Neighbors

Census Records for the In-Between Years: 1842

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 7 Comments

Don’t Forget the (Free!) Territorial and State Censuses

Although they are not as informative as the decennial federal censuses, Wisconsin’s territorial and state census returns can offer useful information about the growth and development of places—such as Mequon—and can add to what we know about a family—like the Clarks—and their neighbors at various times between the once-a-decade federal census population schedules. For a nice explanation and overview of federal, territorial and state census history in Wisconsin, please go to the Wisconsin census FamilySearch.org wiki page. This is an invaluable first stop for locating these records. Be sure to peruse the lists of which records have been preserved for which counties; not all census records have survived. And the Wisconsin Historical Society has a similar page of useful Census Research Tips

The FamilySearch.org Wiki page is kept pretty current, but there have been a few changes that may not be reflected there yet. In one positive development (especially for the safer-at-home researcher), it appears that all of the microfilmed state and territorial censuses are now viewable—at no cost—via the FamilySearch.org portal. (Note that you will have to use a free account to be able to view the digitized images online. So create an account if you don’t already have one, and login before you search the indexes and click the links for the multitude of digitized microfilms.)

Here are some links and tips to speed your search. For the FamilySearch.org index, click here: United States, Wisconsin online census collections. You should land on a page that looks like this:

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The “E” is silent – as in “Clarke”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

A “New” Jonathan M. Clark Document, a New Line of Inquiry, and a Friendly Reminder…

Take a look at the following name as written by a professional U.S. land office clerk in three different places on land patent no. 19687, from 1848:

Patent No. 19687, Jonathan M. Clark(e)? #1
Patent No. 19687, Jonathan M. Clark(e)? #2
Patent No. 19687, Jonathan M. Clark(e)? #3

What to you think? Jonathan M. Clark or Clarke? Is that a silent “e” at the end of “Clark,” or just a looping flourish? Whoever indexed this document at the Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office website1 thought it was Clarke. Is it a big deal? No. Given that the GLO has been digitizing and indexing hundreds of thousands of pages of maps, survey notes and patent documents for the last decade or two, we can’t expect that the indexers can cross-reference each name on each patent and check for consistent spelling. And besides, 19th-century spelling is notoriously capricious anyway.

On the other hand, maybe the indexer could have looked at the end of the document and compared the “K” in “Clark” to the “K” at the end of this signature, representing our eleventh President:

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History Mystery! No. 4 – Who was Arthur Clark?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

And what can he tell us about Jonathan’s Vermont (or Lower Canada) roots?

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the Clark family on the 1850 federal census, and using that document to tease out as much information as possible about Jonathan, Mary, their children and their life in Mequon, circa 1850. If you missed the earlier posts, you can catch up here, here, here, and here. Yet after all that, we are still left with one intriguing question from that census: Who was Arthur Clark?

To date, the only source that connects any “Arthur Clark” to the Jonathan Clark family is line 23 of this page of the 1850 census. What do we find there?

Arthur Clark on 1850 U.S. Federal Census, Mequon Dist. 15, Washington Co., Wisconsin (detail of header and line 23) Click to open larger image in a new window.
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Lesen Sie Kurrent?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 11 Comments
“Lesen Sie Kurrent?” —Do you read Kurrent?—generated at
http://www.deutsche-handschrift.de/adsschreiben.php#schrifftfeld

Do you have ancestors from the German-speaking world? No? Then perhaps you have genealogy or local history interests in southeastern Wisconsin or other German-settled areas of the USA? Or you’ve bumped into handwritten census images, family correspondence, or other historical documents that seem to be almost written in “normal,” readable cursive, but some—or a lot—of the letters just don’t make sense? Would you like to be able to decipher these records? Then whether your name is Smith or Schmidt, you need to learn a bit about Kurrent, the standard handwriting style of the German-speaking world from around the seventeenth- until the early twentieth-century.

And to make things more confusing, writers of German didn’t always use the Kurrent script. Sometimes they employed “English cursive,” also known as “Latin script,” similar to some of the well-known American and English writing styles of the time, and it’s not unusual to see documents created in both the USA and “the old country” that employ a mix of Kurrent and English cursive styles in the same document.

Here’s a practical example. Take a look at the following list of names, recorded in elegant cursive on page 1 of the 1855 Wisconsin State Census for Mequon, Ozaukee County:

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Memorial Day 2020

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Lest We Forget

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, 
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/tn0320.photos.578083p/

In spite of the worst pandemic in a century, a quick glance at the news will show that many Americans are celebrating this Memorial Day in our now usual way, as “the first day of summer.” Beaches and parks are open, stores entice customers with deals and sales, and people are crowding shoulder to shoulder in swimming pools and along ocean boardwalks.

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.”

This Memorial Day, let’s remember those Clark House family, friends and Mequon neighbors who served in the Civil War, and what they fought—and died—for. The History of Washington and Ozaukee Counties of 1881 lists these 65 volunteers from Mequon:

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Santa Claus Visits, 1867: Reviewed

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

I hope you enjoyed our previous post: Santa Claus Visits Milwaukee, 1867, based on the diary of J. W. Woodworth.

Rev. Woodworth’s book is a unique and often entertaining source, but it’s always nice to back up personal recollections with additional contemporary documents. So I did a quick search of online Milwaukee area newspapers from the 1840s through about 1870 and found many mentions of Santa Claus and related traditions beginning in the late 1840s. And on page five of the Wednesday, December 25, 1867 edition of the Daily Milwaukee News I found this news item which adds a few piquant details in support of Rev. Woodworth’s diary entry: Continue reading →

Santa Claus Visits Milwaukee, 1867 (updated)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

Christmas is celebrated as an important religious and community holiday by many Americans. Christians worship and commemorate the birth of Jesus, and they and many other Americans enjoy a break from work and gather with family to feast and exchange gifts. But it was not always this way.

In many of the American colonies, Christmas was not observed as a religious or secular holiday. The seventeenth-century Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony considered Christmas to be non-biblical and pagan influenced, and in Boston and other parts of New England any observance of Christmas was prohibited and, for a few years, illegal. The holiday was not generally accepted in many parts of the United States until after the federal government made December 25 a national holiday in 1870. Continue reading →

Rev. Woodworth’s Autobiography

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

James W. Woodworth (1813-1893) and his brother Ephraim were among the earliest settlers in Mequon. They came from Nova Scotia, as did several other early Mequon settlers and families, including Isaac Bigelow, Daniel Strickland and Stephen Loomer. On March 1, 1838, J. W. Woodworth married fellow Nova Scotia emigrant and Mequon neighbor Mary Cerena Loomer. The marriage was believed to be the first Christian marriage in old Washington county and was performed by Mary Turck Clark’s father, Peter Turck, “an anabaptist preacher.”

J. W. Woodworth, like so many Protestant Christians of his era, was a man in search of a powerful and authentic connection to God. He found his answer in the 1830s and ’40s through Methodism. And, after many years of intense self-instruction, camp meetings, private prayer and preaching at local worship services, Woodworth was certified as a Methodist minister.

For much of his life Rev. Woodworth kept a diary of both the spiritual and mundane events of his life. He published the diary in Milwaukee in 1878 as My Path and the Way the Lord Led Me.  Continue reading →

History Mystery! No. 1 (of many)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Jonathan & Mary & ? on the 1840 Census

Introducing a new feature on the blog: History Mystery! In which you, the reader, are invited to Help the Historian solve one of the many persistent mysteries surrounding Jonathan M. Clark, his family, and related bits of local history.  History Mystery! No. 1 seeks to answer the question: Who was that older guy living with newlyweds Jonathan and Mary Clark in June, 1840? Here are the clues: Continue reading →

Finding Your Mequon Roots (part 3)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

This is Part 3 of our short introduction to Finding Your Mequon Roots. If you haven’t already, I recommend starting with Part 1 and Part 2.

Before we take a break from our Mequon neighbors of the 1900s and return to Jonathan Clark and his family in the mid-1800s, let’s take a look at a few more “macro” and “micro” things one can find by taking a closer look at a U.S. census population schedule. Once again, here’s the Becker family of Mequon, as found on lines 32 to 34 of this 1900 U.S. federal census population schedule: Continue reading →