The main purpose of this homepage is to provide a platform for links to a substantial amount of genealogical information about some of my ancestors who I've succeeded in locating on the web, primarily through use of the Google Search engine. I began looking into the lives of my forebears in the summer of 2002 and have accumulated enough information so that I have now created this site to link the documents I have found with an explanation of the relations between them.
My great grandfather, William Friederich Lubach, is buried in the
Emanual Cemetery in the Tilden Township of Chippewa County, a few miles
west of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. He is buried there along with his
wife, Johannah (Boettcher) Lubach, and their oldest daughter, Lydia. A
transcription of the
Tilden Emanual Cemetery reveals that my great grandfather was the
first adult male buried in that cemetery when he died in 1897. Special
thanks are owed to Katherine Haake for taking the trouble to
transcribe this cemetery and put it online. Finding
this record of the remains of my great grandparents inspired me to do
an online search of the 1910
Census for
Tilden Township. Tilden is a small town now and it was even
smaller then, so it didn't take long to locate my great aunt
Louise. She was 20 years old in 1910 and was listed as a boarder
in the household of August and Minnie Boettcher. She listed her
occupation as a teacher at the Tilden country school. I am fairly
certain that August
Boettcher was her uncle by both blood and marriage. Louise
Lubach's mother, Johannah Lubach, appears to have been August
Boettcher's sister.
He would also have been William Lubach's brother-in-law.
William's sister,
Louise, was married to August Boettcher's brother, Carl.
Double-hullled family alliances were not that uncommon among German
immigrants to America in the 19th century as life in those days was
precarious. Near the middle of the page is the household of
Michael Meyer, whose father, Ludwig Meyer, was living with that
family in 1910
at the age of 90. When Ludwig Meyer was born, Napoleon was still
alive. The first body buried in the Emanual Cemetery was that of
14 year old Gustav Meyer, the son of Ludwig and brother of
Michael Meyer. Ludwig Meyer was buried in the Tilden Emanual
Cemetery in 1915, the same year that my grandfather was ordained as a
minister.
Unable to find any more members of the Lubach family in Tilden, I broadened my search to include the 1910 Census for Chippewa Falls where I found my great grandmother, Johannah Lubach, along with her daughters, Emma, Lydia, Louise and Elsie and her son, Walter. My grandfather, John Lubach, the eldest of the brood, was away at seminary in Illinois in 1910, studying to become a minister, so he was not included. My understanding is that he was 13 when his father died. He quit school and worked at a sawmill in Chippewa Falls for about ten years after they sold the family farm in Tilden. Louise was listed on the 1910 census both in Tilden and in Chippewa Falls. She and her older sister, Emma, both taught at the public school in Chippewa. Lydia, the oldest daughter, had suffered brain damage from a bout of rheumatic fever as a child and was permanently housebound.
William and Johannah (Boettcher) Lubach were married at Eagle Point
in Chippewa Falls in
1879. How long had they been in Chippewa County when they were married?
How did they get there? Why did they go? Chippewa Falls was still
basically a lumber camp in western Wisconsin during the decade after
the Civil War. Six months after finding the Tilden Emanual Cemetery
transcript and the 1910 census records for Tilden and Chippewa Falls, I
found two or three more sites that aroused my curiousity. One of them
was a page headed Auswanderer
Konigsberg which posed a significant riddle for me, in part because
it was written in German, but also because the post-WWII geography of
eastern Europe is complicated enough without trying to guess how things
were laid out there a hundred and fifty years ago. It took me nearly a
year to determine that Konigsberg referred to a county that no longer
exists on the east bank of the Oder River which has served as the
boundary between Germany and Poland since the end of WWII. The
record shows that the Lubach family lived in the village of Wrechow
near Lake Mohrin in present day Poland. My great grandfather,
William Friederich Lubach, was born on August 2,
1856, the same year that his family emigrated to
America. The entries for Wilhelm and Marie (Ebert) Lubach
and their two sons, Karl and Wilhelm, can be
found among the last few names at the very end of the register for
emigrants from Wrechow. Wilhelm listed his occupation there as
"schaeferknecht" which I understand is German for sheepherder or
sheephand. Another family of interest on that list,
August and Sophie (Ebert) Heise and their two children, Karl and
Emilie, can be found listed under the village of Dobberphul/Doelzig,
which was close by but on the opposite shore of Lake Mohrin. They
emigrated one year earlier in 1855. The family is of interest to
me because I suspect that August Heise was Wilhelm Lubach's
brother-in-law as they apparently were married to the Ebert sisters,
Sophie and
Marie. I suspect that Sophie and Marie were sisters because the
two families were next door neighbors a few years later when they
settled in Scott Township in Sheboygan County in Wisconsin.
Another next door neighbor of theirs in Scott Township was the family
of Wilhelm and Mary D. Ebert, presumably the parents of Sophie and
Marie.
I found another document at about the same time early in 2003,
a roster of the soldiers enlisted to fight in the American Civil War
with the
27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, consisting of soldiers
drawn almost exclusively from Sheboygan County. After scrolling to
Company
F on page 354 of that document it can be seen that William
Lubach and August Heise both enlisted on October 18, 1864. William
Lubach took his oath in the town of Hartford in Washington
County. August Heise was sworn in to the military in Town Herman,
farther north in Sheboygan County. Six months later, in August of 2003,
I obtained a copy of the family history of George Baum from the
Washington County Historical Society in West Bend. George Baum also
enlisted on October 18, 1864, in Hartford, Wisconsin. The
granddaughter of George Baum, Jeanette Miller of Kewaskum, Wisconsin,
compiled more than 100 pages of documents, letters, genealogical
charts, pictures, plat maps and biographical sketches of her
ancestors. These included a description of her mother's wedding
in 1915, a wedding where the Wedding March was performed by a 17 year
old debutante named Frona Lubach. George Baum's father, Philip
Baum, according to land records for 1875, lived next door to someone
named Meyer. My guess is that his neighbor was Ludwig
Meyer.
The Lubach family left East Brandenburg in 1856, which would mean that my great grandfather, William, was no more than five months old if the ship in fact sailed that year. His brother, Karl, would have been three in September of that year and since he was listed as two and born in September that suggests that the ship may have sailed in August when William was less than a month old. Census records for Sheboygan County in 1860 and 1870 are not yet available online, but are available on CDs. The State of Wisconsin, however, conducted an 1865 Census for Scott Township in Sheboygan County that is online. The Lubach and Ebert families are listed at the end of page 5 in that document next door to the Ludwig Backhaus family. August Heise and his family are on page 6. Ludwig Backhaus is of interest because records from the 1870 and 1880 censuses suggest that Marie Lubach may have married her neighbor, Ludwig Backhaus, after her first husband, Wilhelm Lubach, died in the Civil War. A record of Sheboygan County Marriages shows that a Mary Lubach married Lewis Backhaus in January of 1867. The list also shows the marriage of Louise Lubach to Carl Boettcher in March of 1880. The Lubach family in 1860, according to the census, consisted of William Lubach 34 M Farmer Prussia, Maria 34 F Prussia, Carl 6 M Prussia, Wilhelm 4 M Prussia and Louise 2 F Wisconsin. The 1865 census indicates that the family contained three males, two females and that only two members of the family were foreign born. Upon leaving East Brandenburg in 1856 Marie listed her age as 26, three years younger than Wilhelm. The census of of 1870 shows a Dorothea M. 40 FW Keeping House Prussia in the household of Ludwig Backhous 54 MW Farmer Prussia. The household lists six children William 24, Gustave 20, August 17, Carl 11, Louise 12 and Edward 8. Wilhelm and Marie's sons, Carl and William, are conspicuously absent. Ludwig's wife in 1860 was named Henrietta. In 1880 Ludwig is married to Mary Backhous F W 50 Prussia. The oldest sons, William and Gustave, appear, like their other brother, Frederick, to have moved away. August and Charles are still working on the farm and a daughter Amelia Backhous F 19 WI and a son Henry Backhous M 12 WI have been added to the fold along with an August Wies M 13 WI. Henry Backhous and August Wies are both listed as students. William and Mary's daughter, Louise, has apparently married Carl Boettcher and is no longer part of the household. Edward, who was born in 1862, is also apparently no longer part of the Backhous household. It is not clear if Edward was the son of Wilhelm and Marie Lubach or of Ludwig and Henrietta Backhous, but it is clear that someone named E. A. Lubach married a girl named Anna K. Luhn in 1886 and they are listed on the record of Sheboygan County Marriages. Did Wilhelm and Marie Lubach have a third son named Edward? The record isn't clear. But land records for Scott Township in 1875 show that the Hyser (Heise) farm was in Section 20. Records for 1889 show what in 1875 was August Hyser's land under the name of Edward Heise. And that land adjoins two other smaller farms listed under August Heise and Fred Backhaus. A Friedrich Backhouse was listed in the 1860 census as the second son of Ludwig and Henrietta Backhouse. All three families, Lubach, Heise and Backhaus appear to have lived in what became Section 20 during the Civil War, along with the Ebert family and several other families. If Edward was born a Backhaus then it appears that his mother, Henrietta, may have died giving birth to him or at some point in his early infancy. If he was born a Lubach, then he would have been three years old when his father died in the Civil War. The question is of interest to me because my middle name is Edward. It is a middle name that I inherited from my father and that he inherited from his.
My great grandfather's older brother, Carl or Charles Lubach, was almost nine years old in 1862 when the first volunteers from the village of Beechwood in Scott Township enlisted to fight in the Civil War. He was almost twelve in 1865 when news came that his father had died in the war. Charles married a girl named Catherine Guth from the nearby town of Kewaskum in 1877. She was the daughter of Nicholas Guth, a business man who owned a lumber yard in Kewaskum, and he was also the business partner of Henry Backhouse, who owned the general store. Henry Backhouse and Nicholas Guth rebuilt the original 1852 J.H. Myer flour mill in 1878, the year after Charles Lubach married Catherine Guth. That was also the year, 1878, when Guth and Backhouse became charter members and were among the original officers in establishing the Kewaskum Turnverein. I would be quite surprised if Charles Lubach wasn't part of the crew that rebuilt the mill in Kewaskum for Guth and Backhouse. How else does one become a journeyman millwright? Charles and Catherine moved to Fond du Lac for several years in the early eighties where I imagine he built or rebuilt a few more flour mills. Then they moved back to Kewaskum for a few years before moving to Ohio with their five children, three boys and two girls. A few years after they arrived in Ohio an epidemic swept through their community in Findlay, Ohio.. All three of their sons, Charles, Ellwood and Edward, died of diptheria in the second week of April, 1893. Their daughters, Lena and Tolinda, both survived the epidemic. Another son, Walter, was born to the couple in 1894. Copious thanks are due to a distant cousin, Ms. Tina Hursh in Minnesota, a direct descendant of Tolinda (Lubach) Maurer, who owns the CDs for the U.S. Censuses of 1860, 1870 and 1880 which she used quite effectively in our e-mail dialogues in October, 2003. Her patience with the wild hunches I provided and her persistence in searching Scott Township census records allowed her to locate our common ancestors there.
Wilhelm or William Lubach, my great-great grandfather, is buried at
the Jefferson
Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. He died on July
27th, 1865, and was buried the same day, two months after the formal
armistice ending the war was signed and more than three months after
Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. His cause of
death was listed as "disease", presumably from dysentery or
cholera.
The 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment
was mustered out of service in Brownsville, Texas, one month after
William Lubach's death. The unit was formed and led by Colonel
Konrad Krez beginning in August, 1862. Colonel Krez was
famous as a
'48er or Achtundvierziger
and quite prominent as a lawyer in Sheboygan and later in Milwaukee
after
the war. But he was best known among German-Americans as a
newspaper poet.
The 27th participated in the siege of
Vicksburg during the greater part of 1863 and was assigned to duty in
Little Rock, Arkansas for most of 1864, where it took part in the Camden
Expedition as part of the VII Army Corps
under General Frederick Steele. The Camden Expedition represented
the Arkansas component of a larger strategy known as the Red River
Campaign. In January of 1865 the 27th
became part of the XIII Army Corps under General Canby and was
transferred from Little Rock to Mobile, Alabama where it took part in
the capture of Fort
Blakely and Spanish Fort during the first week of
April. Colonel Krez was made a battlefield or brevet brigadier
general for the siege of Mobile, commanding both his own unit, the
27th, and another Wisconsin regiment, the 28th. In June they were
sent to Brazos Santiago, a supply depot
on an island guarding the mouth of the Rio Grande near the border with
Mexico on the Texas gulf coast. They marched on and took part in
the capture of Brownsville in
July and early August of 1865 before mustering out of service. I
haven't found an official online history
for the 27th Wisconsin, but a lengthy and engaging account of the
unit's activity
during the war was written by Corporal
Friedrich Buker of Company C.
My guess is that my great-great grandfather and his brother-in-law,
August Heise, and another half dozen Germans from Scott Township joined
up with the regiment as replacement troops in Little Rock in January,
1865, shortly before the 27th was reassigned to the XIII Army Corps and
transferred to Mobile. Corporal Buker's description of the
departure from Little Rock begins on page 61 and carries through to the
end of the war with his discharge in Brownsville and his return home to
Sheboygan on page 79. As part of the VII Army Corps under General
Frederick Steele, the 27th served alongside two other units that were
also commanded by German immigrant officers who were considered
'48ers. The 43rd Illinois was led by Colonel Adolph Dengler
and the 9th Wisconsin was commanded by Colonel Charles Salomon.
Krez and Dengler both reported directly to Adolph Engelmann, another
48er who commanded their brigade. Brigadier General Engelmann
reported to General Frederick Salomon, another '48er, who in turn
reported directly to General Steele. Charles and Frederick
Salomon were both German immigrants and brothers of Edward Salomon, who
was elected lieutenant governor but served as governor of the State of
Wisconsin during the Civil
War. So, in effect, the chain of command for much of the VII Army
Corps was German. Union control of Vicksburg after 1863 meant
that Arkansas had little choice but to comply with the authority of the
occupying forces of the Union army. General Steele took orders
directly from Abraham Lincoln for much of 1864, an election year in
which General McClellan ran for the presidency against Lincoln. A
significant part of Lincoln's reelection campaign involved bolstering a
claim that Arkansas had essentially been restored to the Union and that
complete control of the Mississippi was nearly at hand. The
Camden Expedition involved securing parts of Arkansas that were still
Rebel strongholds and it largely succeeded. The Red River
Campaign involved plans to converge on Shreveport, Louisiana from the
north in Arkansas, from the south in Louisiana, and from the east in
Mississippi, as a springboard
for a drive through the heart of Texas. The Union army
under General Banks coming north from New Orleans, however, was
repelled quickly by
the Confederate General Kirby Smith, who had time to go north
and prevent General Steele from securing Camden and advancing on
Shreveport. The Battle
of Jenkin's Ferry was one fought by General Steele in retreating
from Camden back
to Little Rock once it became clear that the plan to take Shreveport
had gone awry. That battle, fought in April of 1864,
represented the most severe combat the 27th Wisconsin experienced
during the war. The assaults on Spanish Fort
and Fort Blakely at
Mobile, Alabama in the first two weeks of April, 1865, could have been
extremely bloody battles if the Union's superior numbers, superior
artillery, including naval iron clads, and a well-orchestrated battle
plan had not made it evident
to the Rebels that further resistance was an exercise in
futility. The Union Army, according to some estimates, had more
than 50,000 troops massed. The forts had roughly 20,000 Rebel
defenders. Troop numbers were sufficient for a battle that might
have gone on for several weeks if not longer, but once Spanish Fort
fell the Confederate lines at Fort Blakely were quickly broken,
resulting in a brief blood bath and Union possession of both
forts. Sustained artillery fire for
several weeks preparatory to the assaults appears to have been a
greater
hazard to most soldiers than the actual assaults excepts for those
valiant Rebels who resisted, enabling most of their fellow defenders to
escape.
