Mary Turck Clark

Liz Hickman (1944 – 2025)

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

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.

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

UPDATE: This was supposed to go out on Monday. I hit “publish” before the piece was ready. Here’s the updated 2025 version for your reading enjoyment. Sorry for any confusion (and, for you CHH subscribers, the premature email in your inbox).

Monday, September 1st, is Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, and I thought I’d commemorate the day with a lightly-revised re-post of this CHH piece from 2023. This Labor Day, as in 2023, I have to work a shift at our local mercantile establishment. You know, a store kind of like this one, only much bigger, stocked with just about anything you need for modern living:

Like many Americans, I don’t have the day “off” on Monday, and won’t be marching in a parade, but I’d still like to honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present. With that in mind, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark House Historian, highlighting a few of the many skills, trades, and occupations common during the Clark House era.

Since it is a holiday, I’m not going to add long commentaries to each photo. Enjoy the photo galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open and peruse larger versions of each image. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts, filled with lots more information about the different skills, tools, and jobs, and the full image credits.

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Memorial Day, 2025

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

Lest We Forget

Our annual Memorial Day post, first published in 2020, more relevant with each passing year.

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, photo by Clayton B. Fraser, (Library of Congress), public domain. Memphis National Cemetery is the final resting place of Mequon’s Watson Peter Woodworth, and almost 14,000 of his Union Army comrades.

Today is the day our nation officially observes Memorial Day. For many Americans, Memorial Day represents “the first day of summer,” and is traditionally celebrated with trips to the lake, picnics, parades, and sales on cars, appliances, and other consumer goods.

But for many of us, Memorial Day remains rooted in its origins as Decoration Day. The first national observance was in 1868, when retired general John A. Logan, commander and chief of the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization—issued his General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a moment to remember what this day truly represents.

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JCH News & Events – Spring, 2025

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Howdy! Sorry for the long blog silence. It’s not that I’m lacking for topics or material to share with you all, but I’ve been busy “behind the scenes” at the Clark House for the last month or so.

In particular, I’ve been working on two big projects. JCH executive director Nina Look and I have just published the Spring | May 2025 issue of the JCH Newsletter, and Nina and I have been collaborating with JCH intern Nicole Buerosse on a major, archival-quality upgrade for the preservation and display of the museum’s irreplaceable Bonniwell Family Bible.

Scaffolding at the Clark House? What’s up with that? Read on for more info…

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Fred Beckmann, Sr. – updates & clarifications

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

Today’s post is an updated, corrected and expanded version a post I wrote in July, 2020, outlining what we knew (at the time), about the life of Fred Beckmann, Sr., the man that occupied and farmed the Jonathan Clark farm between 1868 and 1872. Then, in early 2023, I was asked to talk about the Clark House and its Cedarburg connections at the Cedarburg History Museum. I chose to center my talk on Fred Beckmann and his extended German-American immigrant family, as I believe they exemplify a number of important themes in the transformation of Ozaukee county from the initial Anglo-American dominated first wave of local settlement in the 1830s and early ’40s, into the subsequent decades of primarily German-American settlement and development.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, and learned a lot, in preparing that 2023 talk. And one of the things I learned is that there was some doubt about the year and date of Fred Beckmann’s death. So I recently investigated the issues and have updated images, text, and information for you about the life—and death—of Fred Beckmann, and I managed to solve at least one mystery in the process…

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Santa came!

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Image credit: see note 1

Remember my “Dear Santa” wish list post from last month? Well, Santa came, in the form of a cheery email with exciting historical source news from Clark House supporter, eagle-eyed historian, and all-around great friend Ellen Hickman.2

Ellen’s email, I’m happy to report, has opened new pathways to locate all kinds of otherwise hard-to-search primary and secondary historical records and documents from the Clarks’ era. Since receiving it, I’ve been chasing after documents down one formerly-obscure research “rabbit hole” after another, with some gratifying results…

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“Dear Santa,”

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

The Clark House Historian’s Christmas Wish List…

Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree [title page], E. Ferrett & Co., Philadelphia, 1845. Library of Congress

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I remember the holiday thrill of riding the Chicago & Northwestern commuter train downtown with my parents, and then walking into the majestic State Street headquarters of Chicago’s grandest department store, Marshall Field & Company. Our mission? A trip up to the “toy floor” at Field’s, where we would wait in line to tell Santa all the wonderful things we would like to receive for Christmas that year.1

It goes without saying that I haven’t been able to fit on Santa’s lap for a very long time. But as the Clark House Historian, I still have holiday dreams and wishes, and today I’d like to share some of them with you. Who knows, perhaps Santa will work his magic once again?

(Official disclaimer: I do not serve on the JCH Board of Directors, or any of its committees. This is my Christmas daydream, a fantasy of what I’d like to see unfold at my favorite museum, given unlimited resources. And besides, as the great Chicago architect and city planner Daniel Burnham famously said: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood!”)

My list is organized into several parts, the first of these is…

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Home to Thanksgiving

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

It’s Thanksgiving today, and I’m taking a few days off to spend time with family. But in the spirit of the holiday, I thought I’d reprint a lightly revised version of our now-annual Thanksgiving post, to share with you a few vintage recipes and a nice Currier & Ives lithograph from the period.1

Thanksgiving, 1867

Durrie, George H. and John Schutler, Home to Thanksgiving, ca. 1867, New York, Currier & Ives. National Gallery of Art, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Public Domain. Click to to open larger image in a new window.

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