Bonus benefits of my business!

 There is so much to love about my new business (Family History Sleuth) helping people to reconnect with their past and their ancestors. If anyone has ever watched Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr you’ll understand how much can be learned and shared about someone’s ancestors and the feeling of groundedness most feel after reviewing their Book of Life. It’s an honor and so rewarding to be a part of other people’s family history mysteries.

The added bonus for me is that most of my clients are investigating people in places where either my husband or my families passed through at some point and sometimes while searching for a client I come across something for me!  This blog is about a recent added bonus about my family, that was made possible by a client’s search.

A find for my client

I learned that one of my client’s great-grandmothers was a “teacher” in 1880 as a 16 year old in Hebron, Potter County, Pennsylvania, presumably a one-room school house. In the 1880 census there were approximately 830 people living in this rural hilly northern Pennsylvania township. I found a map that identified all of the one-room school houses thinking that I might be able to locate the one (based on the census where she lived) that she worked at. 

At the same time, I contacted the Potter County Historical Society through their FaceBook page chat. I asked them for information about Hebron and possible listings of one room school house teachers. They responded very quickly, they looked, and responded that they didn’t have any records for teachers at that time. While I was in the chat, I realized that I had sent an acknowledged but unanswered message in 2021 about my own family, so I brought that to their attention and this is where it gets fun for me!

Sackman House

On 15 July 1856, my great-great-great-grandparents (Johann Sackmann and Christina Dunker) left Hamburg, Germany enroute to New York aboard the ship named John Herman. They joined up with a new settlement called Germania in Potter County, Pennsylvania founded by Dr. Charles Meine in 1855. I haven’t determined yet if they left Germany specifically to join them or learned about it and made their way sometime before 1860. According to the 1860 and 1870 census, they were living in Germania within the township of Abbott. They had three young children prior to leaving Germany (Louise, Carl, and Pauline) and two children in Germania (Emma–my great-great-grandmother and Henry). There may have been another child who died as a baby around 1860.

I have performed substantial research on the 3 sisters (Louise, Pauline, Emma), who I affectionately call the Sackmann Sisters. I have connected with 4th cousins who descend from each of the other 2 sisters. One of these 4th cousins, Amanda Grethe, has found among her family’s collection some incredible photos of the family. One of them is this amazing photo of the house identified as “The Old Sackmann House Germania, PA”. And this is what I was asking about to the Potter County Historical Society.

1869 Map of Potter County with Ownership was labeled “Mrs. J. H. Sackman”

Land Warrant Book,
Source: Potter Co.
Historical
Society

Over the course of a week, this time, the researchers at the historical society provided me with a copy of an 1869 map identifying where their farm would have been, which is where this house was located, AND the original deed with Johann H. Sackmann and his older brother’s name Jacob!! I’m hypothesizing that Jacob, who had been in the US since the mid 1830s and very successful in Kings County, New York, probably purchased the land for his younger brother in 1858. The land was advertised as farming land, but I have been there and this land would have been incredibly difficult to farm because of the rocks, hills, and trees! It’s absolutely beautiful, but definitely not what I would call prime farm land!

Section 15 No 5612
August 1, 1858

About 1887, Christina Dunker is sitting holding her
granddaughter, my great-grandmother,
Louise Hillmann. My great-great-grandfather,
John Hillmann & Emma Sackmann Hillmann
are to the left. This photo is thanks to cousin Marion,
who descends from the boy in the photo, Herman Hillmann.

I haven’t found the death records for Johann Sackman but he was deceased by the 1870 census and by 1880 most of the rest of the family was in Manhattan. My great-great-grandmother Emma Sackman married Johannes Willheim Hillmann (the man in front of the house photo) in 1882 and lived in Brooklyn owning a bar/liquor dealership. Emma Sackman Hillmann lived to be 88 years old, and was very much beloved by my grandmother and my father, who called her “Granny”. She lived with my father’s family for several years so my dad has some cherished memories of his great-grandmother. 

I am delighted to now know, thanks to my client, the exact location of the original farm and farm house!

A Well Traveled Postcard

 

Every summer I get together with college friends and spend several days telling stories while we scrapbook times in our lives. 

This summer, I was working on 1988-1989 when my husband (then boyfriend) and I studied abroad in Aberdeen, Scotland our junior year of college. While going through all of the negatives and scrapbooking paraphernalia I came across a postcard written in German to an address in Detroit, MI. When I saw it, I thought maybe it was a postcard I picked up while in Germany on our travels thinking that it was pretty fun that it was to someone in Detroit, MI?

         I thought I would investigate the addressee and figure out this person’s life. Here’s the postcard:

And here’s the writing and address on the back:

Using this address, and recognizing that this was written in 1929, I found Benno (a 32 year old single man) and his mother, Betty (a 71 year old widower) renting the house at 4918 McClellan Ave in the 1930 census.

I was curious about his life and searched out other censuses, finding him in the 1940 census and then again in the 1950 census. But now he has a wife and 3 children and lives at 17173 Centralia in Redford.

17173 Centralia in 1991

This is when my mind was blown! 

In 1991, my husband and I purchased our first house….17173 Centralia! Yes, clearly, we must have found this in the house and somehow got amongst my Scotland travel things, which I haven’t looked at in over 30 years. (I might add that since 1991 we have moved into 4 different houses, from Redford to Saratoga, Wyoming to Kalamazoo, Michigan to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania to Riverside, Pennsylvania!)

Neither my husband nor I recognized the postcard, but my husband is a very handy man and renovated the upstairs of our cute bungalow at 17173 and the only thing we can think of is that he found it in his deconstruction and we’ve held onto it since then?!

Reconnecting the Post card

In 1991, I would have never had the resources to figure out how to reconnect this post card with the owners, but with the tools today it was easy!

From the 1950 census I had 3 childrens’ names and through obituaries and other on-line tools, I found a relatively current address for one of the daughters, who is now 78 years old. She married and lived in Canton, Michigan. Although I found a street address for her, I didn’t just want to send the original postcard without knowing that she was still alive and living at that address.

Daughter's High School Photo

I sent a letter through US Mail to the address on Monday, July 21st explaining who I was and how I came to have this postcard I believed was her fathers, including a photocopy of the front and back. I included my email address and phone number so that if she was interested, I could send them to her.

On Saturday, July 26th, I received the following email response:

“Thank you for sending the information about the postcard. Yes it was sent to my father many years ago. He was born in Germany and came to the U.S. as a teenager so he left many friends and family there. They kept in touch thru the years. I will try to translate the message. 

I would love very much to see the pictures of your remodeling of the upstairs of the house. My sister and I slept up there for our childhood and teen years until we got married in the sixties. Thank you again. It brought back so many memories.”

So, there you go, 34 years after finding a postcard which began its journey in Bremen, Germany 96 years ago to a 31 year old man in Detroit and traveled to Redford to Wyoming back to Michigan to Pennsylvania and back to Michigan, it is now reconnected with the daughter of the recipient!

Oh, what a find!

I am volunteering again this summer at the Tecumseh Historical Society & Museum, helping to organize and catalogue their vertical files. Last week, I came across a set of photos donated in 2006 by a woman whose aunt was a subject of some of the photos with the family she married into. This family was the Rosacrans family from Tecumseh whose family owned the Rosacrans & Sons dry goods store for 95 years, closing in the 1960’s.

A few of the photos were particularly interesting because she claimed that they were taken in 1922-24 at their cottage on Sand Lake! This is the lake that I have spent every summer of my life. I have spent hundreds of hours researching many of the people and cottages around the lake with my father and was curious where this cottage was.

After a week of various investigations…searching deeds in the court house and tax rolls at the Lenawee County Historical Museum, looking for people/photos at the Tecumseh Library, watching the 1980’s Oral History of Ned Rosacrans (a young boy in the photos), and posting the photos to two different historical facebook pages, I had nothing!

I learned a lot about the Fred Rosacrans family, their kids, and grandchildren. I even learned that they lived (and Ned grew up) in a house at 207 N. Union St, which was next door to my husband’s family! (A house that my husband’s great-great-great-grandmother, Harriet Spofford Webster built in 1850 and 4 generations of his family lived in for almost 100 years! In the 1920’s Jim’s great-great grandmother Eliza Virginia Webster would have still lived in the house, although her husband Myron Conklin died in 1922 after over 50 years of marriage.)

                                                                                            Fred Rosacrans House, 207 N. Union St.

Webster-Conklin House, 211 N. Union St. c. 1980s

Webster-Conklin House, 211 N. Union St. c. 2023

There was one last place I learned about to look…it turns out that there were home movies that Fred Rosacrans made. So yesterday at the Tecumseh District Library, I watched the Fred Rosacrans home movies that he took in 1928 and 1929. It was an amazing silent film filled with every day and special occasions. There were images of boys ice skating on a local pond, playing baseball, men bailing hay, Memorial Day parades, GAR gatherings…and then there it was!

Unexpected and so surprising... nothing about Sand Lake...instead there was a home movie of Eliza Virginia “Jenny” Webster in 1928 (Jim’s great-great-grandmother)! I have seen plenty of photos of her and in fact last year I found a few more (check out blog Sometimes you really luck out!) but I never imagined I would ever see a video of her! This is NOT AI or just animating a photo, this was really truly Jenny sitting on her front steps welcoming (I think her granddaughter) Georgianna Conklin. I wish I could hear her voice, but this is an absolutely amazing find, so I will take it!

This is a reminder to me to keep my eyes open, you never know when you will come across something completely unexpected and totally wonderful!

Grandparents of my Grandparents

 Anyone who has read any of my postings knows that family is incredibly important to me. I feel so lucky with the family members related to me and the role they have played in making me who I am today. Grandparents were those very special people to me. I was fortunate because I knew all four of my grandparents as a child and also as an adult. My first grandparent to pass away was my paternal grandmother, Dorothy Emma Sedlock Massey, in 1993, when I was 25 years old!

Today’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun posted by Genea-Musings asked the question, “Did your grandparents know their grandparents?”

Paternal Grandfather, Rocco Joseph Mazziotti (1909-1995)

Rocco Bellantoni

As I have recorded in other blogs, my grandfather’s father was a “wheel baby” in Calabria, Italy and never knew his biological parents. He was adopted/fostered by Rocco Bellantoni (1842-1920) and Grazia Bova (1847-1900). While my grandfather, Rocco, might have known his namesake since they overlapped 11 years, to my knowledge Rocco Bellantoni never came to the United States and my grandfather never traveled to Italy.

My grandfather did, however, know his maternal grandparents:

• Giuseppe Antonio Mortelliti 

• b. 26 Feb 1843 in Scilla, Reggio di Calabria, Calabria, Italy

• d. 29 Jul 1915 in Elmsford, Westchester, New York

• Santa Morabito

• b. 3 Aug 1857 in Scilla, Reggio di Calabria, Calabria, Italy

• d. 3 June 1945 in Elmsford, Westchester, New York

These grandparents are the people who immigrated in 1893 (Giuseppe) and 1902 (Santa). Giuseppe travelled back and forth a few times before all of the family finished arriving in 1902 when Santa and her daughter (my great-grandmother Concetta) were the last to arrive. Unfortunately I have no photos of this couple to date, but I’m sure there were some taken and I just haven’t found them yet!

Paternal Grandmother, Dorothy Emma Sedlock (1910-1993)

Emma and Otto, 1 Oct 1911

My grandmother, Dot, had a difficult childhood. Her parents, Alonzo Sedlock and Louise A. Hillmann, both struggled with their mental health at various points in their lives. They separated and divorced around 1913, when my grandmother was just 3 years old. My grandmother didn't talk much about her childhood, but my grandfather shared with my father the following story. After the divorce, Dot and her sister were living with her mother who left them in a hotel room when she was working as a clothes buyer for a department store. At one point, the hotel caught on fire when the daughters were there by themselves. I have not been able to verify this with any records but in 1915 Census little Dot was living with a neighbor and her sister living with her grandparents. By 1920, Dot and her sister Ruth were living with their maternal grandmother, Emma Amanda Sackmann and her 2nd husband, Otto Schmidt. (Dot’s biological grandfather Johannes Willheim Hillmann died in 1906 so she would have never met him). My grandmother knew and loved her grandmother very much and “Granny” eventually came to live with her family for a bit and my father knew and loved her too.

Maternal Grandparents:

• 

  Favorite photo of Ruth and Dot

  Johannes Willheim Hillmann

• B.18 Apr 1856 in Bremen, Bremen, Germany

• D. 13 Jan 1906 in Brooklyn Ward 25, Kings, New York

• Otto Fred Schmidt (step-grandfather)

• B. 1868 in Germany

• D. 3 May 1924 in Brooklyn Ward, Kings, New York

• Emma Amanda Sackmann

• 26 Jun 1862 in Germania, Potter County, Pennsylvania

• 2 Feb 1951 in Brattleboro, Windham, Vermont
  

I have evidence that she did meet and know her paternal grandmother but I do not know to what level. She never spoke about this grandmother to my father, so nothing was really known about her, but I am certain that she is the one who paid for one of the favorite photos I have of she and her sister.

Elizabeth Kristof Barath,
taken at the same photography studio

Paternal Grandparents:

• Janos Szedlak

• B. 31 Dec 1841 in Barca, Kosice, Kosice, Slovakia

• D. between 1878 and 1885 in Kosice

• Elizabeth Szabo Kristof
  

• B. 18 May 1855 in Garadna, Borsod-Abauj-Zemplen, Hungary

• 22 Mar 1919 in Port Jervis, Orange, New York

Maternal Grandfather, Walter Elliot Tubbs (1911-1994)

Although my grandfather was the youngest of the three Tubbs children, he did appear to overlap in life with three of his four grandparents. Although this was the case and I knew my grandfather into my 20’s, I never remember hearing a story about any of them. I asked my mother at dinner tonight and she doesn’t ever remember hearing any stories either, even about the grandmother who lived in the same town close to my grandfather into his teenage years.

Samuel Obed Tubbs

Paternal grandparents:

• Samuel Obed Tubbs

• B. 24 Feb 1834 in Ontario County, NY

• D. 30 Jun 1917 in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI

• Francis Eliza Randall

• B. 4 Jan 1837 in Watertown, Jefferson, NY

• D. 22 Oct 1924 in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI

Maternal grandparents:

Frances Eliza Randall

• Chauncey Gould Orcutt

• B. 25 Dec 1838 in Troy, Rensselaer County, NY

• D. 9 Oct 1919 in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI

• Susan Ann Bailey

• B. 8 Dec 1840 in Green Oaks, Livingston, MI

• D. 1 Oct 1904 in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, MI

Chauncey Gould Orcutt

Maternal Grandmother, Elizabeth Anna Leach (1914-1998)

Although I knew all of my grandparents into my 20’s, I was closest with my maternal grandmother, Betty. She was bright, an avid reader and bridge player, and a fierce advocate for women, although not in the feminist sort of way. (See Thankfully Celebrating My Grandmother's 110th Birthday for more about this grandmother.)

I think she learned from her mother never to be dependent on a man. Her father died young leaving her mother and two young children to fend for themselves in the 1920’s. She took away from this experience that women needed to have an education and a job that could support themselves and to always, always have a $20 bill in your purse and 20¢ for a phone call and to know how to drive!

Betty’s father was left an orphan at age 9. His mother died a week after giving birth to him and his father died of a stroke leaving Edward to be raised by his maternal grandmother. So she never had the chance to know her paternal grandparents.

Her mother’s father died also before she was born, but her maternal grandmother was still alive. And I have two stories I heard from my grandmother about her grandmother, Mary Bedell Stoddard. In Michigan, card playing is a common pastime, especially in the cold winter months or the summer vacation time. I’m not sure if my grandmother learned to play cards from her grandmother but I know they played together, because my grandmother told me that her grandmother “cheated at cards!” and she was partially deaf and used a horn like thing. My grandmother would say, “Grandma, you can't do that!” and she said that her grandmother would pretend not to hear or would put the horn to her ear and say, “What? What’s that you say?” knowing full well she knew what she was doing was not allowed! I also know that she was a beautiful artist, and my husband and I have one of her paintings she painted of a civil war soldier and young woman. I, unfortunately, don’t have any stories about what the painting represents.

Henry Edward Leach

Paternal Grandparents:

Henry Edward Leach

• B. 25 Jan 1834 in England?

• D. 15 Jun 1892 in Lake Linden, Houghton, MI

Flora Elizabeth Croft

• B. 1854 Canada

• D. 1 Sep 1883 in Lake Linden, Houghton, MI

• 
  

Flora Elizabeth Croft

Henry Clay Stoddard

Maternal Grandparents:

• Henry Clay Stoddard

• B. 25 Aug 1841 in Detroit, Wayne, MI

• D. 8 Apr 1909 in Reed City, Osceola, MI

• Mary Bedell

• B. 19 May 1852 in Nankin Twnsp, Wayne, MI

• D. 8 May 1933 in Big Rapids, Mecosta, MI

Mary Bedell