The Zells and German Ancestry

It would be a misnomer to call my mother’s side of the family, the Wilkins side of the family. More appropriate might be to call it the German side of the family. Here is what the family tree looks like for the few generations leading up to Elvera Catherine Wilkins.

Ignoring for the moment some of the misspellings that need to be changed, it is easy to see that other than the mysterious Ed Wilkins, whose family with its English last name disappears into the mists of time, the remainder of the family – the Sitzmanns, the Rymans and the Zells all have Germany-speaking roots. All of us that have made it past sixth grade are very familiar with the settling of the country from the British perspective, but not a lot us know much about the German settlement – the second largest ethnicity to settle the United States. Its an interesting bit of trivia that probably more present day Americans have their roots in Germany than they do in England. At any rate, I wanted to sketch out a few basic facts to try to put our family’s appear in the United States into context.

There were basically two waves of immigrants coming into the United States from Germany. One came in during the colonial period. These Germans came in principally through Philadelphia. They founded Germantown, the largest German speaking settlement in the colonies, which became incorporated into city of Philadelphia in 1707. Those that did not settle in towns moved out past Philadelphia to farms and became the people today that we call the Pennsylvania Dutch. Most of them came from the western part of Germany.

The second wave of immigrants came in the 1800’s and entered principally through New York, but tended to bypass the east coast and move on into Wisconsin and other area in the mid-west. They came from areas in southern Germany like Bavaria and eastern Germany like Prussia. It is important to remember that the Germany of the 1700-1800’s was not the Germany of today and, just like Italians, they did not think of themselves as coming from Germany, but from that area of German speaking Europe where they lived. Bavarians were no more like Prussians than Sicilians were like Venetians. This second wave left most from one of two ports in Germany: Hamburg or Bremen. The records of the passengers who set sail from Bremen were pretty much all destroyed when the U.S. bombed the city in World War II.

So that is some of the context for our German-speaking ancestors: the Sitzmanns, the Rymans, the Zells and the others who entered our family through them.

It is pretty understandable that coming into a country whose main language was English, that German families frequently looked for communities with other German speaking families, and, in fact, it was not uncommon in more rural areas for towns to be made up of all residents who came from a certain area of Germany. I was reading a book on migration and culture when I came across the following sentence, . “Lomira, Wisconsin, was settled almost exclusively by Prussians from Brandenburg, while the nearby towns of Herman and Theresa were settled by Pomeranians.” The name “Lomira, Wisconsin” jumped out at me because I knew that someone on my mother’s side of the family had lived there in their migration across the United States and it turned out to have been Anna Zell. An 1880 census puts Anna there at age eleven there with her parents John Zell and Wilhelmina Grafunder. It also lists their nationality as Prussian. (To confuse things further one family tree also puts the family living in living in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin in 1869 when Anna was one year old, but this is undocumented.)

Perhaps the most interesting document that we have about the Zell family is the ships log. The ship that they sailed on was the Deutschland. The lists of passengers includes Johanne Friedrich Zell, Wilhelmina Zell and three children. The youngest, Ana is only six months old. Here is a picture of the ship below.

One can only imagine what the passage on this ship must have been like for the family with an infant. It set sail from Bremen, so against all odds, the record of our families voyage must have been one of the few that survive the World War II bombing. The ship arrived in New York on Sept. 2, 1869. By the end of the colonial period trips took about 6-8 weeks, so chances are the trip took less than six weeks but these trips almost always stopped in England before crossing the Atlantic and picked up more supplies and passengers.

A fact that I found very interesting was that the Deutschland sailed for only a short time. Its first voyage in was in 1866 and in 1875 it ran aground and sank. Here is one short description of what happened at the time.

“On 6 Dec. 1875 The Deutschland ran aground on Kentish Knock in the mouth of the river Thames. 157 passengers, mainly German emigrants, and crew lost their lives… She stranded in severe fog and snowstorms, which also prevented her signals of distress from being seen.”

The incident prompted the famous British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to right a poem called “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

I remember when I was in nine grade gathering material for a family history project, my Grandpa Wilkins alluding to a story that came from the Ryman side of the family that some members of the family came over on a boat, while others stayed behind. The gist of the story was that for some reason one son came over first and when those who stayed behind attempted to come later, the boat they were on sank. It was kind of a vague story – sort of a family legend – and I’d always assumed it concerned the Ryman family coming from Switzerland, but it looks as though there is a possibility that this story is really grounded in history and that the family involved was not the Ryman’s but the Zells.

Sitzmann Family Photo

Hanging on the wall among the pantheon of family pictures in upstairs guestroom is a copy of an old black and white photograph that has been hanging there for years. In it, a family is sprawled across a yard in front of a mid-west style farmhouse. The clothes they are dressed in – the men including boys in long sleeve white shirts, vests, coats and hats, the women in floor length dresses with long doily-like collars around the neck – suggests that this picture is from the end of the 1800’s or beginning of the 1900’s. A man, looking like the family patriarch, is sitting in a chair with his arms crossed, and a woman, presumably his wife, stands near him with hands on a baby carriage. In front of them, the children all lounge in the grass and to the side a robust woman stand beside a man who may be her husband but comes barely to her shoulder.

I’ve always vaguely known that it was somehow related to my mother’s side of the family but I was never sure just how. Yesterday, through a stroke of luck I discovered who the family was. I was viewing a copy of a page from the June 30, 1969 Centennial edition of the Le Mars Sentinel, the newspaper of Le Mars, Iowa. The page was titled, “Some Early Houses of Plymouth County.” In the middle of bottom row of pictures was one with the captain “The barn and farm of Valentine Sitzmann.” I recognize the name immediately, of course. The pictures on either side were labeled “Walnut Rose Stock Farm, Residence of Valentine Sitzmann” and “The Residence of Joseph Sitzmann,” respectively. Valentine and Joseph Sitzmann were the brothers of my great-grandmother Katie Sitzmann.
The pictures themselves looked to have been photocopied so much that no detail was visible. As in a photograph taken by high contrast film, all that remained were the vague outlines of shapes with white spaces between them. In staring at the darkest of them, that of Joseph Sitzmann’s residence, however, I began to recognize the outlines of the shapes and realized that it was exactly the same picture as the one hanging on the wall in the upstairs bedroom. This told me not only whose family it was but, by default, also where the picture was taken. It was on the land the Joseph Sitzmann owned in Lincoln Township, Plymouth County, Iowa. (The one I described in the Northen History blog post “Unscrambling the Map: Notes on the Sitzmann Family” a few weeks back.)
The man in the chair is obviously Joseph Sitzmann, but who were the others? I located Joseph Sitzmann in the 1910 federal census when he was 41 and his wife Eva was 40. The census lists the children as George (20 years old), T. Mary (18), Edward (15) and James W. (13) and then stops, although quite obviously Joseph did not. A family tree posted by Brenda Humphrey lists the children as follows.

Adam Joseph (1876-1965)
John Joseph (1878-1948)
Mary M (1880-1951)
Aloysius “Louis” Valentine (1882-1972)
Francis “Frank” Benedict (1885-1975)
Elizabeth M (1887-1986)
George (1889-1958)
Theresa Mary (1892-1977)
Edward Joseph (1894-1985)
William (1897-1913)

Brenda has been on the trail of all of the Sitzmann relatives so while the family trees aren’t always that reliable, hers seem to be. In any case, it gives a key of sorts as to who all the people in the picture are. She names nine children and eight (from what I can see) are pictured. This means that the latest this picture would be would be 1895. If that were the case it would mean the two oldest girls, Mary and Elizabeth would be 15 and 7 respectively. If this picture were taken before the youngest child was born, this would make it about 1893 and make Mary 13 and Theresa about 5, which looks more likely, so I’ll take that as the working date.

Ed Wilkins: Unraveling a Mystery

I’m continuing to work on the genealogy of Mom’s side of the family. Having gotten the maps that showed in 1907 most of the Sitzmann family were ensconced in the northeast corner of Lincoln Township in Plymouth County while great grandfather Ed Wilkins was not now there but owned property in Elkhorn Township, I decided to see if I could unravel a bit of a mystery.
Here are the official documents I have of him up through slightly more than fifty years.

• 1880 U. S. census show him as a farm laborer at the age of 13, born in Missouri but now working for farmer in Elkhorn Township, Iowa.
• 1890 according to Iowa Marriages, he married Katie Sitzman in Kingsley, Plymouth county Iowa.
• 1900 census shows living in Lincoln Township with his wife and three children Victor, Odelia and Raymond. His family is listed next to that of Valentine Sitzmann, Katie’s brother.
• A picture from apparently taken from a newspaper ad in approximately 1906 shows his dry goods store in Kingsley, Iowa
• 1907 – Land maps for Plymouth County show that he was had 120 acres of land in Elkhorn County.
• 1910 According to his mother-in-laws obituary in the Lemars Sentinel, he was the Plymouth County Supervisor representing Kingsley Iowa.

The 1900 census showed Ed Wilkins as living in Lincoln Township and, in fact, his family was listed right next to that of Valentine Sitzmann’s. The mystery I wanted to try to solve was where the land in Lincoln Township was that he had been living on was located, given that the land of the other Sitzmann’s seemed to form a family compound. The two documents that I used were the 1900 census and the land map of Lincoln Township.
Census data, on a second look, can often reveal information that seemed less interesting upon first glance. One might expect that the census taker would list those being enumerated in the order in which he worked and, in fact, on the 1900 census there are two columns that verify this. One is a column telling the numerical order if the house visited and a second column was a numerical order of the family. The second column, was the one to which my eyes turned first because the numbers were darker, but these were crossed out and replaced by barely legible lighter numbers, probably originally in pencil. Moreover, not only were the numbers crossed out but some families (for example that of a John Sitzmann) had none of the original heavy numbers, so I turned instead to the first set of light numbers, the order of the house visited.
The list looked like this

232   111   231   John Laden
233   112   232   Edward Wilkins
234   113   233   Valentine Sitzman
235   114   234   Edward Carel

I compared the list of those names on the 1900 census with the names on the property of the 1907 map. For all of those who were on the map in 1907 I wrote in the number from the sequence in which the house had been visited. What this game me was a picture of not only who owned property in 1907 that had not in 1900, but it also gave me a visual picture of the sequence in which the houses were visited. Therefore, while John Laden’s and Valentine Sitzmann’s names were on the map and situated near each other. Visit number 233 (to Edward Wilkins’ House) which would have occurred between the two were missing. Instead, between the land of the other Valentine Sitzmann’s and the other Sitzmann’s to the north (A. J., J. J. and Joseph) lay the property of two landowners who had not been there in 1900. One of these must have been the property previously occupied by Edward Wilkins.
Though this is speculation based upon some fairly concrete facts, I am going to take my sleuthing a bit further to try to take a stab at building up a picture of Ed Wilkins and help to answer a question of how a 13 year old farm hand from Missouri living with a family in Iowa eventually ended up in 1910 representing the town of Kingsley as one of the county supervisors. In 1880, he was a farmhand from Missouri and in 1890 he was married Katie Sitzmann. One fact that keeps interfering with research during this time period is the fire that burned all of the federal census records in 1890. Based on what I’ve described so far, Ed and Katie were living on land that abutted that of Valentine Sitzmann. Katie’s father Adam Sitzmann died around 1883. Being the oldest daughter, she was probably the one who helped her mother, but if the land was divided between the two brothers, it is also likely that the mother and younger daughters lived with one of the brothers and that quite possible that they wanted to see Katie married. Somehow between 1880 and 1890, the Sitzmann family met Ed Wilkins and it may well have been that Valentine agree to give up a part of his land to Ed, if he would farm the land and take care of Katie. Because Ed had his own land in 1907 and somewhere during that period ran his own dry goods store. He must have done well on the farm. Perhaps there was an agreement that the land that came from Valentine was to be sold and returned to the Sitzmann family once Ed got on his feet but his trend towards upward mobility does seem to suggest that Ed had a great deal of individual drive. By 1910, not only was he a supervisor in the county but he now was residing in Garfield Township. While this entire description is a flight of fancy it is also a scaffold for hanging new information on and changing the picture as a new one emerges. If I had skill in writing historical fiction, this would indeed make for an interesting basic premise.

Unscrambling the Map: Notes on the Sitzmann Family

It has been a while since I wrote my last Northen history blog post. In that one I examined the obituary of my great great grandmother Katharine Buechner. Katharine was married to Adam Joseph Sitzmann, who immigrated to Iowa from Wisconsin, becoming one the earliest settler farmers in Plymouth County, Iowa. It is there oldest daughter, Katharine who married Ed Wilkins and became my mother’s grandmother.
Yesterday, I was straightening up my loose genealogy papers to re-file them and came across the partial land maps for the Sitzmann property in 1907. I decided to try to approximate where that land would be today and actually came across the land maps themselves for all of Plymouth County, Iowa for 1907. I was also able to locate the land of Ed Wilkins in 1907 in Elkhorn Township, the same township that includes – in a gerrymandered way – the city of Kingsley where his store was. He owned 200 acres of land.
A close up look at the maps of Lincoln Township reveal that the Sitzmanns (their name is spelled with a double n) owned land in the northeast corner of the township. Joseph Sitzmann owned 275 acres. To the immediate west are 160 acres owned by J. J. Sitzmann and to his immediate west are 160 acres owned by A. J. Sitzmann. Joseph Sitzmann owns an additional 83.3 acres immediately above J. J. Sitzmann, that extends to the county line and bordering that property are a cemetery and a Catholic Church. Below the land of Joseph Sitzmann, like an L lying on its back is land belonging to Valentine Sitzmann, upon which is written Walnut Rose Stock Farm. I also noted that there is a bit of land owned by Valentine Sitzmann in Elkhorn County, but for now, I am going to just note that information and lay it aside.

Katherine Buechner’s obituary notes that her family was one of the pioneering families of the county. The obituary, in 1910 says that her husband Adam Sitzmann died 27 years before – so, about 1883. Of her children, two are sons – Joseph and Valentine. My great grandmother, Katherine “Katie” Sitzmann, was the sister of Joseph and Valentine and the wife of Ed Wilkins, who was the Kingsley town supervisor.
I’m turning now to speculation. Taking the farthest borders of the property owned by the Sitzmanns (Joseph on the east, Valentine on the south, A. J. on the west and Joseph on the north) and connecting the borders, a perfect square with four quadrants is created. Within, this square are two branching streams (one I believe is called Muddy Creek) which would have been extremely important for settlers wanting to farm and look looking for property in the 1800s. My guess is this entire block of land was owned by Adam Joseph Sitzmann, my great great grandfather when he first came from Wisconsin and settled the land. When he died in 1883 the land was probably split between his two sons Joseph and Valentine. Because A.J. and J. J. Sitzmans’s lands are adjacent to Joseph, I believe that they are probably Joseph’s sons to whom he gave the land. For some reason, Valentine (perhaps he had no sons) may have sold off a part of this land. The same is true of the northern and westernmost parts of Joseph’s land. Adam Sitzmann was a mason when he lived in Wisconsin and helped construct a Catholic Church there. I believe it may have even been called St. Josephs. My guess is that the cemetery and church adjacent to that land were built in part by Adam and that this cemetery may have originally been a family cemetery. Katherine Buechner’s obituary reads, “The remains [i.e. Katherine’s] will be laid to rest tomorrow beside her husband in St. Joseph cemetery.” Though it is pure conjecture, I am hypothesizing that Joseph Sitzmann retained that arm of land in order to have access to the cemetery – though his mother would not yet die for three years, she did apparently have some health problems and her husband was no doubt buried there. (It seems that I did read somewhere that their remains were eventually moved to another cemetery, but it would be interesting for any family members passing through that area to check it out and see.)
It appears to me that the road that now bifurcates the land of Joseph Sitzmann’s family and along which the cemetery once stood is now called Nature Ave. With the east and west roads being Noble Ave. and Marble Ave., respectively. The bottom boundary seems to have been what would be 290 St. today with 280 St. bordering the top. Along 290 St., where J. J. and A. J. Sitzmann’s properties meet was a school, according to the 1907 map. Perhaps that is where the school their children attended. I’ll end of my speculation for now, but I’ve enjoyed doing the archaeology. I’ll add the additional disclaimer that what I’ve written here were originally essentially my own notes to try to makes sense of the material that I’ve come upon, but knowing that I would probably not get around to recreating them for a while, I’ve decided just to post them – thus their rather muddled nature.