Genealogy Story – Wilhelmina Luptke

This is the first of three stories about some of my wife’s ancestors.  Wilhelmina was my wife’s great-great-grandmother.  She was born in Prussia in 1828.   Sometime around 1848 she married a man by the name of Mathus (the Prussian equivalent of Matthew).  [His last name is the subject of part 3 of this story.]  They had four children, Emilie [Amelia] born in 1849, Emil born around 1851, Minnie [Wilhelmina Caroline] born in 1854, and Adolph born in 1856. 

The family lived near Posen, Prussia – a province about midway between Warsaw and Berlin.  At this time Prussia was a separate kingdom.  In 1871, as part of the first unification of Germany, Prussia was absorbed by Germany.  In 1918, following WWI, it became part of the country of Poland.

In 1858 Mathus died of some kind of illness.  With four young children to support, Wilhelmina needed to have a husband, so she shortly thereafter married a man by the name of Michael Kowalske.  Over the next several years she would have another four children by her new husband: Emma born in 1860, Reinhold Louis born in 1862 [his birth is the subject of part 2 of this story], Rudolph [Rhudy] born in 1867, and a still-born daughter in 1872.

In 1862, when Emma was just two years old and Wilhelmina was well advanced in her pregnancy with Reinhold, the family left Prussia and sailed to the United States.  Their destination was Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where Michael’s younger brother, Frederick, had moved four years earlier.  They arrived in NY on 10/16/1862 and immediately traveled to Wisconsin via train.

The early 1860’s were the time of the US Civil War.  Although neither Frederick nor Michael were US citizens, the laws at that time allowed men who were eligible for war service to pay someone else to serve in their place.  For these two men from Prussia, that meant not only a payment of $600 for their time of service, but the granting of citizenship.  Both men took advantage of this.

Following the war, the brothers moved to Michigan and bought adjoining farms in what was then called South Arm Township (later part of East Jordan, MI).  Michigan was a very new state at the time and so settlers were welcome in the upper part of the Lower Peninsula.  Wilhelmina passed away in 1897, having been in the US for 35 years.  Michael lived to be over 100.  Their children lived as follows:

Amelia married her step-father’s brother, Frederick in 1870.  This led to an interesting anomaly in the 1870 census.  When the census taker stopped at the farm of Michael and Wilhelmina in August of 1870, he asked about all the children who had lived there as of June and Wilhelmina included Amelia in the count.  At the next farm, when 21 year old Amelia answered the door, she included herself and her husband in the count.  So Amelia appears twice on the same page of the census – once as a daughter and once as a wife.  She and Frederick had 10 children.

Emil passed away some time before 1870.  Nothing more is known of him.  Minnie married a local businessman, Solomon Isaman and had four children.  Adolph married and had four children, then divorced and remarried twice more, having one more child with his second wife.  (Adolph was my wife’s great-grandfather.)  Emma married and had four children.  Reinhold married and had one child.  Rudolph married and had seven children.  That gave Michael 31 grandchildren before he passed away.

Much of the family history was passed on in a letter written by Adolph’s youngest son, Lawrence.  Lawrence was born in 1897, and so had personal knowledge of much of the above since he knew all these individuals.  However, by the time he wrote this letter in the mid-1980’s, some of it was a bit muddled in his memory.  He made several errors, including mistakes about the birth order of his father’s siblings, so it required a bit of fact checking against other sources.

Nonetheless, this is a story of a family who emigrated from Prussia, fought in the Civil War in service to their new country, settled in what was then a new state, and gave their many children and grandchildren a new place in which to live.