The Athletic Club

 The Herald Dispatch featured an article by Jim Casto with a photo supplied by David Smith today.

The three story building at 624 9th Street was built in 1915-1916. This photo of it dates to when it was being used as the Athletic Club 

When first built it had retail shops on first floor and apartments above.  In 1922 it became the Plaza hotel.  Its close proximity to the C&O railroad station supplied guests.  After the Swartz brothers closed their Continental Club in Chesapeake in 1949, they moved to this location and opened the Athletic Club.  By 1973 the Athletic Club was no longer in use and it was bought by a Beauty College.  My parents and grandparents spoke of the Athletic Club many times.  I don't think that children were welcome on the premises?  

Indian treaty of 1744 and Southwest Virginia

Much of the below is taken from

 https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/e7469af5-2f00-4139-93e3-f2fcdbbf2469/content

The author seems to be Ryan S. Mays.  I am hitting the high points but the main emphasis of this blog post is to remember how to get to this information again.  

1744 was the year that there is the first primary documentation that Adam Harmon had settled on the New River.  And June 1744 was the time in which a meeting was held in Lancaster PA between representatives from PA and VA and Maryland as well as representatives from the six Nations and other northern Indian tribes.  Note it ends with Adam Harmon's at Tom's Creek on New River

I will zero into the box above so it is clearer where Tom's Creek is

There is an excellent map of where the author of this article believes likely the location of Adam Harmon's cabin.  I am not going to try to reproduce his drawing.  But it is very worth visiting the site to see.

It would seem that the six nations indians gave up their rights to the land that lay in Virginia and that in return they were promised use of the road.  This opened up settlement of the Virginia lands on the western waters.  

The footnotes to this article are excellent if one wishes more information.  

There is a great little map on the blog site 

https://rattlingoldbones.blogspot.com/2014/03/adam-harman-pioneer-on-new-river-1745_19.html

There is more good information on this blog site.  The below paragraph is found on this site.  The information is taken from the first book that Kegley wrote when Mary Kegley was just helping him.  It is a huge book that I own.  The two facts inferred in this paragraph is that in order to obtain a tract one had to settle and improve the land which kept settlers from buying for resale only and also that that this was the time period when the french and Indian War was beginning and that the Shawnee warriors were coming as far south as this area.

In fact, the Harman name appears on grants in numerous places in the area, so many places that M. B. Kegley and F. B. Kegley observe, “It is apparent that the Harmans were interested in tracts of land on Pine Run, Walker’s Creek, Bluestone, Sinking Creek, as well as the tracts on Tom’s Creek and the Horseshoe, but their large selections were more than they could ‘settle and improve’ and as a result most of their claims were forfeited.”[21] One might also infer, given the danger from attacks on the settlements perpetrated by Shawnee warriors, which intensified with the start of the French and Indian War, that the Harman families may have abandoned their tracts for that reason as well.22

The Cohongoronto River according to wikipedia is another name for the Potomac river.  Looking at the below map you can see that the road above uses the Great wagon road that is already in existence in 1740 down to what is now Roanoke Virginia.  What is interesting is that the great Wagon road continues south into the Carolinas at this point.  However, the Shenandoah Valley itself begins to go south west at this point and this would have been the road that our Castle family would have taken when leaving the land they had bought from Stover....and sold about 1740.

As the road came through the valley Below Harrisonburg to Lexington the men who were mentioned are Colonel James Patton, Patrick Campbell, and Patrick Hayes. The latter two are my ancestors and I know where they were living on the Beverley Manor in this time period.  This would have been about halfway between Harrisonburg and Lexington right on the Great Wagon Road 

Captain George Robinson settled on 191 acres on a branch of Buffalo Creek. 

The next road that went from Adam Harmon's to the

 

Marriage of Barbe Schweickart and Georges Hornberger

My constant battle to clean out my overfull inbox yielded fun stuff yesterday.  I was looking at messages that were sent to me by family search.....hints about members of my family tree.  Lo and behold one of the messages contained links to original documents found in Obersteinbach Bas Rine France.  These documents contain dates of marriage for Barbe Schweickart and Georges Hornberger as well as death information for Georges and name parents for both.  I have added the information to my private tree on my computer as well as my public trees on Ancestry and MyHeritage.  I am putting the links below so that you can look at them as well.  Please get in touch with me if you know more about any of these people.

On the map below you will see Obersteinbach truly on the border of France and Germany.  No wonder one has to look at the history and geography books to know which country claimed them in any given year.  It is just north of Strasbourg.

Marriage of Barbe Schweickart and Georges Hornberger:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FYN-9BWV?treeref=G3Q7-QKM&cid=rom-email 

"France, Bas-Rhin, Parish and Civil Registration, 1525-1912", , FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FYN-9BW8 : Tue Mar 05 03:30:34 UTC 2024), Entry for Georges Hornberger and Fréderic Hornberger, 2 Feb 1863.

This document names parents for Georges as Frederic Hornberger and Anne Marie Wenberger.  And parents for Barbe as Dorothée Koelhoeffer and Frederic Schweickart

Death of Georges Hornberger:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CST3-94L3?view=index&personArk=/ark:/61903/1:1:6FYX-VY5H&action=view&cc=4116416

"Obersteinbach, Bas-Rhin, France records," images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CST3-94L3?view=index : Dec 1, 2024), image 243 of 473; . 008322038

This document gives death date as  21 Jul 1870.  Georges was only 43

New mtDNA match

I received an e-mail from FTDNA today telling me of a new mtDNA match.  And it happened that my day was not busy with anything pressing.  So I decided to look...And after looking a bit, I decided to write a blog post about my mtDNA matches.  I have seven matches.  I am not sure how people feel about their names being posted on the internet, so I printed out the list and I have numbered the matches and will refer to them by number.

I have written a blog post or two about my mtDNA in the past and I'll put the links here in case you have interest:

http://marshamoses.blogspot.com/2013/05/trip-to-blue-ash-ohio-in-april-2013.html

Everyone's mtDNA comes from their mother whether you are male or female.  The Males do not pass on their mtDNA.  Only mothers pass their mtDNA to their children.  And quite honestly I know less about my mom's mother's female ancestors than almost anyone in my tree...so this is a fairly interesting project.

Number 1, 2, and 3 are my closest matches with a genetic distance of 1.  #1 has listed Mary Ann Butcher b. 182? and d. 1902.  I opened Ancestry to try to put together a "quick and dirty" tree for Mary Ann Butcher.  Believe it or not there are several Mary Ann Butchers who died in 1902.  I chose the Mary Ann Butcher who was born in 1821 in Lancaster Co PA and died in Indiana in 1902.  Mary Ann's mother is said to be Anna Mariah Gruber in several of the trees connected to this person.  Anna Mariah Gruber is said to have been born in 1783 in Basel Switzerland.  This makes sense to me as my mother's mother line goes back Clara Margaret Hornberger Sammons>Maggie Schmitt Hornberger>Margarite Rauch Schmitt.

Margarite Rauch Schmitt says in the 1900 census that she was born in Germany, her father was born in Switzerland, and her mother was born in Germany.  However, I believe that the family was living in the Alsace Lorraine area that was sometimes in Germany and sometimes in France before the move to our shores.  

So it is the next generation earlier than Margarite Rauch Schmitt that is my earliest know female ancestor on this line:  Magdalena Baumert.  Her husband was born in Switzerland.  Magdalena and her husband Abraham Rauch married in 1826 in Strasburg, Alsace France.  I do not have documentation for most of this.   However, it is of great interest that the place of birth for Magdalena's husband, Abraham Rauch is said to be Mittloedi, Glarus Switzerland.  And here is a map of the geography that includes Anna Maria Gruber's birth place in 1783 in Basel Switzerland and the place of Abraham's birth.  I do not have a birth place for Magdalena....did they know each other in Switzerland?  Did Abraham move to Alsace  before they met?  

158 km is almost a 100 miles....But still what ever the truth we do know that our maternal lines started out in the same area of the world.  

OK....Match #2.  Earliest known ancestor is Rosine Fischer 1887, Caroline Wurth 1842, Beihingen.  The first tree I looked at on Ancestry with these clues had a tree owner who had done a great deal of research and collected many sources and he took this tree back to Margretha Bunttenschuch who married Petter Dreer.  If this person's research is correct this line live in Baden-Wurttemberg, Deutschland for many generations.

Oh, that is very interesting....guess where that is?  It is inside the red dotted lines below.

Some of the surnames in this tree after  Margaretha Bunttenschuch are Jorg, Betz, Seitz, Dublin, Herker, Strenger, Walter, Beuttenmuller, Hettich,  

So it would seem likely that my Magdalena Baumert was born somewhere near Strasbourg and her husband moved from Switzerland to marry her in Strasbourg

OK match #3 has not earliest female ancestor and her tree is not helpful.

Match #4 Has earliest ancestor Bertha Hirsch, 1893-1979.  The Bertha that fits our story best has a slightly different birth date:  

 

Bertha was very pretty.  

Born about 120 miles from Strasbourg.  The surnames with this tree are Drumm and Schug

Match #5 has earliest ancestor of Martin Sayes b.1813 d 1896.  Match #5 has a pretty decent tree, so I was able to go back his female line to Earliest female Adele Mayeaux b. c 1846 and died 1923 in Effie LA.  I could find nothing much about the earlier females on Ancestry except that Adele's mother was Mary Bordelon.

Match #6. Match #6's tree showed these to be the earliest females that could have passed down their mtDNA to him.

Match #7  No tree and no earliest female ancestor. 
 

I filed the paper that has names of the matches for each number in the cubby in my office labelled DNA.  I might look to see if I can find any of these people via autosomal DNA

Migrations from NC to Ohio and Indiana

 My research Winter/Spring 2024 culminated in the talk that I gave at the Hollingsworth gathering in Ohio about what I believed to be the migration path of the Quaker families from Bush River MM to the Miami river valley in the first decade of the 1800s.  

Joe sent me a link to a site this morning that has more information about these migration routes.  The one that he sent me actually went another direction.  It left Chatham County, NC and traveled up through Randolph County to Cane Creek MM in NC.  The quaker families that traveled via wagon train in 1815 took a different route than the one I described in June.  They traveled to Lost Creek MM in Jefferson Co TN.  

I didn't want to lose this link so I am posting it here:

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mygermanfamilies/family/Journey.html

This link connects to an actual diary and also other migrations.  

Passions

 I don't usually put things on my public blogs about who I am.  But this morning there was an article written by Melissa Kirsch about the fact that she is a lapsed Tennis fan.  While I have never been much of a professional tennis fan, I understood the fact that she had given up a passion.  My husband was an enthusiastic golfer and so at our house we followed golf rather than tennis as well as Marshall University's football team.  However, I have to admit both of these passions belonged to my husband .....not to me.

But I liked what Melissa said and wanted to capture it:

If we define ourselves by who and what we love, and I think we should, then it’s valuable to love as many things as we can, to accumulate enthusiasms and lean into them, to hold onto passions when we discover them and not let them fall away. This way, our identities become rich, multidimensional, expansive. ....

                                                                                                                        María Jesús Contreras

I love her illustration.  It reminds me of my days in the stands with my husband.  Clearly this woman is not paying very close attention to the match going on....that would have been me at a football or basketball game.  

Cane Creek Dispute involving Charity Cook, Charity Wright and Herman Husband

 In the midst of my early September "busyness" Joe sent me the following paragraph.  I did not want to loose the several thoughts that I would like to look at when I have a bit more spare time:

   Charity Cook (m. Brock) just below them is of interest to me.  Her mother Charity Wright was of convicted (not the right word but it will do) of having pre-marital sex in 1761 Cane Creek, North Carolina and that started a fury among the Quakers that became known as the the Cane Creek Dispute. A couple of results were that Charity's mother Rachel Wright, a Quaker minister, and Herman Husband were both Disowned and that caused very serious rift in the North Carolina Quaker community. Many supporters of Herman, including both my Day and Jones families, then left Cane Creek and went to Georgia and formed a new Quaker colony at Wrightsborough in 1767.   Herman would continue as a Non-Quaker in North Carolina until he provoked the Battle of Alamance in 1771.  He escaped that and returned to Pennsylvania and there he would later provoke the Whisky Rebellion.

   Joe