to Hermann’s departure for America on the 19th of May, as a keepsake for his new wife until she could join him three months later in Detroit. At any rate, it was taken when he was 28 or 29 years old.

So, finding the “where” of the photo also fortuitously led to finding the “when.”

And the icing on the cake?

The Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s nightlife and red light district, going back at least a couple of hundred years, due to Hamburg’s function as a port city catering to sailors’ needs. And in the early 1960s, the Beatles — who recorded the sound tracks to my formative years — played the Reeperbahn’s clubs, where they honed their musical skills over countless nights of grueling, stimulant-fueled, hours-long sets in seedy bars.[6] So when we go to see the area where my great-grandfather Hermann walked, we also get to see the clubs where the Beatles honed their craft before becoming famous. In fact, the site of the old Carl Schultze’s theater is where, years later, the Top Ten Club was located, one of the places the Beatles played in 1960 and 1961. It’s now the Moondoo Club, and you’ll find me having a drink there with my son this summer.

From left, Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Pete Best (drummer), and George Harrison in an undated photo from their early years in Hamburg.

Hamburg, here we come!

Notes:

[1] The original is in the possession of Elizabeth Nick, Hermann’s great-granddaughter. She loaned it to me to scan in 2012.
[2] “Large detailed old map of Hamburg city – 1911,” Mapsland, https://www.mapsland.com/europe/germany/hamburg/large-detailed-old-map-of-hamburg-city-1911.
The street name at the time, Langereihe, is confirmed in an 1890 map of the city, “Large detailed old map of Hamburg city – 1890,” Mapsland, https://www.mapsland.com/europe/germany/hamburg/large-detailed-old-map-of-hamburg-city-1890
[3] “Hamburger Adressbücher – Dokumentanzeige,” 1880, Hamburgisches Adress-Buch für 1880, Straßenverzeichnis: Vierter Abschnitt. Verzeichniß der Straßen und Häuser der Stadt, Vorstadt und der Vororte nebst Angabe der Einwohner und Eigenthümer der Häuser.  Alphabetteil: Langereihe, Seite IV/518, Staats und Universitäts Bibliothek Hamburg, https://agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de/subhh-adress/digbib/view?did=c1:493192&p=632. Accessed 25 March 2023.
[4] “Hamburger Adressbücher – Dokumentanzeige,” 1879, Hamburgisches Adress-Buch für 1879, Personen- und Firmenverzeichnis: Dritter Abschnitt. Alphabetisches Verzeichniß der Einwohner der Stadt Hamburg, der Vorstadt und des Landgebiets, mit Angabe ihres Standes und ihrer Wohnungen. Alphabetteil: Nienstädt, Seite III/267, Staats und Universitäts Bibliothek Hamburg, https://agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de/subhh-adress/digbib/view?did=c1:494924&sdid=c1:495199&hit=6. Accessed 25 March 2023.
[5] “Hamburger Adressbücher – Dokumentanzeige,” 1880, Hamburgisches Adress-Buch für 1880, Personen- und Firmenverzeichnis: Dritter Abschnitt. Alphabetisches Verzeichniß der Einwohner der Stadt Hamburg, der Vorstadt und des Landgebiets, mit Angabe ihres Standes und ihrer Wohnungen. Alphabetteil: Niemeyer Seite III/252, Staats und Universitäts Bibliothek Hamburg, https://agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de/subhh-adress/digbib/view?did=c1:493192&sdid=c1:493455&hit=29. Accessed 25 March 2023.
[6] “The Beatles in Hamburg,” Wikipedia, last modified 25 February 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_in_Hamburg.

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The Americanization of Friedrich Hermann Schütze

One of the biggest steps our immigrant ancestors could take in their newly adopted county — America — would be to disavow allegiance to their former country’s government and to indicate they wished to become U.S. citizens.

Documentation of this step in the story of our German immigrant, Friedrich Hermann “Hermann” Schütze, was elusive. None of the popular genealogy sites had digital images, or even indices, indicating  that Hermann had obtained citizenship.

However, a couple of years back I ran across a Detroit Genealogical Society magazine index[1] that pointed the way to his documents. And last week, with the kind assistance of Mark Bowden, the Special Collections Coordinator of the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library, we finally obtained a digital copy of these milestone documents. (Click here to see the 73 megabyte pdf file.)

We addressed Hermann’s German origins in an earlier post. By way of recap, he was born in the small town of Zauckerode, southwest of Dresden, in 1851, the son of a coal miner. Hermann moved to Hamburg to pursue his goal of becoming a journeyman butcher in the early 1870s, married there in 1879, and emigrated to Detroit in 1880.

Naturalization was a two-step process, requiring an immigrant’s Declaration of Intention, followed by a Naturalization Oath a minimum of two years later. At that time any “court of record” could grant U.S. citizenship. Hermann went to the local Detroit Recorder’s Court to begin the process in March of 1884.

In his Declaration, Hermann swore it was his intention to become a citizen of the United States, and renounced all allegiance to the emperor of Germany, of whom he’d been a subject. He affixed his signature to the document, spelling his surname with an extra “e” to Anglicize the German “ü.”

Declaration of Intention, 24 March 1884   (Click on image to enlarge)

Almost three years later, on January 10th of 1887, he returned to the court to swear his Naturalization Oath. In this document he used his full name, Friedrich Hermann Schuetze, again signing at the bottom. By extension, when Hermann became a U.S. citizen, his wife and children also became citizens … as would  his descendants.

Naturalization Oath, 10 January 1887   (Click on image to enlarge)

Americans celebrate the birth of our country on July 4th — Independence Day — with hot dogs and a bottle or two of Budweiser. As members of the Schütze/Schuetze/Schutze family I propose we also celebrate our “Citizenship Day” on every January 10th with brätwurst and a bottle of Löwenbräu — or good ol’ hot dogs and Bud, if that’s more your thing — which is  particularly apt considering Hermann was a sausage maker by trade.

Are you in? Mark your calendar for January and we can clink glasses to celebrate this turning point in our Americanized family’s history.

Zum Wohl ! (Cheers, y’all ! )

Footnote:

[1] The Detroit Society for Genealogical Research Magazine, Fall 2003, Volume 67, No. 1, p19.

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Added Security and Other Changes Behind the Curtain

There are a couple of changes to this blog site and its related Family History website worth noting.

First, security has been enhanced through a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate, meaning that information uploaded or downloaded from the site is encoded to protect your privacy. In order to use the secure websites, you have to add an “s” after the old http:// addresses, making them:

This blog — https://genealogy.thundermoon.us/blog/

The family history website — https://genealogy.thundermoon.us/content/index.php

Second, we’re using a different web hosting service (WHS). For you the reader, there are no visible changes, which is good. For me, however, the new WHS is way less expensive, has more responsive technical support, and presents a  more intuitive and feature-rich interface. [If you’re curious, our old WHS was Site5 (👎)and the new one is HostGator (👍).]

Changing WHSs was an interesting and humbling experience. The new host uses updated versions of some of the software (specifically, PHP and MySQL) that run many web sites. That’s always a plus in the technology world, but a challenge for people whose pages were coded years ago. The code on this site needed to be updated in order to run properly, and the weeks-long process was not an easy or pleasant exercise.

However, the experience revealed, once again, that in any digital endeavor or environment — websites, digital images, archived electronic documents — obsolescence is going to creep in and become an enemy of longevity. This painstaking update reinforced the beauty of old technology —namely that paper and photographic prints have long lifespans. Paper lasts perhaps a hundred years or more, whereas digital data, left unattended, can sometimes be measured in decades or less. That isn’t to deny the huge advantages of digital information. But paper has its benefits too, which is why our family history book is an important adjunct to the information on our blog and website. (And the latest edition, the third, has been updated to include histories going back to the 1600s of the Schütze and Schrotzberger families in Germany.)

 

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The Passing of James Peter Bartlett, Jr.

On June 22nd, 2022, we lost our brother-in-law James P. Bartlett, Jr., after a massive stroke.

James’s extended family gathered in Omaha, Nebraska, to mourn his passing and to celebrate his warmth and accomplishments over the 63 years of his life.

His funeral pamphlet can be opened by clicking on the image above, and his funeral service and slideshow can be found at the bottom of the photo albums page on our web site.

James will be in the hearts and on the minds of our family forever. Rest in peace, brother.

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Oral Interview with Hugh Davis

In July of 2021 I traveled to South Pasadena, California, to meet my father’s cousin Hugh Davis.

We had a fun time exploring the history of the California branch of the Hermann Schütze family, visiting cities, cemeteries, and old family residences.

One of the highlights of the visit was an interview I conducted with Hugh to get an oral history of his mother Harriet (née Schutze) Davis and his uncles Leonard and Hugo Schutze.

The recording is at the audio page of our family history web site.

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Malcolm Campbell — Our Australian Relation

 

Portrait of Malcolm Campbell taken in Detroit while he was visiting his siblings in Ontario. Photo dates to an unspecified year following his mother’s death in 1875.

Today we are looking into our great-grand uncle Malcolm Campbell, the only member of our Scottish Campbell clan who didn’t emigrate to Canada, and who headed to Australia instead.

Background

The Campbell farmsteads in the western highlands. Circled from bottom to top: Gallochoille, Arichonan, Baroile, and Auchrome. Click on map to enlarge.

By way of background, Malcolm Campbell’s mother Isabella McLean — our great-great-grandmother — was born in 1801 at the Arichonan farmstead in the parish of North Knapdale, in Argyll, Scotland. Her husband John Campbell was born in 1796 at the neighboring farmstead of Gallochoille.

Isabella and John were married in 1829 in the parish church in Tayvallich and between 1830 and 1843 they had seven children (see below) at the Baroile farmstead in the neighboring Kilmichael Glassary parish.

The children of John and Isabella (McLean) Campbell
     Neil Campbell (1830-1909)
     Effie Campbell (1832-1910)
     Malcolm Campbell, our great-granduncle (1835-1905)
     Sarah Campbell (later Livingston), our great-grandmother (1837-1914)
     Jane Campbell (1839-1891)
     Donald Campbell (1841-1919)
     John Campbell (1843-1860)

The Highland Clearances

Isabella and her family felt the effects of the Highland Clearances while residing as tenants at farmsteads owned by Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch.

Arichonan Farmstead ruins in North Knapdale

The Arichonan farmstead, where Isabella’s family still lived, famously rebelled in 1848 against the Clearance instigated by their landlord. Two of Isabella’s brothers were indicted for rioting, with one of them serving a prison sentence.

View of Kilmartin valley from now-empty Baroile farmstead
Ruins of Auchachrome, the last Scottish family home

At about the same time, John and Isabella moved from their home at Baroile farmstead in Glassary parish to the Auchrome farmstead in Kilmartin parish. It seems likely this, too, was due to a clearance instigated by Neil Malcolm, who owned both farmsteads as well as many others in the area, including Auchachrome. The former farmsteads are now all in ruin; or as in the case of Baroile, there is nothing left of the former structures, further indication that the farms were “cleared.” (Click on photos to enlarge.)

In 1854 John Campbell passed away at the age of 58 at Auchachrome and his body was buried in the Kilmartin churchyard. Three years later his widow and their children — probably as a result of another clearance — emigrated to Ontario, Canada, near the town of Alvinston.

All of the children, that is, except for Malcolm Campbell.

Malcolm Campbell

M. Campbell Store in Muswellbrook

For many years I wondered why Malcolm didn’t move with his mother and siblings to Canada. Why — and when — did he emigrate to Australia instead? What is the story of this person who became a  successful businessman in Muswellbrook and the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, 160 miles north of Sydney?

His obituary, recently found in an Australian newspaper, provides some answers. From it we learn that Malcolm left his family in his teens to make a living at a wholesale drapery establishment in Glasgow, 85 miles and a seemingly whole world away from the isolated farmstead. At the age of nineteen, in the same year his father died at Auchachrome, Malcolm emigrated to Australia to get in on a gold rush there. Whereas his father and siblings were farmers at heart, Malcolm was an entrepreneur, and untamed Australia was in his sights rather than rural Ontario.

 

Malcolm Campbell’s home on his 7,000-acre estate, Saint Heliers

Campbell Clan Origins?

Interestingly, Malcolm’s wife’s obituary, below, makes some fascinating assertions about the origins of our Campbell family in the Scottish Highlands. According to the obit, Malcolm (and his father and siblings, of course) were from the Duntroon branch of the powerful Campbell clan, with a direct line of ancestry to William the Conqueror and an Irish chieftain. Wow! I’m ready to strap on my kilt right now!

Duntroon Castle on Loch Crinan

The Campbell clan was indeed dominant in Argyll  and still maintains a large castle near the town of Inveraray, not very far from our family’s parishes. Closer still is the Duntroon castle, located on the shore of Loch Crinan, exceptionally close to our Campbell family farmsteads. Duntroon castle was owned by the Clan Campbell until 1792, when it was sold to the Malcolms of Poltalloch. So there may be some merit to the claim in Mrs. Campbell’s obituary.

Yet it is also true that many poor families took on the surnames of the powerful clan chiefs of their area. And there were a lot of Campbells in the parishes of Kilmartin, Glassary, and North Knapdale. If our ancestors were indeed of noble stock, it seems our humble farmers were perhaps on the lower rungs of the clan ladder. It’s an awful irony that the family the Campbell Clan sold their castle to, the Malcolms of Poltalloch, would be the ones who booted our ancestors off their farms.

I know of no documentation to refute, or conversely to verify, the obituary’s clan lineage assertion. I leave it up to you to judge. But if you want to show your colors, a piece of Campbell tartan clothing might be in order. (I got my kilt at St. Andrew’s Society Highland Games, in Livonia, Michigan, but there are a number of on-line sources as well.)

Whether from exalted heritage or just a poor adventurous kid trying to make his fortune, Malcolm Campbell the entrepreneur turned into the wealthiest of his Campbell siblings. He grew both a large family and a small fortune in New South Wales, Australia.

Despite the distance from Canada, Malcolm didn’t lose touch with his birth family, who passed on the photo of him at the top of this blog post and some of his hand-written notes. I’m sure they were proud of his accomplishments. Then again, that’s exactly what one would expect of a Scotsman from the powerful Campbell clan whose lineage traces back to England’s great king William the Conqueror, isn’t it????

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day — Our Irish Connection

On this Saint Patrick’s Day we celebrate our Irish heritage through Jane Hannah, our great-great grandmother.


She was born on May 7th, 1819, to James Hannah and Sarah Maxwell in County Antrim,[1] a maritime county in northeastern Ireland. The area was largely composed of Scots-Irish. Given that fact, plus her mother’s surname, and that two of her daughters were married in Presbyterian churches, it seems likely her more distant roots were buried in Scottish soil. For today’s celebration, though, she is Irish through and through. (Just not Catholic Irish — sorry, St. Pat.)

Jane emigrated at the age of 16 with her parents and her brothers, William and James, in 1835 to North America.

What prompted the family’s emigration is unknown, but conditions in Ireland at the time were difficult. The French sociologist, Gustave de Beaumont, who visited Ireland in 1835, wrote:

“I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland. … In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland.”

Only one-third of Irish laborers had regular work, and conditions in rural areas weren’t any better.

“In most of Ireland, housing conditions were terrible. A census report in 1841 found that nearly half the families in rural areas lived in windowless mud cabins, most with no furniture other than a stool.”[2]

Unfortunately, the escape route across the Atlantic wasn’t much better than the conditions they were leaving. And sadly, Jane’s mother didn’t survive the seven-week voyage to North America, thus was buried at sea. Her death was likely caused or at least exacerbated by the harsh conditions in steerage class on emigrant boats. According to a report to the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission in 1847:

“Before the emigrant has been a week at sea he is an altered man. How can it be otherwise? Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children of all ages, from the driveling idiot of ninety to the babe just born, huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart, the fever patients lying between the sound, in sleeping places so narrow as almost to deny them the power of indulging, by a change of position, the natural restlessness of the disease. … The food is generally ill selected and seldom sufficiently cooked, in consequence of the insufficiency and bad construction of the cooking places [passengers had to cook their own meals]. The supply of water, hardly enough for cooking and drinking, does not allow washing. In many ships the filthy beds, teeming with all abominations, are never required to be brought on deck and aired: the narrow space between the sleeping berths and the piles of boxes is never washed or scraped, but breathes up a damp and fetid stench, until the day before the arrival at quarantine, when all hands are required to ‘scrub up’ and put on a fair face for the doctor and Government inspector.”

Anthony family in New York state

After landing in Quebec, the remaining family traveled up the St. Lawrence River to Sackets Harbor in the Cape Vincent area. The family settled at the farm next to Job Anthony’s, where Jane Hannah kept house for her father. She would have met Barney Anthony in the mid to late 1830s. They were likely married between 1839 and 1840, and had their first child, Sarah, across the river in Canada in 1843. Their second and third daughters were born in Cape Vincent, New York, in 1845 and 1847.

Barney and Jane farmed in upstate New York for a number of years, showing up in censuses in Croghan in 1850, back in Cape Vincent in 1855 (living in a log home with Barney’s 76-year-old father, Job Anthony), and in Osceola township in 1860.

In 1867 Jane and Barney moved their family to a farm in Ravenna Township, just northeast of Grand Haven, on the western side of Michigan. They located across the road from their first-born daughter, Sarah Seymour, whose family had settled there a few years earlier. Most of the farm was densely wooded and dropped steeply to Crockery Creek; the property was picturesque, but not widely arable. In the 1870 census Jane was keeping house and the couple were raising their son Henry, then seven years old, while three of their daughters – Anna (our great-grandmother), Libbie, and Eliza – worked as domestic servants in the surrounding area. Barney was shown to be unable to read or write, while Jane was unable to write.

The Anthony farm in Ravenna Township

At the time of the 1880 census the farm was composed of nine tilled acres for potatoes, corn, oats, and wheat, eight acres of pasture and the remaining 15 acres were wooded or unimproved. There were two horses, nine head of cattle (three of which were milch cows), two pigs, and 25 chickens. After Ireland, this would have felt like paradise.

Barney’s health was never good, and at age 75, in 1886, a doctor found he was stooped, tottering, and suffering from respiratory murmurs in both lungs. That year he was admitted to the newly-opened Michigan Soldier’s Home (he was a Civil War veteran, of sorts) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with diseases of lungs, liver, and heart as well as partial deafness. He remained in the home until at least 1892, when a doctor’s report also noted senile debility. Fortunately Jane still had their son Henry at home.

Jane’s obituary. Note that not all of the info is completely accurate.

Barney and Jane moved in 1892 or 1893 to Green Lake Township, near Grawn, seven miles south of Traverse City, to live first with their daughter Sarah Seymour and later with their son Henry, who’d bought property and opened a sawmill in Green Lake Township. Barney died in 1893 at age 82 in a state of paralysis. Jane died five years later at age 78 of “old age.” Their bodies were buried next to each other in the Maple Grove Cemetery in Grawn, Michigan. A few years later their infant granddaughter Henrietta was buried next to them.

As we eat our corned beef and drink our Guinness this St. Patrick’s holiday, we can celebrate our Irish heritage. We can also count our blessings that we have ample food on the table and a warm kitchen, something our Irish kin likely didn’t enjoy back in the old country.

Here’s to Jane Hannah and her parents …

Sláinte!

Footnotes

1. J. B. Mansfield, ed, History of the Great Lakes, Volume 2: Biographical (Logansport, Indiana: J. H. Beers & Co., 1899), pp 428-429. (Internet Archive) A biography of Jane and Barney’s son-in-law Henry L. Chamberlin reports “On August 13, 1879, Mr. Chamberlin was married to Miss Eliza Anthony, daughter of Barney and Jane (Hannah) Anthony, the latter of whom was from Antrim, a maritime county in the northeast of Ireland, and the principal home of the celebrated Scotch-Irish race. Jane Hannah was a daughter of James and Sarah (Maxwell) Hannah.”

2. “The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America.”