The name of our Bossly ancestors has been spelled a number of different ways: Bossley, Bosly,Bosley, Bossli, Busley. However it is spelled, our great-great grandmother Magdalena Bossly, seems to be a pioneer woman in the Laura Ingalls Wilder tradition. Unfortunately, like most women before the twentieth century, little is known of her life. From censuses, we can gather that she was known to most people as Lena. Almost all of the detail of her life comes from her obituary.
Lena was born in Meirigen, Bern, Switzerland on November 15, 1835. Her father was Anton Bosley and her mother was Katharine (Kate) Streich. Being raised in Bern, her first language she spoke was German. On October 16, 1861 she married Melchior (Michael) Ryman and in March of 1862 their son Michael, Jr was born. For reasons that are not clear, in 1863 with her husband and son, she headed for the United States , sailing on the Wm. Frothington.
The Rymans settled in Jeffersonville in Sullivan County. This an area where, as noted in the previous post, a large group of people from Switzerland had settled. At the time, it was still a very remote area and her husband took up farming. Lena was busy too, since by 1870 she had five more children, including our great-grandfather William. When she came to the United States, Lena did not leave her family behind. The 1870 shows that her parents (now 67 and 66 years of age respectively) had also come over and were living with her brother Anton Jr. and his family. Like Michael’s parents, they were living in the town of Liberty rather than Jeffersonville. The Bossly’s lived in a frame house and had land valued at $700 dollars, so they were apparently doing relatively well. Though Michael’s and Lena’s parents were not neighbors, it is easy to surmise that they were probably still close, having known each other back in Switzerland.
By 1880 Lena had nine children in the house and one of them was not her oldest son Michael who would have been 18 and appears to have moved out. We know that he was not married at that point, though, because his future wife Amelia Nieger was fourteen years old and still living with her father. Amelia’s family had also come from Switzerland at about the same time as the Ryman’s and Bossly’s. IN February of 1880, Lena’s father Anton died. He was buried where his grave still rests in the Youngsville Cemetery in Youngsville, Sullivan County, New York.
How his death might have affected Lena we can’t know, but by 1883, she and her family were living in Mansfield, Brown County, South Dakota. Her obituary calls Lena a pioneer woman and while it might seem that 1883 is a bit late in U.S. history to label someone a pioneer, we need to remember that South Dakota was not a state and would not become one until 1889. When her family made the trip out there it was still Dakota Territory. Railroads were just beginning t come in.
There are few details about Madalena Bossly’s life in Dakota, but we can get a glimpse of it through one important event that she lived through. It was called the School House Blizzard of 1888. It swept across the Great Plains during the middle of the day on January 12. The temperature dropped from an unusually warm 74 degrees to 28 degrees in twenty four hours and eventually went down to -40. The blizzard got its name because many children were at school when it hit. Teachers thinking that children might beat the storm home safely sent them out and some disappeared. Here is what one source says:
“As the morning broke, parents rushed to schoolhouses to search for children who hadn’t returned. Near Warner, SD, the local newspaper reported the ‘whole school dead; sad story of the loss of teacher and pupils, near Warner, confirmed.’ An estimated 235 people died during the one day blizzard, most of which were schoolchildren who froze to death on their way home.”
Warner is in Brown County where the Ryman’s live, so it is likely Lena’s youngest children experienced this. It is considered one of the worst blizzards in U.S. history.
Such weather may be the reason that from 1900 to 1906 Lena and Michael went to live with their son Michael and his wife Amelia in Orange County, California. That may not have been the only reason for heading out of California. Michael’s obituary says that they went to life with his son Michael from 1901 to 1908; however, the 1900 census puts them in Buena Park in Orange County, California in 1900 and Lena’s obituary says they were there for six years. The 1900 census also shows that Lena’s mother Katie Streich Bossley was also living with Michael, Jr. and his family. She died in 1906 and according to her obituary had been living with her California grandson for twelve years. According to Katie’s obituary, she had suffered an attack of illness ten years before her death and at that time was not expected to recover, though she eventually did. It may well be that Lena and Michael Ryman went out to their son’s residence in California to help with the care of Lena’s mother and then returned to South Dakota in 1906 after her death.
On October 3, 1913 Lena suffered a stroke and paralysis, dying ten days later at the home of her daughter Mrs. J. H. Nieger (whom we can probably assume was the brother of her daughter-in-law Amelia.) Though she was a member of the Evangelical Church of Aberdeen, she had two funeral services, the first at home and later in the day at the Presbyterian Church in Warner with the Evangelical church minister presiding. At the time of her death, Lena’s husband Michael and nine of their eleven children were still living. A few years later in 1917, her son William owned property in Brown County valued at over $27,000 making him, at the time, one of the more well-to-do farmers in the area. The story of Magdalena Bosley’s life is one that truly exemplifies the lives of those Swiss immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-1800’s and the communities that they formed as they became part of American society.
Northen History 