I am saddened to report that my dear friend and fellow Clark & Turck family researcher and descendant Elizabeth “Liz” Alice (Wenger) Hickman has died, at home with her family, at the age of 81.

A life well lived.

Her family has posted a lovely obituary online and it’s worth reading. It not only reviews Liz’s personal and professional achievements—and they were many—it also manages to give the reader a good sense of her lively, intelligent, and fun personality. These two excerpts were particularly good at capturing Liz as I knew her:

Liz was a woman of determination and unmatched work ethic, whose approach to life was reflected in her annual back-to-school advice to her daughters to “sit in the front row and ask lots of questions.”

[…] With an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Liz read widely, was a passionate follower of current events, a collector of recipes, and a world traveler. She was keenly interested in technology, and often one of the earliest adopters in her family of any new technology or gadget.

Cousin Liz

Her obituary also recalls that “in retirement, Liz enjoyed genealogy, especially as it allowed her to find ‘new’ cousins and expand the family.” In 2012 it was my good fortune to become one of Liz’s newly-discovered cousins. Liz had noticed some of my early online corrections and additions to Turck and Clark documents and sources, and then contacted me through a genealogy message board. We exchanged emails and began to collaborate, and in no time we formed a happy and productive relationship as researchers and as kin.

By 2012, Liz already knew a quite a bit about her Clark genealogy; I had assembled more information about the Turck family. From then on we were frequent research partners: sharing facts and documents, posing questions, and pondering as-yet-unsolved family history mysteries. Together we were able to obtain and interpret original sources, sort fact from fiction, eliminate errors in the record, and fill in many—though not all—of the missing pieces of the Jonathan Clark family history puzzle.

It was a great help that Liz was “keenly interested in technology,” as we never lived close enough to each other such that we could easily visit and compare notes in person. Instead, we used a variety of ever-improving technologies to chat and to create and share pdfs and jpegs of documents, photos, maps, and other images of kin and historic sites, as well as our spreadsheets of Clark families and their neighbors as found in early censuses and land patents of Vermont and Lower Canada.

The Jonathan Clark House

During her research, Liz discovered that the historic stone house, built in 1848, in Mequon, by her great-great-grandparents Jonathan M. and Mary (Turck) Clark, was for sale and might be turned into a museum. Liz was an early and enthusiastic supporter of that project and became one of the charter members of the Friends of the Jonathan Clark House.

Liz and I got acquainted at about the same time, and on her enthusiastic recommendation I got in touch with Nina Look and the newly-formed Friends of the JCH, and signed on as both a charter member of the Friends, and as the volunteer JCH Historian.

And by the way, it is from Liz and her family that the Jonathan Clark House museum was able to obtain copies of the only known images of Jonathan M. Clark, Mary (Turck) Clark, and their daughter Elizabeth “Libby” Clark.

In Memorium

We all hoped that we’d have Liz in our lives for years to come, but it was not to be. I am privileged and grateful to have known her and to have pursued Clark and Turck genealogy with her for the past 13 years. Without Liz, I would not have found the Jonathan Clark House, and we would not have produced the subsequent research, images and documents that now enhance and promote the mission of the Jonathan Clark House Museum to “collect, preserve and share the history of the Jonathan Clark House and the early settlers of Mequon and Thiensville.”

Liz was one of a kind, and my life has been richer for knowing her and her lovely family. My condolences go to her husband Bob, daughters Ellen and Susan, son-in-law Anders, her grandchildren and surviving siblings, and the many other family and friends that knew and loved her.

The family plans to gather to celebrate Liz’s life at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Jonathan Clark House Museum of Mequon Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education, or your local food bank.

Forward…

No matter the circumstances, Liz was not one to sit around and let life slide idly by. She was a life-long questioner, learner, and doer. In that spirit, I plan to honor Liz by continuing my work as the JCH Historian and, especially, by continuing the search for Jonathan M. Clark’s so-far-elusive parents, siblings, and other kin.

In fact, I was thinking of Liz—and our 13-years-long search for Jonathan Clark’s roots— just a few days ago, and it prompted me to spend several hours sorting (once again) through my digital files of early Canadian documents and, in particular, to make a close re-reading of a long, handwritten Lower Canada land petition from the 1820s. And as in our previous, similar, searches, I didn’t find “the answer” to our Clark genealogy quest, but I may have discovered a few more clues to the JMC genealogy mystery. So the search will continue, and so will my—and all of our—many memories of Liz Hickman.

Thanks, Liz.

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P.S. Back in June, 2020, in lieu of a summer newsletter, I helped JCH director Nina Look put together a Salute to Liz Hickman that was then sent to the JCH Friends mailing list. I thought you might enjoy a second look. —R.P.