Gone for Soldiers: Pete Slater Writes Home - March 31, 1919 (Part IV)

In this last installment of the letter written by my great uncle Pete Slater he detailed his experience in the advance troops of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive* which ended on the day the armistice was signed and "the big show was over."

[29 May 1919, Page 8 - The Severyite at Newspapers.com]

*Here's a good source of information including some photographs of the offensive.

© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Gone for Soldiers: Pete Slater Writes Home - March 31, 1919 (Part III)

Continuing with the third part of Pete Slater's letter to his great uncle describing his experiences on the battlefields of France during World War I. Up to this point in his deployment he had not seen much action but that changed. During this action all the officers and half of the men in his company had been killed.

[22 May 1919, Page 10 - The Severyite at Newspapers.com]

© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Gone for Soldiers: Pete Slater Writes Home - March 31, 1919 (Part II)

Here ise the second of a series of articles from the The Severyite of a letter sent by my great uncle George Logan "Pete" Slater to his great uncle Albert Ross Tomlinson back in Kansas describing his experiences during World War I.

[15 May 1919, Page 8 - The Severyite at Newspapers.com]

© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Gone for Soldiers: Pete Slater Writes Home - March 31, 1919 (Part I)

In my post last week I shared a clipping from The Severyite with a letter my maternal great uncle George Logan "Pete" Slater wrote to his uncle A.R. Tomlinson* just before he was shipped off to France and lamented that we didn't know more about Pete's wartime experiences.

I spoke too soon.**

This week I found a series of articles in the same newspaper referring to another letter Pete wrote to his uncle from Germany four months after the Armistice was signed.

[8 May 1919, Page 8 - The Severyite at Newspapers.com]

 
Come back next week for the next installment.


*Alfred Ross Tomlinson (1847-1923) was Pete's maternal grandfather's brother.
**Hint: I've found that relying on a single search on Newspapers.com doesn't turn up everything on the subject you're searching for. Every time I repeat my search I get new hits. It pays to try and try again!

© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

I See By My DNA That I Am Neanderthal

Of course that's a gross exaggeration--according to my recently received 23andMe results less than 4% of my overall DNA can be traced back to Neanderthal ancestors. Even this small amount puts me at the upper end of the range.*

We've come a long way since the mid-19th century when scientists made the realization that fossilized bones that had been discovered in France, Belgium and, most famously, the Neander Valley in Germany belonged to an older species of hominid. And ongoing genetic research has made it clear that they are still influencing some of us.

[Prehistoric man. 3.--The Neanderthal man, member of the hunting race inhabiting central France in Mousterian times. Stereograph created by Philip Brigandi, Philip, 1873-1945, photographer, Los Angeles, California, c1924.

Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.]

If I ever make it to Düsseldorf I definitely want to visit the Neanderthal Museum. It looks like a fun place.

[Be part of the human family...Neanderthal Museum Home Page]

Here are several recent articles on Neanderthal DNA:

Neanderthal DNA has subtle but significant impact on human traits

Ancient Neanderthal Still Influences our Genes

*23andMe states that I have more Neanderthal variants than 94% of their customers.


© 2017 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Throwback Thursday: Position Wanted

"Wanted: Position, by middle-aged widow woman of German descent...," Morning Examiner (Bartlesville, OK), page 7, col 1; digital image, The Gateway to Oklahoma History (http://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc143253/m1/9/zoom/?q=buchholz : accessed 15 December 2016).

The wanted ad in its its context.

The fate of my husband's 2nd great grandmother M Louise "Lizzie" (Malchow) Buchholz (born about March 1862, likely in Brandenberg, Germany) remains a mystery.  The wanted ad is the last record I find for her (I can't find her in the 1910 Federal Census).  She had daughters in Dewey, Washington County, Oklahoma about 1910, and one of her daughters married a man in Polk County, Missouri in 1911 (I'm not sure how they met, Polk County is over 200 miles away).

Modern Bing map showing Dewey, OK and Polk County, MO.  I will start on my journey to pick up Mrs. M. L. Buchholz's trail somewhere along that way along these corridors.

Mrs. M. L. Buchholz was the maternal grandmother of my husband's paternal grandmother Kathleen Murphy.

© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Working on Wednesday: Johannes Magendanz (1878-1964), Musician

How did this German pianist, born in what is now Gniew, Poland, on January 22, 1878, and educated at Berlin University, find a place in my extended family tree?

An examination of his arrival in New York on board the S.S. Rhein in 1905 provides a substantial clue: he was bound for Tuskegee, Alabama, where some of my great great great grandmother Timney P. Watts Warren Phillips' descendants were still living.

[I found this image at The Linosaurus]

[Year: 1905; Arrival: New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Microfilm Roll: Roll 0619; Line: 1; Page Number: 62. Ship or Roll Number : Roll 0619. Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Original data: Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820-1897.

Microfilm Publication M237, 675 rolls. NAI: 6256867. ]

[Detail of above page]

The above snippet gives us a further clue for his destination. Dr. John Massey was the President of the Alabama Conference Female College from 1876 to 1909.*

[Courtesy of Huntingdon College Archives and Special Collections]

The year after his arrival, Johannes married a student at the college, Velma De Bardeleben (1884-1967), Timney's great granddaughter and my second cousin, twice removed.** The couple's oldest child was born in Alabama in 1907.

By 1910 the family was living in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Johannes had been named Director of the Conservatory and Head of the Piano Department at the Nebraska Wesleyan University.

[Piano Recital, Johannes Magendanz. Source: Nebraska Memories]

However he doesn't appear to have remained in Oklahoma for long as the 1911 second semester catalogue for the college shows:

[Catalogue by Nebraska Wesleyan University, 1911-12. Source: Archives.org]

And in 1912 he had moved his family to New York State, where he and Alfred H. Jay were Directors of the Utica Conservatory of Music.

[The Ogdensburg journal. (Ogdensburg, N.Y.) 1868-1916, August 18, 1913, Page 2, Image 2.

Image provided by Northern NY Library Network]

Here's his listing in a Who's Who in music published in 1918.

[International Who's who in Music and Musical Gazetteer: A Contemporary Biographical Dictionary and a Record of the World's Musical Activity, Current literature publishing Company, 1918. Source: Google Books.]

Johannes and Velma remained in Utica for the rest of their lives and established a musical dynasty. Here's a photo of Johannes and son Felix taken the year before his death.

[Source: Old Fulton NY Post Cards By Tom Tryniski]

And an article from the same source about the family.

[Source: Old Fulton NY Post Cards By Tom Tryniski]

*Originally founded as the Tuskegee Female College in 1854, it's now called Huntingdon College and was moved to Montgomery in 1909.
**Here's her family tree back to Timney and her second husband John P. Phillips.

© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.