My Grandmother's Grandmother

My grandmother, Lillian May Timmerman, married J. M. Remington on March 16, 1912 in Cadillac, Michigan. Her headstone reads Lillian Schuyler Remington. So that raises the question – why Schuyler?

My grandmother’s grandmother was Maria Sophia (Sofia) Schuyler.  She was born about 1822, probably in Montgomery County, New York.  Her parents were Peter P. Schuyler and Elizabeth Becker.  Around the year 1835, Peter and several other families left Montgomery County and settled in Jefferson County, New York.  Their destination was the small community of Three Mile Bay in Lyme Township.  This village is located on an inlet of Chaumont Bay on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario.  The economy was based on fishing and ship building.  Peter’s brother Daniel became the first merchant in the town and Peter was a farmer with land nearby.

1864 Map of Lyme

Peter's Property in 1864

View of Three Mile Bay

In 1845 Marie married Daniel Timmerman, whose family had moved to Lyme from Herkimer County, New York.  They are on the 1850 census living next to Philip Schuyler, Marie’s brother.  Both men were laborers with growing families – Marie’s first three children were born in Lyme.

By 1855 the family had moved to Ottawa County, Michigan, a journey of almost 600 miles. According to information from Claudia Throop, “Daniel F. Timmerman and Maria Schuyler Timmerman moved by horse and wagon from New York State to Michigan. They purchased the farm at 9130 Arthur Street…” Their fourth child, Eugene Fitzroy Timmerman, father of my grandmother Lillian, was probably born there on July 6, 1855. 

Marie died a few months later, on October 12, 1855, at 33 years of age.  According to Claudia’s father and other family members, “The snow was so deep from early storms when her casket was taken to the cemetery, the pall bearers were forced to use a sled to carry her casket. A temporary grave was used at the southeast corner of the cemetery. It was intended that someone would then come back and move her to the family plot. By the time they did, they were unable to determine exactly where she was buried.”  Her burial location is supported by Daniel’s obituary but there is no marker that I know of.

A few years after Marie’s death, Daniel married Sarah Fisk and they had five children together.  My grandmother would never have known Marie.  Perhaps she knew some aunts or uncles or cousins from the Schuyler branch of the family.  Or perhaps she heard stories about the history of the Schuyler family in New York.  That is for another post.

Anton Fortman

The goal of many genealogists is to find the home of the immigrant ancestors.  On my Fortman side that brings us to Anton Fortman and Anna Catherine Schwartengräber.  From church records we know that Anna was baptized in Füchtorf – now part of Nordrhein-Westfalen Germany. It is also where Anton and Anna married in 1836.  There don’t appear to be other records of Fortman’s in that parish so Anton was probably from a nearby town.  Other Fortman’s migrated from an area just north of Füchtorf so we can speculate that Anton came from there.

Family records show that Anton was born January 10, 1806.  Naturalization and census records show that he was from Prussia or Germany.  However, I recently found an old newspaper story recounting his settling in Ohio.  This story, from the April 23, 1933 Lima News, states that he was from Hanover.

 

 

So where was he born?  Germany did not become a nation until 1871.  Before that the term Germany referred to a geographical area made up of many states populated by German speakers, and that was a very broad area.  Prussia was one of the largest states and frequently shifted borders.  A little research showed that the newspaper story most likely refers to the Kingdom of Hanover, not the city.  This kingdom came and went and also had shifting borders.  The challenge is which of those to record as the birth place of Anton. 

Anna and Anton could have lived in different countries. One mile to the north of Füchtorf is a political boundary that remained pretty constant even as the rulers of the two lands changed.  A family living north of that line in 1800 would have lived in the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück which was part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1803.  The land then went to the Kingdom of Hanover, passed to Prussia in 1806 [the year Anton was born], the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807, to Napoleonic France in 1810, and again to Hanover in 1814 (thank you Wikipedia!).  In 1866 this area was annexed by Prussia and in 1871 Germany was formed.  Therefore Anton most likely was born during the time his land was a part of the Kingdom of Hanover.  More research is needed to determine exactly where…

 1800

Red circles are points of reference

Füchtorf is about where the blue x is located

1818

 

Today

Elizabeth "Bertha" Pitman

My favorite ancestor on my husband’s side of the family is Elizabeth “Bertha” Pitman.  You would never guess her story from her obituary:

Elizabeth was born Oct. 7, 1826 in Harrison County, Indiana.  Her father, Isaac Noah Pitman, was born in Virginia.  Isaac’s parents were some of the first settlers in the Indiana Territory and his father filed a land claim when Indiana became a state in 1812.  Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Grant, was from Kentucky, born around 1807. They married in Harrison County, Indiana in 1825.  Elizabeth was the oldest of seven children and the only girl.

Isaac Pitman was of German descent and must have had a persuasive nature.  Around 1849 he took his family to California during the Gold Rush.  On the 1850 census they are one of only a very few families in an area full of miners.  Elizabeth married one of those miners, Robert Morrow, and had her first child in 1852.  "Family tradition says they returned home to Iowa by ship to the isthmus of Panama, crossing the gulf of Mexico by ship to the port of New Orleans, where his [Isaac’s] oldest son and son-in-law [Robert] died of cholera. Traveled by boat up the Mississippi river to Iowa..." (attributed to Margaret Pitman Guinney).

Within a year Elizabeth had married a widower, Jacob Noah Combs. Though Jacob's first wife, Sarah, had ten or eleven children, not all were living when he married Elizabeth. Nine years later Elizabeth was 36 years old and had six more children.  It was 1862 and her father again led his family, many associated families (including Elizabeth and Jacob’s) and friends across the country, now to Oregon.  This was during the Civil War and they may have gone to Oregon because they followed the Dunkard religion and were pacifists, or because they were originally from the south and did not want to fight against former neighbors, or because they wanted to see mountains and rain.

While in Oregon, Elizabeth had two more children.  There are quite a few stories about the trail crossings in the book Ancestors,descendants and other relatives of Joseph Henry Ring and Sarah Ann Combs.  Yes, crossings, because within four years the families returned to the Midwest, first to Iowa then settling in Wea, Miami, Kansas.  Two more daughters were born.  The second youngest, Elma Meloda Combs married Joseph Riley Whitaker.  Their daughter Bessie Whitaker married Clarence Walton Carter, and their son James Walton Carter is my husband’s father.  As much as you might think that 20 or 21 children may be a few too many for one man, my husband’s line comes from the tail end of that list of children.  

Elizabeth and Jacob moved a few more times, but never so far as before.  They died within a few months of each other in 1907 and are buried in McPherson County, Kansas.  Part of me is in awe of a woman who managed to raise so many children while traveling so many times to places so far from home…at a time before trains and when states were still being formed.  I hope she had some fun.

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  A page from Ancestors,descendants and other relatives of Joseph Henry Ring and Sarah Ann Combs

Some of the places that Elizabeth lived:

1) Born in 1826 in Harrison County, Indiana
2) Lived for two years in Illinois 
3) Returned to Indiana 
4) In Eldorado County, California by 1850
5) Returned to Midwest and settled in Marion County, Iowa
6) Moved to Madison County
7) Gone to Oregon in 1862 
8) Back to Iowa then Miami County, Kansas
9) 1895 in Coffey County 
10) Back to Miami County
11) Died in McPherson County, Kansas in 1907 at the age of 80