Documents & Sources

County Government – Early Records

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

The Jonathan M. Clark House is located in Mequon, Ozaukee (formerly Washington) County, Wisconsin. In our previous post, Mequon – What’s in a name?, we looked into how Mequon became a political entity and how its goverment evolved from the county system to the town system.

From…which archives?

Where do you look when you’d like to read (and download) the handwritten minutes of the meetings of old Washington county’s commissioners, circa 1841-1846? How about…the Washington Co. Highway Department!

This actually makes more sense than you might think, since many of the county’s earliest decisions and expenditures involved proposing, surveying and cutting roads to connect new settlements to each other, to the rest of Wisconsin Territory, and beyond. So—in a fine example of professional organization and public service—the Washington county highway department has gathered together and put online many of their oldest records.

The County Highway Register was an attempt to search out, correlate, and record all known information concerning the laying out of all roads in the county. Some of these books have not been updated since the mid to late 1950’s. Read the forward in the index to understand how these books were created.

(link)

If you follow the link, you’ll find an long list of pdfs, organized by Washington County towns, that contain the collected official highway records and some of the earliest records of county government.

But…Washington County?

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Monday: Map Day! – 1874 map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

Today’s map is another unique and wonderful map from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, American Geographical Society Digital Map Collection. It is map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties from 1874, and it is packed with information and unique details.

Map of Washington and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin 1873-4 / drawn, compiled and published by G.V. Nash & M.G. Tucker ; engraved & printed by J. Knauber & Co. ; colored and mounted by E.M. Harney. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, American Geographical Society Digital Map Collection. Full copyright notice here, presented in this post as a public domain item and/or under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Click map to go to the UWM collection and open larger image in new window.

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The Turcks sell their Palmyra land, 1832

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

The Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family in Wayne Co. deeds (part 2)

Today’s post continues our series where we use deed records to follow the lives of the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family—including young Mary Turck—from the 1820s through their emigration to Mequon in 1837. This post will make more sense if you read our previous Monday: Map Day! and The Turcks – Catskill to Palmyra, 1828.

Earlier, we discovered that on April 21, 1828, Peter Turck of Catskill, Greene county, New York, bought 76 acres of land in Palmyra Township, Wayne County, New York. He paid $1,475.00 “cash in hand” to the sellers, Ellera and Catherine Potter. The record of this transaction was found on pages 266-267 of the Wayne County, New York, Deed Books, Vol. 12.

Four and a-half years later…

Today’s 1832 deed, in which Peter Turck sells the same land that he purchased in 1828, is recorded in the same deed book, immediately following the (apparently delayed) recording of his 1828 transaction. This new 1832 land sale covers parts of pages 267-268 of Vol. 12 of the Wayne County, New York, Deed Books:

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RBOH – Photo Mystery, 1865

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

Another in our occasional series of Random Bits of History, illustrating life as experienced by the early Mequon settlers and their contemporaries. Today we examine a photograph that may—or may not—depict an early Mequon settler or their kin.

Is this a photo of young Sarah (Strickland) Clark?

Reader Eric Pearman is a descendant of early Mequon settlers Cyrus Clark and Sarah Strickland. For a while last year Clark House Historian spent some time tracing Cyrus and Sarah’s lives, and analyzing some old photographs of those Mequon pioneers here, here, here, here and here (and a few more places, too; just use the blog’s Search function and keyword “Cyrus” or “tintype”).

Eric recently sent me this, unidentified, photo that belonged to a Cyrus and Sarah Clark descendent, and wondered if it might be of a previously un-photographed member of the Cyrus Clark or Sarah Strickland families. Even if this is not a Cyrus Clark or Sarah Strickland family member, the photo has a unique feature that you may want to know about as you examine other old photos. Let’s take a look…

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The Turcks – Catskill to Palmyra, 1828

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

The Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family in Wayne Co. deeds (part 1)

This post will make more sense if you read our previous Monday: Map Day! post first. And then grab a hot beverage and settle in for some quality time with old legal documents…

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you may have noticed that I usually like to gather various bits of evidence, think about them for a bit—”behind the scenes,” so to speak—and then present them to you as a coherent (I hope!) narrative that sheds light on some aspect of the history of the Clark House, its inhabitants or their community. For years, I’ve wanted to do that with the story of the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family and their migration to Wayne County, New York in the late 1820s, but we have very few records of the family from this period.

In order to make an accurate timeline of the Turcks’ years near the Erie Canal, I need to—finally—wade through the few records that do exist: land deeds recorded in Vol. 12 of the Wayne County, New York, deed books. The legal prose in these deeds is often so thick and convoluted that it’s hard to just skim them and find the useful bits. So since I need to transcribe, read, and interpret a number of handwritten deeds anyway, I thought I’d share the process with you, here on the blog. Today will be the first of several posts featuring transcriptions of the old deeds. Once we’ve transcribed them, we’ll sort through each and see what we can find out about the Turcks’ lives in the eight years before they came to the Wisconsin Territory.

The Challenge

Here’s the first page of today’s deed. Peter Turck’s contract (“indenture”) to purchase land begins about a third of the way down the page, just below the horizontal double-line:

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Monday: Map Day! – Wayne County, 1829

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

Before Mequon: finding Mary Turck’s home in upstate New York

Tracing the lives of Americans in the first decades of the 19th-century can be challenging. Whether along the expanding frontier, or in long-established and settled areas such as New York’s Hudson River valley, there are often many unhelpful gaps in the paper trail. Even the federal census—which counted, every ten years, “all persons” living in America—only recorded the name of the “head” of each (white) family, and the sex and age ranges of other members of the household.

So what do we know about the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family in the years before they arrived in Mequon? As we discussed previously, we know the family had deep roots in the traditionally Dutch-American communities of the Hudson River valley’s Ulster, Greene, Dutchess and Columbia counties. We know Mary Turck was born in Athens, Greene county, in 1821, the eldest child of Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck. By tracing the baptismal registers (where they exist) and other biographical records of her younger siblings, we know that by 1833 the family was in Palmyra, Wayne County, New York.

Wayne County: Palmyra and Macedon

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Erie Canal – the Woodworth family, 1835 (part 2)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

Continuing our look at the influence of the Erie Canal on the lives of Mequon pioneers such as Jonathan M. Clark and the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family (here and here), and the Bonniwell family (here). Today’s post continues our look at the first of two migrations of brother Ephraim and James Woodworth from Nova Scotia to their eventual home in Mequon. This post will make more sense if you read Part 1 first. The Woodworths were among many immigrants from Nova Scotia—including the Strickland, Loomer, Bigelow and West families—that came to Mequon and other parts of old Washington/Ozaukee county, Wisconsin Territory, during the early decades of settlement. 

Setting the scene: Eastern Canada and the Northeast United States, c. 1835

Here’s an annotated version of the map we featured in Part 1. As always, be sure to click the map to open a larger, high-resolution version in a new window. (If you’d like to see an enlarged, zoomable version of the original map, just click here.) Today’s annotated map illustrates the Woodworths’ 1835 trip as recorded in James W. Woodworth’s published diary.1 Later in this post we have another—more detailed— map to show the brothers’ wanderings in Ohio.

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RBOH – Walter Bonniwell’s first marriage

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

UPDATED: February 25, 2021. See notes, below, for details.

Introducing RBOH – Random Bits of History!

I have so much information to organize and share with fellow Clark House researchers and blog readers, and it doesn’t always fit into a one of our longer, regular blog posts. So today we begin an occasional series where I publish random bits and pieces of Mequon related history. With RBOH, I plan to write shorter posts that present new information or unknown documents, and try to solve mysteries or confirm existing, but undocumented, facts. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions or requests.

Walter Bonniwell’s first marriage documented!

Regular readers know that I often refer to George B. Bonniwell’s excellent history of Mequon’s early and influential pioneer family—and Clark House neighbors, friends, and in-laws—the Bonniwells. Like any work of history or genealogy, George’s book, The Bonniwells: 1000 Years, printed in 1999, has a few omissions and blank spots. But research has not stopped since his book was printed, and today we present three documents that give information about one of those missing bits of history, the marriage of Walter Bonniwell (1824-1884) and his first wife, Eleanor “Ellen” Bailey (c. 1827 to ????). In the process we’ll run into another key early settler—and man of many trades—Jonathan M. Clark’s father-in-law, Peter Turck.

Marriage License – January 18, 1845

The couple’s handwritten marriage license is image number 1211 in the Milwaukee Public Library’s collection of Milwaukee County Marriage Certificates. It reads:

Territory of Wisconsin }
Washington County }
License is hereby given to
Walter Bonniwell and Ellen
Bailey to Unite in Marriage according
to Law
Given under my hand this 18th day of January. A.D. 1845
{SL} Peter Turck Justice of the Peace

Source
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Erie Canal – the Woodworth family, 1835 (part 1)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

We’ve been looking at the influence of the Erie Canal on the early lives of both Jonathan M. Clark and the Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck family (here and here), and the Bonniwell family (here), I thought I’d share more stories of Mequon settlers that used the canal to make their way westward to the wilds of the Wisconsin Territory in the 1830s and ’40s. Today’s focus is on immigrants from Nova Scotia, particularly the Woodworth brothers, Ephraim and James.

We’re going to need a bigger map!

We’ve had numerous occasions to quote from the memoirs of early Mequon pioneer—and Turck and Clark family friend—James W. Woodworth. Unlike many pioneers who came west, bought land, and never returned home, James W. Woodworth and various members of his family made the round-trip journey between Nova Scotia to the newly opened lands of the midwestern U.S. several times in the 1830s and ’40s. Descriptions of three separate trips can be found in Rev. Woodworth’s book, and they give additional color and detail to our understanding of what immigration to “the West” was like in that era. But to give you a proper feel for the hardiness of these 19th-century migrants, we’re going to need a bigger map!

Eastern Canada and the Northeast United States, c. 1835

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