1700s

Veterans Day, 2022

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

Veterans Day is today. For a perspective on the day—and our early Mequon veterans—here’s a post originally published at Clark House Historian on November 11, 2016, and revised, expanded and republished several times since.

Armistice Day

One hundred and three years ago, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour—Paris time—the Armistice of Compiègne took effect, officially ending the fighting on the Western Front and marking the end of World War I, the optimistically named “War to End All Wars.”

In the United States, the commemoration of the war dead and the Allied victory began in 1919 as Armistice Day, by proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson. Congress created Armistice Day as a legal holiday in 1938. Starting in 1945, a World War II veteran named Raymond Weeks proposed that the commemorations of November 11 be expanded to celebrate all veterans, living and dead. In 1954 Congress and President Eisenhower made that idea official, and this is what we commemorate today. There are many veterans with a connection to the Jonathan Clark house. We honor a few of them in this post.

Jonathan Clark, Henry Clark, and the U.S. Army

Jonathan M. Clark (1812-1857) enlisted as a Private in Company K, Fifth Regiment of the U. S. Army, and served at Ft. Howard, Michigan (later Wisconsin) Territory, from 1833 until mustering out, as Sargent Jonathan M. Clark, in 1836. In the 1830s, Fort Howard was on the nation’s northwestern frontier. Jonathan’s Co. K spent much of the summers of 1835 and 1836 cutting the military road across Wisconsin, from Ft. Howard toward Ft. Winnebago, near modern Portage, Wisconsin.

Fort Howard, Wisconsin Territory, circa 1855, from Marryat, Frederick, and State Historical Society Of Wisconsin. “An English officer’s description of Wisconsin in 1837.” Madison: Democrat Printing Company, State Printers, 1898. Library of Congress. Click to open larger image in new window.

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Help the Historian! – MS “History Mystery” solved!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

On Monday, I mentioned how I’ve been reading a lot of interesting documents lately, including some very cool and very old Clark House related manuscripts, and I was puzzled by this bit of manuscript marginalia, found in an old religious book, a real History Mystery:

I noted that this handwriting may (or may not) be a variation on the English writing style known as Secretary hand. I was stumped, and asked you readers to Help the Historian! with this mysterious passage. And although I didn’t have any prizes to award—except eternal fame and glory throughout our vast Clark House Historian readership—I hoped someone would step forward and claim their virtual laurel wreath. Well, the week is over, and the winner is…

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Help the Historian! – a manuscript “History Mystery”

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of interesting documents lately, including some very cool and very old Clark House related manuscripts. (More details on these exciting documents coming later this spring or early summer.) We’ve looked at many old manuscripts here at Clark House Historian, and I think I’m pretty good at deciphering most older English handwriting from about 1700 until the present and, with help, I can even figure out many German scripts from the late 18th- through the 19th-century.

But then there’s this, a real Clark House Historian History Mystery:

That’s the handwriting of a literate English-speaking man or woman of a certain era. I’ve seen handwriting like this before in old Cornwall parish records of my Perkins family. In my (limited) experience I’ve seen this style of writing on documents dating from the later-1600s through the early 1700s, perhaps as late as 1750 or so. But I’m not an expert on Early Modern English or English orthography, and it’s possible that this hand was in use as early as the 1500s. It may (or may not) be a variation on the English writing style known as Secretary hand.

For some reason, this writing style remains very difficult for me to read. I’ve spent enough time with examples of this hand—and the many spelling conventions of the era—that I’m not completely lost, but there is a lot here that I don’t understand. So I’m asking you readers to take a crack at it, and Help the Historian! with this mysterious passage.

Along the way, I recommend you click on each image to open it in a new, larger window. You’ll get the best, enlargeable, view of each mystery text and my annotations. Here are your clues:

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Hail, Smiling morn! – 2022 edition

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Happy New Year to all, and best wishes that 2022 will be an improvement on the past year. (A low bar, I know.) Anyway, when I first published this post, on January 1, 2021, I wrote: I’m almost done with my research on the second half of the 1843 concert by the Milwaukie Beethoven Society. (If you missed our earlier posts on that concert, links are here and here.) But it’s New Year’s Day, and I’m not quite done writing about “Part Second.”

Well, it turns out that “not quite done” was an optimistic estimate, as I became distracted by so many other research topics and posts and never got around to discussing the second part of the Milwaukee Beethoven Society’s concert. New Year’s Day is here again, and I’m still not done, alas, but I have not forgotten and—with luck—I will finish that post some time this winter.

A spot of Spofforth to ring in the New Year…

Meanwhile, let’s start the New Year on a cheerful note by reprising last year’s festive musical selection, drawn from that second part of the Milwaukee Beethoven Society’s 1843 premiere concert:

Milwaukee Weekly Sentinel March 15 1843, page 2. Click to open larger image in new window.

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Home to Thanksgiving

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

I’m still preoccupied with non-Clark House matters, and new posts continue to be delayed. But in the spirit of our upcoming national holiday, I thought I’d help your preparations by sharing 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.

By 1867, when this sentimental lithograph was first published, the Clark family had been living in Milwaukee for about six years. Family patriarch Jonathan M. Clark had died a decade earlier, and his only son, Henry M. Clark, had been dead for about a year and a half. Family matriarch Mary (Turck) Clark was living in a Milwaukee house with her unmarried daughters, Libbie, Persie, Theresa, Laura and Josie.

The Clark’s eldest child, Caroline, had married William W. Woodward in 1861. In 1867 the Woodwards were still living and farming in Granville, Milwaukee County, about nine miles south of the old Clark farm in Mequon.

So in 1867, Mary (Turck) Clark and her daughters would not have celebrated Thanksgiving at the old family farm in Mequon. But a picture like this Currier & Ives lithograph might have stirred fond memories of family and friends gathering for earlier Thanksgiving celebrations at the old Clark place.

And, you might wonder, what did the Clarks and their neighbors eat for Thanksgiving in Wisconsin in the mid-1800s? Glad you asked…

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Veterans Day, 2021

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

Veterans Day is today. I’m preparing a new post on one of our Clark House veterans, Mary (Turck) Clark’s youngest sibling, Benjamin Turck (1839-1926), but it’s not quite ready yet. For a wider perspective on the day—and our early Mequon veterans—here’s a post originally published at Clark House Historian on November 11, 2016, and revised, expanded and republished on November 11, 2020. I’ve also incorporated a list of Mequon’s Civil War soldiers, originally published here on May 24, 2020.

Armistice Day

One hundred and three years ago, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour—Paris time—the Armistice of Compiègne took effect, officially ending the fighting on the Western Front and marking the end of World War I, the optimistically named “War to End All Wars.”

In the United States, the commemoration of the war dead and the Allied victory began in 1919 as Armistice Day, by proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson. Congress created Armistice Day as a legal holiday in 1938. Starting in 1945, a World War II veteran named Raymond Weeks proposed that the commemorations of November 11 be expanded to celebrate all veterans, living and dead. In 1954 Congress and President Eisenhower made that idea official, and this is what we commemorate today. There are many veterans with a connection to the Jonathan Clark house. We honor a few of them in this post.

Jonathan Clark, Henry Clark, and the U.S. Army

Jonathan M. Clark (1812-1857) enlisted as a Private in Company K, Fifth Regiment of the U. S. Army, and served at Ft. Howard, Michigan (later Wisconsin) Territory, from 1833 until mustering out, as Sargent Jonathan M. Clark, in 1836. In the 1830s, Fort Howard was on the nation’s northwestern frontier. JMC’s Co. K spent much of the summers of 1835 and 1836 cutting the military road across Wisconsin, from Ft. Howard toward Ft. Winnebago, near modern Portage, Wisconsin.

Fort Howard, Wisconsin Territory, circa 1855, from Marryat, Frederick, and State Historical Society Of Wisconsin. “An English officer’s description of Wisconsin in 1837.” Madison: Democrat Printing Company, State Printers, 1898. Library of Congress. Click to open larger image in new window.

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Turck, Turk…Durk?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

Spelling variations in old records

Durk, Peter [Turck], baptismal record, 1798, detail. “Peter” starts the left column, father “Jacob A. Durk” is at the top of the center column (source). Click to open larger image in new window.

In a previous post, reader Laura Rexroth asked: Why did they spell Peter Turck’s name incorrectly [i.e., Durk] when he was baptized? That’s a great question, and super relevant to successful historical and genealogical research. So let’s talk about the Turck family surname and, by extension, the whole issue of spelling in earlier times and documents.

There are two main issues to keep in mind:
• variations in spelling that existed at the time the source material was created, and
• subsequent misreadings, including incorrect transcription or indexing of sources

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CHH Reader Challenge – results!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

At the end of last month, while working on some longer posts about the Turcks and Clarks, I had some fun creating the first Clark House Historian Reader Challenge: where you get to be the historian!, and today we have the results. The original challenge went something like this:

Here’s an excerpt of a document that will be part of an upcoming post. Can you read and transcribe it? (Ignore the squiggles in the top right corner, they belong to another record on the same page.)

The original CHH Reader Challenge #1. Click to open larger image in new window.

And I gave y’all a hint, the full page from which this record was excerpted. And as a second hint, I suggested that a look at my discussion of Kurrent handwriting might be helpful.

So what is this a record of, and what does it say?

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Mary Turck Clark—updated

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 10 Comments

The original version of this post was the second-ever post on Clark House Historian. It represented what we knew at the time about Mary Turck, the daughter of Peter Turck and Rachael Gay, wife of Jonathan M. Clark, and mother of the eight Clark family children. The original April, 2016, post was pretty accurate, but we have learned a lot more about Mary and her Turck and Clark families in the meantime. So here is a revised version of that post with errors corrected and ambiguities clarified—where possible.

Please note that there are many more facts about Mary and her Clark and Turck families that I’ve written about in the past almost-5 years that are not linked to in this post. If you are looking for more information about Mary, I highly recommend using the blog’s SEARCH function and our new INDEX. And if you still can’t find the info you want, please ask me! Just use the Leave a Reply box, below, or the CONTACT link, above.

Mary Turck Clark: Mequon Pioneer

CLARK, Mary TURCK portrait

Mary Turck Clark. Photograph courtesy Liz Hickman. Click to open larger image in new window.

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Monday: Map Day!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

Mary Turck’s Greene County, NY

As we discussed last Monday, 2021 is the bicentennial of Mary Turck Clark’s birth. So this year I’d like to focus on Mary, her parents and her seven siblings: where they came from, how they got to Wisconsin, and where they went afterwards. Today we’ll start to get our Turck-family bearings with a look at an excellent map of Greene County, New York, an important place in the lives of Mary, her parents, and her extended family.

The Hudson River Dutch-Americans

Mary Turck’s parents and ancestors descended from Dutch-American families that had been in New York since colonial times. For more background and a fine 1829/32 map of the whole state, take a minute to re-read our previous Monday: Map Day!, Peter and Rachael (Gay) Turck’s New York, 1829/32. The initial Dutch immigrants to New Netherland landed on Manhattan Island; it wasn’t long before Dutch settlers headed inland, west and north up the Hudson River. By the time Mary Turck was born in 1821, there had been generations of Dutch-Americans living along the Hudson. The story of Mary’s extended family—the Turck, Gay, Groom, and Van Loon families and their kin—is centered around a handful of Hudson River counties. Some of the boundaries and place names changed over the centuries, but much of the story of Mary Turck’s family will be found in the documents, maps and places of Ulster and Greene counties on the west bank of the river and Dutchess and Columbia counties on the east side.

Burr, David H., Map of the State of New-York and the surrounding country by David H. Burr. Compiled from his large map of the State, 1832.[…] Entered according to Act of Congress Jany. 5th., 1829 by David H. Burr of the State of New York. Engd. by Rawdon, Clark & Co., Albany & Rawdon, Wright & Co., New York [detail]. Credit, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, non-commercial use permitted under Creative Commons license. Click image to open larger map in new window.

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