Bingen Homestead, Great-Grandparent treasure trove

This past weekend turned out to be quite exciting. On Saturday I drove to Milwaukee to meet my cousin Jack Bingen Copet who I have corresponded with for a few years now about the Bingen family.

Jack showed me around Allenton and Addison, two small communities in Washington Co. This included several churches and cemeteries. The last cemetery we visited was St. Anthony, which contained the graves of my ancestors Johann Bingen and Anna Maria Mueller as well as Anna Mueller's parents, Mathias Mueller and Elizabeth Bommersbach.

After wandering around outside of St. Anthony's church for a while we went to the top of the hill where a cousin of ours, Dorothy Weiss, lives. Jack wanted to ask her all she knew about where the Bingen homestead was, and who we might ask for permission to look at it. We were told that it was just ruins back in the woods somewhere, but we still agreed that it would be very interesting to look at anyways.

We drove to this person's farm and asked them if they knew anything about it. The man who owned the farm told us it was back along this, basically, wagon trail, and that it would get brush-y and we'd have to go for a little jog but that the foundation was still there and the remains of a summer kitchen.

We started driving back on the trail but it was crazy- lots of rocks rutting the entire thing, huge dips and other similar things, so we eventually abandoned the car and set out on foot for as far as we could go on the path.

The entire path was overdrawn by a canopy of trees, bright new green leaves leaving dappled splotches of light all on the ground. We walked briskly to avoid the perpetual onslaught of bugs, but were constantly looking around everywhere for signs of what we had been told to look for. We walked very far back along the path and eventually ran into a full-blown forest where the path we were on split in two directions. Each of us went down one way and then came back, deciding we still didn't see anything.

We gave up and traipsed back to the car, determined to ask Mark, the farm owner, some more questions to try to find what we were looking for. Just as we reached it we took another look at the square of grassy field next to the car. I had briefly considered the spot right when we stopped, I guess using my affinity for archaeological concerns, but I hadn't seen anything conclusive that looked like a foundation from where we were on the path.

We asked Mark, and he offered to take us on his 4-wheeler to show us. Of course, he stopped right where we had stopped the car. The ruins were back behind some of the huge overgrowth of grass and weeds, prickly plants and so on, that had taken over the small square of land since a home had been there. Mark left us, and Jack and I proceeded to jump through the tall foliage to where we could see a lot of stones. We found the back edge of what we believe was the foundation of a house, the stones perfectly aligned in a straight edge.

Well we took a lot of pictures, took a couple of interesting rocks from there and then left.

Yesterday I was at my grandmother's house doing some yardwork and we decided to go in the basement to try to find the elusive little book that Mathew Diebold wrote all of his plans in for building the Diebold house that now stands on Breese Terrace here in Madison.

We found a large box and the first thing I saw was a bag of pictures!! I couldn't believe it. My grandmother didn't understand, either, because she had thought all of our family pictures were upstairs and already indexed. But no, here is a nice big collection I now have to get labelled and indexed for my photo porject.

Also in the box was a huge assortment of memorabilia from my great-grandparents Blanche Tice and Sylvester Diebold. We found a program from a 1914 horse show that had Mathew Diebold's most famous horse, Lady Broderick, being shown by his son James Diebold.

Blanche's yearbook from Marshfield High School were there as well as her nursing yearbooks from when she attended nursing school at St. Joseph's in Marshfield. There was also a scrapbook album Blanche had assembled from her Junior, senior and post-hs years including a lot of interesting mementos, old crepe napkins and other things, and at the back a series of journal-style entries detailing trips and other high points in life after graduating from high school. Included in this was the chilling "Joe died" on a particular June day. Blanche was initially engaged to Joe Marsh when he signed up for service and had acute appendicitis strike him soon after arriving at camp. He underwent a number of botched surgeries and eventually died, and this is what caused Blanche to enter nursing school. So, this was altogether extremely poignant look into Blanche's early life.

I found another box with an old metal chain link purse that must have been hers as well as some drawings Sylvester did in middle and high school - ca. 1915! They are pretty fantastic and all in good shape still. These were very exciting finds!!

Long time no see?

I'm sorry about the length of time that has elapsed since my last entry, because, of course, I have been doing genealogy even when not having the time to update this blog.

I haven't found anything extremely big or anything but here are a few little tidbits from recent memory:

Generally catching up on emails, I've been in contact with a lot of random lines all over the place. I found a man, Gerhard Wiederholt, who is connected to the Mayville family through the Nachtwey family (I was able to find that line back to the 17th century!) and ALSO to the Hartung family, which his wife belongs to. So it turns out we are cousins by marriage twice, by two completely different families. Isn't that funny how it turns out?

I was also contacted by a random Mueller who lives in Germany--- between he and Gerhard my German has been quite tried!!--- who was gracious enough to trace back my Mueller line (Bingen ties) although he apparently doesn't have a connection to this line.

Just last week I found out a little more about William Mayville, a stray son of Susan Reynolds and John Mayville. The last I could find of William was in 1910 living in Montana after the death of his wife Acsah Averill Mayville. A Huycke relative occasionally sends me records he comes across, however. Recently he sent me Silas Reynolds's pension files from when he served in the Revolutionary War, and before that he sent me William Mayville's pension files, because he had served in the Civil War.

Well, the pension files were extremely interesting, and included affidavits from both Ephraim and Peter Mayville as well as other relatives and family friends. It also included William's full birthdate, which I had previously not been able to find. And at the very, very end of this huge document was a short little notation stating that William had died 13 Feb, 1919 in Tennessee! I couldn't understand how he possibly ended up in Tennessee. He had been born in Vermont, lived in Wisconsin for a number of years, moved on to Minnesota and then to Montana, before- apparently- deciding to live at the National Soldiers' Home in Johnson City, TN. I admit it's a pretty area but quite the opposite of anything I expected to find.

With this new date I set to work looking for ways to locate his death record and also find where he was buried. Through findagrave.com I found he is buried out in Tennessee and I hope to find someone who would be willing to visit his grave and photograph it. My Aunt Anne Mayville lives in Nashville but the cemetery is actually closer to my dad's family who live in Fuquay-Varina outside of Raleigh, NC. I hope that someone will help me out at some point.

I was able to find that Tennessee has started an online index for some of their later records and this included William's record. I found a volunteer on raogk.org who made a copy of this record for me, for a somewhat steep price of $10. I volunteer at the Historical Society for RAOGK, also, but usually only charge a couple dollars because I don't believe in paying exorbitant amounts for what should, really, be free and available to everyone. I would agree, however, that associated fees are not necessarily the fault of the researcher, buuuut... well.

Anyway, I hope to receive that record soon and hopefully it has something to say, although I would expect it to contain scant information at best.

I may be meeting towards the end of this week with Jack Bingen Copet, because I realized I haven't yet seen the graves of my Bingen ancestors out in Washington Co., WI. He's out of a job and has agreed to meet with me to show me around. We've been in contact probably 3-4 years now so it should be interesting to finally meet!

That is all I can think of for now but I will be sure to update this considerably more frequently now that it is summer break!