A couple of years ago, I wrote about my third great grandmother Elisabetha Scheid Bold after I had discovered she came to America to follow her children as a widow. It was a surprise that she was on a passenger list with her daughter Rosa, leading to a reunion with her children. In the very the least, she reunited with those that had stayed in New York City.
Who is Elisabetha to me? She is the mother of my immigrant second great grandmother Emilia Anna Bold Leies. Elisabetha was born in 1822 in Rodalben, Germany to Johann Jakob Scheid and Catharina Buchler. She was baptized by the oldest brother of her future husband, Father Peter Bold. Elisabetha married Franz Jacob Bold in 1842 in Nunschweiler, Germany. Their children Emilia, Alexander, Anna Maria, Richard, Ferdinand, and Rosa came to the United States under the following circumstances:
Emilia came about 1866 at age 23 to Wooster, Ohio. It is a mystery who she came to meet and reside with until her marriage to my second great grandfather Johann Leies. He too arrived in 1866. I should note I do not know the year of their marriage.
Alexander came in 1866 at age 16 to Wooster, Ohio.
Anna Maria came in 1867 at age 15 to New York City. I do not know who she stayed with until she married in 1868. Her first cousin Franz (Frank) Scheid was also an immigrant that year and he may have already been living in New York City.
Richard came at age 17 in 1871 with his brother Ferdinand who was 13. Richard went to Chicago and stayed with Alexander who had moved to Chicago until he married. They both became Chicago police officers.
Ferdinand stayed in New York City. I speculate that he stayed with his sister Anna and her husband, also from Nunschweiler, Jacob Leies until he married. Ferdinand and his family were living in the tenement that collapsed and is known to history as the Grand Street Tenement Disaster. His wife and child survived. His in-laws perished.
Rosa came with her mother Elisabetha in 1880 at age 19 to New York City.
I have so many questions. What could it have been like for Elisabetha to send her young children across the ocean without her? What was that bad in Nunschweiler that caused her to do this? Was it something at home? We will never know why. She may have even thought she would never see them again. I wonder if she had a reunion with her Chicago children, especially my ancestor Emilia.
In 1900, according to the census, she was listed as aunt to the head of household Jacob Werlein. Because I am unable to map their relationships to Elisabetha, I can’t determine whether she was the aunt to Jacob or his wife Louisa. Elisabetha passed away in 1906 in New York City. She outlived all of her children except Alexander.
Does anyone reading this know of Elisabetha? I would love to hear from you!
Do you have additions, comments or deletions? Please feel free to email me at the address below!
Dear Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother Kunigonde,
You have the most interesting name in my tree and your last name is not known to those of us researching you. You were the mother of my ancestor named Michael Kempf. He lived in a town named Hornbach. I have discovered that you were Roman Catholic and the historic church in Hornbach contains the bones of St. Pirminius. You must’ve worshipped there.
I didn’t know Kunigonde was even a name until I found you. I looked up the meaning and origin. It is from the Old High German and sometimes spelled as Kunigonda. The name dictionaries call it a two-element name. Kunni=the tribe, the clan. Gund=the fight, the battle. I really dig the two-element meaning of your name!
Apparently there was a St. Kunigonde and she was the daughter of King Bela of Hungary. She is the patroness of Poland and Lithuania where she is known as St. Kinga.
Was Kunigonde a family name in your family?
Did you know your third great grandson was named Heinrich Leies and he traveled across the ocean to the United States of America in 1848 with his family to have a farm in Wooster, Ohio? His brother Jacob Leies came three years later to the greatest city in the New World called New York City. Your fourth great grandson named Peter Leies joined the Union Army during the nation’s Civil War and died at a battle called the Battle of Antietam. He was only 21 and he was born in Nunschweiler, not far from Hornbach.
Anotherfourth great grandson followed Heinrich to Wooster, Ohio. His name was Johann Leies and Heinrich was his uncle. He was my ancestor. He ran saloons in Chicago and was a piano dealer. He had very religious sons. One became a Roman Catholic priest and died in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Did you know you probably have thousands of descendants across the ocean in America perhaps due in part to Heinrich’s emigration?
You are named in a book called the Rubenheim Register from Zwiebrucken. I would love to see that book. But, what can YOU tell me that the book doesn’t. What was Hornbach life like?
Sincerely,
One of your thousands of descendants
1550 Hornbach, via Wikipedia
Dear 9th Great Granddaughter,
Females rarely learned to write in my day unless they took a religious order. My good friend Sr. Marie Radegonde Belina is writing this for me. What an angel she is too to be able to translate English to our dialect and back to English for me. She was a half English/half French orphan the good Sisters took in.
Thank you for digging my name. I don’t know what you mean by “digging.”
What can I tell you about my life? I was born at a time of a long religious, political, and terrible war – The Thirty Years War. We would hear from the priests there was a peace and then another peace. But it would not end. Then a few years later there would be word of another peace.
We did not care about those far away princes fighting for power. We were more concerned with having food on our tables when the winter was through. Half the men in my family were gone and another quarter of my family uprooted themselves and were never heard from again. We just wanted it to end.
When I married, the war was coming to an end. My husband (your 9th great grandfather) and I lived near Hornbach at a time the entire surrounding area was almost devoid of citizens and buildings due to the many years of war. The country-side had been devastated due to famine, disease, and theft. The old town wall of Hornbach and our church were some of the few things left.
We were ruled by the Duke of Zwiebrucken.
Before the war, Hornbach was once surrounded by rich vineyards. Nobody came back to re-plant them. Instead, after the war, the Dukes invited people from the Swiss Cantons and from Tyrol to our area to farm. They were rumored to be excellent farmers.
Some of my descendants married the descendants of the Swiss immigrants.
My husband Johann Kempf and I had a farm. We had 8 children: Matthias, Anna Christina, Michael, your 8th great grandfather, twins Kunigonde and Johann, Maria Katharina, and twins Regina and Anna Margaretha.
Michael was my second born son and he was trained to follow his father as a farmer.
I died before I could see Michael’s children be born.
I died before France took control of the Hornbach-Zwiebrucken area in 1680.
Yes, I heard about Heinrich and the others. Nunschweiler was very tiny in my day.
Heinrich Layes (that’s how Sr. Marie Gertruda spells the surname) left Germany at a time when liberal nationalists pushed for civil liberties here. The cost of the war I lived through and cost of that war on our people was ingrained in their minds.
In 1848, these forward thinking men had to flee their homeland for your country – a country that had established those ideals when those in power began to silence their democratic plans.
Keep shaking those female branches of my tree in Germany. You aren’t even close to finding all of my descendants in America.
My great great grandfather Johann Leies was born in Nuenschweiler in the German Palatinate in 1843 to farmers Johann Adam Leies and Elisabetha Margaretha Pfeiffer. He came to America in 1867 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States that same year in Wayne County, Ohio. Before moving to Chicago and running a saloon, he worked as a farmer, a carpenter, in beer and wine dealing, and married a childhood friend from Nuenschweiler in Wooster, Ohio – Immigrant #24 ~~ Great Great Grandmother Emilia Anna Bold Leies~~and had their children, Alexander, my great grandfather, and John Ferdinand.
Uncle John wrote a lot about this immigrant grandfather of his and even visited the Catholic church in Nuenschweiler to obtain a transcribed copy of his grandfather’s baptism. The village is about 6 miles from the current day border of Moselle, Lorraine, France. Johann was born at Huber Hof near Nuenschweiler. Huber Hof was the name of his great grandfather Michael Conrad’s farm. Hof originally meant temple or hall in Old Norse. It later was used for courtyard and eventually for a collection of buildings on a farm. Source: Wikipedia.
When Johann was born, the farm had already been inherited by his grandmother Gertruda Conrad. Information on his estate came from a great source: Intelligenzblatt des Rheinkreises, Volume 7, or Google Books! Johann was the oldest of at least four children. The baptismal records of Nuenschweiler are missing a few decades which means there may have been more siblings.
Like me, Uncle John did not know the date or location of Johann’s arrival here, although he left a great trail for the researchers that would come after him. He thinks he may have entered the country in New Orleans.
I wondered why did Johann go to Wooster, Ohio when I read Uncle John’s research. This past summer when I found a relation of ours (Union Soldier Peter Leies, 1841-1862, born in Nunschweiler, Germany and killed at Antietam), I began looking for more Leies family members in the Civil War. That led me to two other first cousins of great great grandfather Johann that were drafted during the Civil War in Ohio – Henry and Anthony Leies. They were brothers. From what I can tell, they were only drafted and didn’t serve. Their parents were Heinrich Leies and Barbara Buchheit from Nuenschweiler and all of them had been living in Wooster, Ohio. Heinrich was the oldest brother of Johann’s father making them aunt and uncle to Johann.
Not only is it apparent at this point in my research that the Heinrich Leies family paved the way for the other Leieses to come to America, but they got here even earlier than our first direct American ancestor Johann Schuttler in 1849. Heinrich Leies, wife Barbara, and their sons arrived in New York City in 1848.
September 1848 Passenger Manifest of the Nicolas, which sailed from Le Havre, France
I do siblings when I count the immigrants in my tree. Do Heinrich and family count since he was the sibling of Johann’s father? Definitely.
Back to Johann. Do you think he lived with Uncle Heinrich or a cousin when he got to Wooster? It is very likely. Johann would only have been about 5 years old when his Uncle Heinrich and Aunt Barbara left Nuenschweiler. Both his Uncle Heinrich and Aunt Barbara were two of his baptismal sponsors, as you can see on the parish record below.
Johannes Leies Baptism, dated April 25, 1843, Catholic Parish in Nuenschweiler
Uncle John had a copy of a letter his grandfather wrote to his cousin Johann Leies (a different Johann!) in Massweiler, Germany in 1910 that he translated from German and distributed to his family before his death. One detail from his life in Germany is written in the letter. He stated that “When I was 18 years old I worked in Pirmasens near the church not far from Loewenbrunnen for a Jew called Wolf. He had a bone mill at Nuenschweiler; his son’s name was Alphonse. He went to America.”
Important facts about Johann’s years in America were listed in the letter to back home in 1910 in this order:
“I have been in America for 43 years. I worked as a farmer and carpenter for two years;
Then I worked 7 years in the wine and beer industry in Wooster, Ohio;
Then we moved to Chicago. Here in Chicago I have dealt in beer and wine for 8 years;
Then for four years in other types of work;
Then for 22 years in the piano business with my son.”
At the time of the 1880 Census in Wooster, Ohio, Johann’s cousin Henry Leies was running a saloon. I can’t help but think that Johann may have been working there at some point before he moved to Chicago in the “wine and beer industry.”
The paper trail on Johann picks up in Chicago in 1880 where he is running a saloon according to the census. I would love to know the name of his saloon – his beer and wine business. I couldn’t find anything on newspapers.com regarding his saloon. By the mid 1890s, the hard-working and diligent Johann owned his own piano dealing shop – John Leies Pianos. Later he brought his son Alexander into the piano dealing business and they became known as John Leies & Son Pianos.
Chicago City Directory, 1896
Johann remarried in 1896, two years after the death of Emilia Bold. His second wife, Carolina Sickel, was born in New Orleans. The 1910 Federal Census stated that her father was born in France, and that her mother was born in Germany. She had been put into a home before Johann died in Chicago in 1922. You can see his Find-a-Grave Memorial here.
Written in Latin above, in the margin next to Johann’s baptism, is his date of death in America. Uncle John knew his grandfather often sent money home to the parish in Nuenschweiler. The priest back home either received word of his death from a relative in Nuenschweiler, a relative in Chicago who wrote home, or from Uncle John himself when he visited. In turn, the church books of Nuenschweiler were photographed by the Latter Day Saints. I would like to think it was from Uncle John.
Uncle John wrote a fantastic report on this grandfather of his. Email me if you wish to have a copy.
The Ancestry of Johann Leies (so far)
The great grandmother of Johann was Margaretha Rubly. It is in this part of Leies line that we descend from The Anabaptist Rubeli of Aeschlen bei Oberdiessbach, Switzerland, religious refugees to the German Palatinate in 1672. I really enjoyed researching that part of the Leies family.
One of Johann’s ancestors was named Hans Adam Schwartz, born around 1650. According to the Contwig Reformed Church Records I found, he was a Gerichtsschoffe or Court Alderman in the Zwiebrucken area of the Palatinate. He was our 7th great grandfather. His daughter Anna Ottilia married our 6th great grandfather Jakob Johann Wenceslaus Layies-Trauden. Leies was spelled as Layies at that point in the church records.
Johann also had ancestors born in France like his wife Emilia. The earliest known of them was Jean Michel Conrad, born December 3, 1697 in Shweyen, Moselle. I would like to point out that in 1697, parts of the Palatinate were under French rule. His baptism from the Archives of Moselle is below. Thank you cousin G. Pfeiffer in France for sharing and emailing many Conrad records to me.
Like some of the ancestry of Emilia Bold, going back to the 1400s in this part of Europe, there are two parts of Johann’s ancestry that “claim” to be able to trace back to the 1400s, and even to the 1300s in a town in the present-day Saarland. In the 1300s the region of present-day Saarland was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Emilia’s Helfrich line isn’t a myth right now like Johann’s pre-1600s ancestors are for American researchers. Maybe those trees on Geneanet are correct, but I can’t prove it!
Johann’s 1910 letter stated he had a photo album of his family back in Germany. If that album still exists, it must be a treasure.
Sources:
Wayne County, Ohio Historical Society
Nuenschweiler, Germany Catholic Church Records
Hornbach Catholic and Protestant Church Records
Intelligenzblatt des Rheinkreises, Volume 7
Cousin G. Pfeiffer, France
Baptemes Loutzviller 1691-1723, Archives 57
Contwig, Germany Church Records
Weisbach and Massweiler, Germany Catholic and Reformed Church Records
Zur Familie Trauden/Layes von Oberhausen, by Johannes Becherer via L. Broschart in Koblenz, Germany
United States Federal Censuses
Ohio Birth and Marriage Indexes
Uncle John
Chicago Marriage and Death Indexes
Find-a-Grave
Newspapers.com
New York Passenger Lists/Manifests/National Archives
Wikipedia
Google Books
Chicago City Directories
Numerous French and German personal genealogy databases
Who is Elisabetha to me? She is the mother of my immigrant second great grandmother Emilia Anna Bold Leies. Elisabetha was born in 1822 in Rodalben, Germany to Johann Jakob Scheid and Catharina Buchler. She was baptized by the oldest brother of her future husband, Father Peter Bold. Elisabetha married Franz Jacob Bold in 1842 in Nunschweiler, Germany. Their children Emilia, Alexander, Anna Maria, Richard, Ferdinand, and Rosa came to the United States under the following circumstances:
Cinziarosa's Descendants (c) 