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Grandson of paternal grandparents back in Germany (Prussia) who he never met, Matthias Wilhelm & Maria Ludwig Wilhelm. This couple had married on February 14, 1831 in Germany. Matthias was born February 21, 1803 in Selback, Germany, and died March 27, 1873. Maria Ludwig was born 1800 in Buschfeld, Germany (not far from Selback, north), and died November 17, 1880.
Selbach
Community Nohfelden, Saarland
800 inhabitants
www.nohfelden.de
Strangely, the place name denies the kinship with the Nahe, which originates near the village. Apparently, the namesake had no idea that the modest brook is about the beginning of the river, which finally flows into the Rhine and has already been named "Near" in the Celtic period. The prefix "sel" could go back to the old word "seli" for "meadow."
The farm estate Imsbach, which belonged to the Selbach district since the Oldenburger period, has returned to the "territory of the municipality of Tholey" after the administrative and administrative reform.
In historical times, the place was always politically, judicially and ecclesiastically linked with the neighboring Neunkirchen.
The landmark of the place is the Katharinenkapelle.
The origins of the chapel building extend far back to the Romanesque period. Thus, the Katharinenkapelle of Selbach is not only the oldest chapel in the district of St. Wendel, but one of the oldest ecclesiastical buildings in the Saarland. There is no comparable range of chapels in the vicinity of the village. The Katharine Chapel is the germ cell of Selbach.
The Saarland or Saarland or else Shar as it was known when it was under French control ( German : Saarland , French : Sarre ), is one of the 16 federal states of Germany. The capital is Saarbrücken. And the extent and the population is the smallest German Flachenlander (area states, non-city states).
History
Initially, Saarland was inhabited by peoples of Celtic origin. Saarland, after many years spent in the hands of the Romans and Fragkonianon, the possession of the French in 1792. In 1870, after the battle of Saarbrücken, in the possession of the German Empire. In 1920, the Saarland came into the hands of France and Britain, but in 1933, following a referendum, the Saarland was an acquisition of Nazi Germany with the overwhelming proportion of 90.3% compared to 9.7% in favor of union with France. After the end of World War II, for a time, the Saarland state was autonomous until 1959, and now is part of Germany.
Geography
Bordered by France ( Department de Moselle ) in the south and west by Luxembourg in the west and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the north. The name of the state derives from the River Saar, which is a tributary of the river Moselle (tributary of the Rhine ). Most residents live in cities on the French border, surrounding the capital of Saarbrücken and the French Sargkemin (Sarreguemines).
Saarland is divided into six areas:
Merzig-Wadern
Neunkirchen
Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken)
Saarlouis
Saarpfalz
Sankt Wendel
Anton's father was:
Nicholas Wilhelm
Born February 1, 1834 in Wilhelmshaven, Niedersachsen, Germany
Son of Matthias Wilhelm and Maria Ludwig
Brother of Peter Wilhelm
Why Nicholas's birthplace has been listed as Wihelmshaven is unknown. Wilmhelmshaven is a deep water port on the north coast of Germany, quite a long ways from the Alsace region where Nicholas's parents had been born and raised, and married. It is generally believed that Nicholas did grow up in the Alsatian village of Selbach where he and his siblings are thought to have been born on a family farm. Perhaps young Nicholas lived in Wilhelmshaven briefly as a young man, prior to his emigration to the U.S. at the age of 21. Or, perhaps the entire family did leave Selbach, and relocated to Wilhelmshaven - but it seems unlikely that a large farm family would leave their land.
Besides the brothers Nicholas and Peter, there were thought to be several other brothers, all of whom emigrated to America (maybe as many as 6 or 7), except presumably the eldest son, who inherited the family farm in the Saarland-Alsace area of France. It is unknown if there were any girls in the family. Members of an American branch of the Wilhelm family (Anton's daughter Clara's McCarthy grandchildren through her youngest Josephine) visited the tiny village of Selbach, Germany in 1991, and met with Wilhelm descendants still living there. The family farm fields had been redistributed and dispersed over the years, but there was a surviving family home in the village, still occupied by the Wilhelm family, with a vintage basement that traced back at least 200 years.
In Selbach, there was also a tiny Catholic church at a crossroads in the center of town, where all of the Wilhelms had been baptized and married over several centuries. The chapel St. Antonius, better known under the name "Kathreinkapelle" (St. Katherine). It is the oldest preserved church building in the municipality. The completely preserved late-baroque Kreuzweg (crossroads) is unique in the North-Saar area. There were no cemeteries whatsoever in the area, as they had all been plowed over, due to the land being valuable as farm land.
If one studies the 1850's era wedding portrait of young Nicholas taken in Illinois, and a photo of his brother Peter as an older middle aged man also in Illinois, it is obvious that Nicholas, with his short, square face, very much resembled his mother Maria Ludwig. But his brother Peter, with a long face and deep-set eyes, looked exactly like his father Matthias Wilhelm. However, the 4 sons of Nicholas, all with longer faces, including the eldest Anton, and then later Anton's eldest son Alfred, looked very much like Matthias Wilhelm. Anton's youngest children, Clarence and Clara, had soft round faces like their paternal grandfather Nicholas and his wife Magdalena.
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Grandson of maternal German immigrant grandparents who he knew very well -- Johann Antonie Mueller and Mary Margaret Weckerle (Weckerie, Wakerley) Mueller. Weckerle, Weckerie and Wakerley may be different spellings and pronunciations of the same name due to either the choice of the family or inadvertently distorted oral history in America.
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Son of Nicholas Wilhelm and Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm. Nicholas had been born in Selbach, St Wendel, Saarland, Germany. In 2013, Selbach is still a small village in the middle of rolling farmland, a few miles southwest of the small recreational lake called Bostalsee, outside of the town of Nohfelden, Germany. Selbach is slightly less than 30 miles straight north of the German border town of Saarbrücken. Wilhelm families in the United States and in Selbach communicated, and even met each other, in the 1980's and 1990's.
Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm's Mueller family (and also the Weckerie/Wakerly, Winter, and Rinck families in her background) also originated in the Alsace region, 80 miles to the southeast of Selbach, in a village called Bremmelbach, which in 2013 is now Cleebourg, France, located on the southwestern edge of Wissembourg. Cleebourg, France is in the easternmost area of France, and lies 38 miles north/northeast of the largest Alsace city of Strasbourg, France, and 28 miles straight west of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany which sits just east of the Rhine River.
The Peoria Library has a book listing Peoria County births in the late 1800s. Under the Nicholas Wilhelm family there are the births of Nicholas (child #8, b. 1871) and Martha (child #12, b. 1877). Children of Nicholas of Wilhelmhaven, Germany and Magdalena of Alsace Lorraine, France. Sibling Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" (b. Nov 1880) married Fred Merrill.
Anton's young uncle Peter C. Wilhelm married Anton's first maternal cousin Mary Anne Ernst. Mary Anne was the daughter of Albert Ernst (of Germany) and Anton's maternal aunt Teresia Mueller, who had 10 children.
Husband of:
1) Catharine "Katie" Dornberger, married Anton Wilhelm in 1882 - children Frank and Edward Wilhelm. In 2014 there are no known photographs of Katie Dornberger, and no information about her birth family, which was probably German. Frank was the firstborn of Katie and Anton Wilhelm. He eventually married, owned his own farm not far from Chillicothe, and had three children. His only heirs at the time of his passing were 2 grandsons and 2 greatgrandsons. His firstborn in 1913 was Carl Francis Wilhelm, the first grandchild of Anton Wilhelm. Frank's brother Edward also married and was a farmer, apparently acquiring a farm through his wife Helen's Semptner family. Ed and Helen had three children, but sadly two were lost to appendicitis in middle childhood in the 1920's in Chillicothe, leaving one surviving daughter Katherine. Katherine left Chillicothe as a young woman, but returned there to her mother Helen's home to live out her life in her older years. She died in her 80's in 2005, leaving a son Gary.
2) Mary Thome, married Anton Wilhelm on July 11, 1888 - children Alfred, Frances, Clarence, and Clara. Alfred had no biological children, but raised 2 daughters Marjorie and Mary who actually belonged to his sister Clara. Frances had 4 children and many grandchildren; Clarence had 6 children and many grandchildren; Clara had 5 children (one deceased as an adult without children), and many grandchildren.
After their 1882 marriage, Anton had two sons with Katie Dornberger, Frank the oldest who was born in April of 1884, and Edward "Ed" the younger who was born in January of 1887. Sadly Katie died of unknown causes when Ed was a baby. She was buried right down the road from the Wilhelm farm, in Mooney Cemetery, then known as St. Joseph's. St. Joseph's was a tiny wooden Catholic church on a small piece of land at the edge of rolling wheat and corn fields. In 2014 the roadside cemetery is still maintained as a historic site, and consists of several dozen gravesites of mostly early Irish inhabitants of the Irish enclave known as the Mooney Settlement. Pioneer Thomas Mooney donated the land for the church and cemetery.
After his first wife Katie died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness. In contrast, his immigrant father Nicholas, who was called "Old Nick" by his 45+ grandchildren, was seemingly a simple and sweet man, who planted a peach orchard, named his farm the Lakeview Fruit Farm, and raised corn and wheat and twelve children there.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was a 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University.
A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 15, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
In 1916, the year of Arch and Clara's marriage, Old Nick's 59 year old son Anton Wilhelm was Clara's well-off father, the oldest son in a family largely comprised of girls, who had inherited Old Nick's original 160 acre land purchase of 1855. Throughout the prior years of the 1890's, Anton had been a smugly self-satisfied, arrogant man, exactly 20 years younger than his Irish neighbor John Boylan who owned double the acreage of Anton's farm. John had a son ten years younger than Anton, William Franklin Boylan, but he left to attend a medical college by 1888-90 and never returned to farm life. There was a farm recession in the 1890's that hurt many farmers so badly that many sold their farms. Young husband and father Anton was likely insulated from the recession by a very large extended family (he had 11 siblings) and by the productive peach orchard that his father Nick had planted in the early years when he first arrived from Germany. In 1892 Anton was only 35 years old. His German mother Magdalena was able to help with childcare, and his father Nick was 58 and still robustly healthy. Yet despite the falling prices of grains, the much more challenged John Boylan was able to keep his farm intact in its entirety. By 1892, John was already 55 years old, but was raising four young boys ages 12 and under who he had had in the 1880's with his second wife Eva Weber. His Irish mother Mary had been gone for years, and his father Patrick had just died in 1890. Of the five children from his first marriage to Christina Holihan, his four daughters 17 to 25 years old were still at home, but his oldest son William had become a medical doctor in 1891 and left Illinois for Kansas and then Nevada. John's two older brothers Thomas and Charles, also both lacking sons who were able to take over, would both sell their farms before 1900. Finally decades of hard labor took their toll, and in 1903 John died of heart disease at the age of just 66. His four boys were now in their late teens, and they and their mother Eva were left to farm the land alone. Oldest daughter Ella and her husband John Staab owned a farm next door.
Anton's two daughters had been a valuable source of unpaid farm labor for a decade prior to their marriages in the same year of 1916. Frances and Clara spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours picking peaches in order to enrich their father throughout their childhoods and teen years. But Frances was later allowed to attend high school at the Normal school, and was either given or demanded more freedom as the eldest. Clara was forbidden from attending high school, and was used as a maid, mopping floors and preparing dinners for household members. In the desperation of a young girl, she poured out her heart of misery in a diary she kept.
It is no mystery then why Anton and his sour, embittered wife Mary Thome Wilhelm disapproved of Clara's marriage - they were losing a "slave". But they were also likely fearful that the Boylans had lost so many family members - with Arch's parents both gone, there were no Boylan grandparents to help with childcare.
Arch and Clara then essentially eloped, although they were married by a priest in the Catholic cathedral in Peoria, but with only two wedding guests and the priest in attendance.
Old Nick Wilhelm on the other hand seemed to have wished the couple well, offering his granddaughter Clara an entire houseful of beautiful marble-topped antique furniture as a wedding present. Clara was unable to accept the gift however, because she was now living in the Boylan farmhouse which had its own rich collection of furniture. Clara's grandmother, Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm, Old Nick's wife, was still living at the time as well. But since Magdalena had 45 total grandchildren to keep track of, Clara was lost in the shuffle, and never spoke of any significant relationship with her paternal grandmother.
Several grandchildren were born to Clara before Old Nick died in 1922. With the arrival of these "Wilhelm-Boylan" children, the Wilhelm and Boylan families had known each other an amazing 67 years, since the time of Old Nick's arrival in Chillicothe in 1855 as a single 21 year old, who had walked across a field and introduced himself to his 18 year old neighbor John Boylan and his parents Patrick Boylan and Mary Branigan Boylan. The German immigrant Mueller family had just arrived in the neighborhood as well, and within a short time Nick married one of their daughters. Who knew at that initial meeting of Nick and John that in 61 years Nick's granddaughter would marry John's youngest son ?
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died (named Mary Anne, for her grandmother), but the other was a healthy child (Nellie). Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child Robert, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, was pregnant, and had her firstborn Johnny the following February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of viral St. Louis encephalitis transmitted by a mosquito bite in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family. Grandmother Mary Anne, age 72, allowed it as well.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. Mary Anne lived in the biggest and nicest of the cottages, "the Big House", while Clara and her children lived in a smaller cottage next door. Neither home had indoor plumbing. There were outhouses in the back. Baths consisted of sponges and water heated on the kitchen stove. Coal was the heating fuel for the winter. There was abundant garden space that both cottages shared, where Clara and her mother Mary Anne tended asparagus, strawberries, cabbage, lettuce and flowers. Clara also had a cow that was pastured a short distance away. Mary Anne liked German beer and limburger cheese that her son Clarence brought with groceries.
Mary Anne was cared for in the last 4 years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children Johnny, and highschoolers Paul and Josephine "Jo". Johnny was a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing in 1943. Younger brother Paul had graduated from Spaulding Institute, a Catholic boys' high school in Peoria in 1941, and had enlisted in the Navy. Johnny had taken excellent care of the family since his father Arch's untimely death when Johnny was just 14. But Mary Anne did not like him, calling him "that sport", referring apparently to Johnny's attempt to maintain a nice car and clothes. Confident and mature beyond his years, Johnny was a gentle and affable man - while his grandmother was a caustic and ornery woman. With his curly blonde hair and blue eyes, Johnny probably reminded her of his Irish father Arch Boylan, who Mary Anne undoubtedly blamed for eloping with her youngest Clara, and then ruining her life by losing the Boylan farm, and dying young.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. She had had a small stroke at some point. According to her daughter Clara who took care of her, she had a prolapsed uterus, from her four home childbirths. Her silver hair was apparently never cut, long and twisted up into a bun. The day she was taken to St. Francis hospital in Peoria, she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". Amazingly, the same day of her passing, in the same hospital, her daughter Clara's firstborn daughter Marjorie, gave birth to her first baby Philip Walker. Mary Anne kept asking from her hospital bed "Has Margie had that baby yet?" That same day, Clara's youngest Josephine, a 17 year old senior in highschool, had "played hooky" from The Academy of Our Lady girls' highschool with a friend, shopping in Peoria stores, and later in the day was shocked by the news of her grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances Wilhelm Holmes (4) and Clara Wilhelm Boylan (5), and her youngest son Clarence Wilhelm (6), and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed. In 2013, Clara's youngest granddaughter was discovered to have a 1% Hungarian Jewish ancestry in a DNA study. This Jewish ancestry very likely came through Mary Anne Thome's German lines, since her lineage is almost completely unknown.
Grandson of paternal grandparents back in Germany (Prussia) who he never met, Matthias Wilhelm & Maria Ludwig Wilhelm. This couple had married on February 14, 1831 in Germany. Matthias was born February 21, 1803 in Selback, Germany, and died March 27, 1873. Maria Ludwig was born 1800 in Buschfeld, Germany (not far from Selback, north), and died November 17, 1880.
Selbach
Community Nohfelden, Saarland
800 inhabitants
www.nohfelden.de
Strangely, the place name denies the kinship with the Nahe, which originates near the village. Apparently, the namesake had no idea that the modest brook is about the beginning of the river, which finally flows into the Rhine and has already been named "Near" in the Celtic period. The prefix "sel" could go back to the old word "seli" for "meadow."
The farm estate Imsbach, which belonged to the Selbach district since the Oldenburger period, has returned to the "territory of the municipality of Tholey" after the administrative and administrative reform.
In historical times, the place was always politically, judicially and ecclesiastically linked with the neighboring Neunkirchen.
The landmark of the place is the Katharinenkapelle.
The origins of the chapel building extend far back to the Romanesque period. Thus, the Katharinenkapelle of Selbach is not only the oldest chapel in the district of St. Wendel, but one of the oldest ecclesiastical buildings in the Saarland. There is no comparable range of chapels in the vicinity of the village. The Katharine Chapel is the germ cell of Selbach.
The Saarland or Saarland or else Shar as it was known when it was under French control ( German : Saarland , French : Sarre ), is one of the 16 federal states of Germany. The capital is Saarbrücken. And the extent and the population is the smallest German Flachenlander (area states, non-city states).
History
Initially, Saarland was inhabited by peoples of Celtic origin. Saarland, after many years spent in the hands of the Romans and Fragkonianon, the possession of the French in 1792. In 1870, after the battle of Saarbrücken, in the possession of the German Empire. In 1920, the Saarland came into the hands of France and Britain, but in 1933, following a referendum, the Saarland was an acquisition of Nazi Germany with the overwhelming proportion of 90.3% compared to 9.7% in favor of union with France. After the end of World War II, for a time, the Saarland state was autonomous until 1959, and now is part of Germany.
Geography
Bordered by France ( Department de Moselle ) in the south and west by Luxembourg in the west and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the north. The name of the state derives from the River Saar, which is a tributary of the river Moselle (tributary of the Rhine ). Most residents live in cities on the French border, surrounding the capital of Saarbrücken and the French Sargkemin (Sarreguemines).
Saarland is divided into six areas:
Merzig-Wadern
Neunkirchen
Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken)
Saarlouis
Saarpfalz
Sankt Wendel
Anton's father was:
Nicholas Wilhelm
Born February 1, 1834 in Wilhelmshaven, Niedersachsen, Germany
Son of Matthias Wilhelm and Maria Ludwig
Brother of Peter Wilhelm
Why Nicholas's birthplace has been listed as Wihelmshaven is unknown. Wilmhelmshaven is a deep water port on the north coast of Germany, quite a long ways from the Alsace region where Nicholas's parents had been born and raised, and married. It is generally believed that Nicholas did grow up in the Alsatian village of Selbach where he and his siblings are thought to have been born on a family farm. Perhaps young Nicholas lived in Wilhelmshaven briefly as a young man, prior to his emigration to the U.S. at the age of 21. Or, perhaps the entire family did leave Selbach, and relocated to Wilhelmshaven - but it seems unlikely that a large farm family would leave their land.
Besides the brothers Nicholas and Peter, there were thought to be several other brothers, all of whom emigrated to America (maybe as many as 6 or 7), except presumably the eldest son, who inherited the family farm in the Saarland-Alsace area of France. It is unknown if there were any girls in the family. Members of an American branch of the Wilhelm family (Anton's daughter Clara's McCarthy grandchildren through her youngest Josephine) visited the tiny village of Selbach, Germany in 1991, and met with Wilhelm descendants still living there. The family farm fields had been redistributed and dispersed over the years, but there was a surviving family home in the village, still occupied by the Wilhelm family, with a vintage basement that traced back at least 200 years.
In Selbach, there was also a tiny Catholic church at a crossroads in the center of town, where all of the Wilhelms had been baptized and married over several centuries. The chapel St. Antonius, better known under the name "Kathreinkapelle" (St. Katherine). It is the oldest preserved church building in the municipality. The completely preserved late-baroque Kreuzweg (crossroads) is unique in the North-Saar area. There were no cemeteries whatsoever in the area, as they had all been plowed over, due to the land being valuable as farm land.
If one studies the 1850's era wedding portrait of young Nicholas taken in Illinois, and a photo of his brother Peter as an older middle aged man also in Illinois, it is obvious that Nicholas, with his short, square face, very much resembled his mother Maria Ludwig. But his brother Peter, with a long face and deep-set eyes, looked exactly like his father Matthias Wilhelm. However, the 4 sons of Nicholas, all with longer faces, including the eldest Anton, and then later Anton's eldest son Alfred, looked very much like Matthias Wilhelm. Anton's youngest children, Clarence and Clara, had soft round faces like their paternal grandfather Nicholas and his wife Magdalena.
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Grandson of maternal German immigrant grandparents who he knew very well -- Johann Antonie Mueller and Mary Margaret Weckerle (Weckerie, Wakerley) Mueller. Weckerle, Weckerie and Wakerley may be different spellings and pronunciations of the same name due to either the choice of the family or inadvertently distorted oral history in America.
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Son of Nicholas Wilhelm and Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm. Nicholas had been born in Selbach, St Wendel, Saarland, Germany. In 2013, Selbach is still a small village in the middle of rolling farmland, a few miles southwest of the small recreational lake called Bostalsee, outside of the town of Nohfelden, Germany. Selbach is slightly less than 30 miles straight north of the German border town of Saarbrücken. Wilhelm families in the United States and in Selbach communicated, and even met each other, in the 1980's and 1990's.
Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm's Mueller family (and also the Weckerie/Wakerly, Winter, and Rinck families in her background) also originated in the Alsace region, 80 miles to the southeast of Selbach, in a village called Bremmelbach, which in 2013 is now Cleebourg, France, located on the southwestern edge of Wissembourg. Cleebourg, France is in the easternmost area of France, and lies 38 miles north/northeast of the largest Alsace city of Strasbourg, France, and 28 miles straight west of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany which sits just east of the Rhine River.
The Peoria Library has a book listing Peoria County births in the late 1800s. Under the Nicholas Wilhelm family there are the births of Nicholas (child #8, b. 1871) and Martha (child #12, b. 1877). Children of Nicholas of Wilhelmhaven, Germany and Magdalena of Alsace Lorraine, France. Sibling Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" (b. Nov 1880) married Fred Merrill.
Anton's young uncle Peter C. Wilhelm married Anton's first maternal cousin Mary Anne Ernst. Mary Anne was the daughter of Albert Ernst (of Germany) and Anton's maternal aunt Teresia Mueller, who had 10 children.
Husband of:
1) Catharine "Katie" Dornberger, married Anton Wilhelm in 1882 - children Frank and Edward Wilhelm. In 2014 there are no known photographs of Katie Dornberger, and no information about her birth family, which was probably German. Frank was the firstborn of Katie and Anton Wilhelm. He eventually married, owned his own farm not far from Chillicothe, and had three children. His only heirs at the time of his passing were 2 grandsons and 2 greatgrandsons. His firstborn in 1913 was Carl Francis Wilhelm, the first grandchild of Anton Wilhelm. Frank's brother Edward also married and was a farmer, apparently acquiring a farm through his wife Helen's Semptner family. Ed and Helen had three children, but sadly two were lost to appendicitis in middle childhood in the 1920's in Chillicothe, leaving one surviving daughter Katherine. Katherine left Chillicothe as a young woman, but returned there to her mother Helen's home to live out her life in her older years. She died in her 80's in 2005, leaving a son Gary.
2) Mary Thome, married Anton Wilhelm on July 11, 1888 - children Alfred, Frances, Clarence, and Clara. Alfred had no biological children, but raised 2 daughters Marjorie and Mary who actually belonged to his sister Clara. Frances had 4 children and many grandchildren; Clarence had 6 children and many grandchildren; Clara had 5 children (one deceased as an adult without children), and many grandchildren.
After their 1882 marriage, Anton had two sons with Katie Dornberger, Frank the oldest who was born in April of 1884, and Edward "Ed" the younger who was born in January of 1887. Sadly Katie died of unknown causes when Ed was a baby. She was buried right down the road from the Wilhelm farm, in Mooney Cemetery, then known as St. Joseph's. St. Joseph's was a tiny wooden Catholic church on a small piece of land at the edge of rolling wheat and corn fields. In 2014 the roadside cemetery is still maintained as a historic site, and consists of several dozen gravesites of mostly early Irish inhabitants of the Irish enclave known as the Mooney Settlement. Pioneer Thomas Mooney donated the land for the church and cemetery.
After his first wife Katie died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness. In contrast, his immigrant father Nicholas, who was called "Old Nick" by his 45+ grandchildren, was seemingly a simple and sweet man, who planted a peach orchard, named his farm the Lakeview Fruit Farm, and raised corn and wheat and twelve children there.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was a 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University.
A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 15, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
In 1916, the year of Arch and Clara's marriage, Old Nick's 59 year old son Anton Wilhelm was Clara's well-off father, the oldest son in a family largely comprised of girls, who had inherited Old Nick's original 160 acre land purchase of 1855. Throughout the prior years of the 1890's, Anton had been a smugly self-satisfied, arrogant man, exactly 20 years younger than his Irish neighbor John Boylan who owned double the acreage of Anton's farm. John had a son ten years younger than Anton, William Franklin Boylan, but he left to attend a medical college by 1888-90 and never returned to farm life. There was a farm recession in the 1890's that hurt many farmers so badly that many sold their farms. Young husband and father Anton was likely insulated from the recession by a very large extended family (he had 11 siblings) and by the productive peach orchard that his father Nick had planted in the early years when he first arrived from Germany. In 1892 Anton was only 35 years old. His German mother Magdalena was able to help with childcare, and his father Nick was 58 and still robustly healthy. Yet despite the falling prices of grains, the much more challenged John Boylan was able to keep his farm intact in its entirety. By 1892, John was already 55 years old, but was raising four young boys ages 12 and under who he had had in the 1880's with his second wife Eva Weber. His Irish mother Mary had been gone for years, and his father Patrick had just died in 1890. Of the five children from his first marriage to Christina Holihan, his four daughters 17 to 25 years old were still at home, but his oldest son William had become a medical doctor in 1891 and left Illinois for Kansas and then Nevada. John's two older brothers Thomas and Charles, also both lacking sons who were able to take over, would both sell their farms before 1900. Finally decades of hard labor took their toll, and in 1903 John died of heart disease at the age of just 66. His four boys were now in their late teens, and they and their mother Eva were left to farm the land alone. Oldest daughter Ella and her husband John Staab owned a farm next door.
Anton's two daughters had been a valuable source of unpaid farm labor for a decade prior to their marriages in the same year of 1916. Frances and Clara spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours picking peaches in order to enrich their father throughout their childhoods and teen years. But Frances was later allowed to attend high school at the Normal school, and was either given or demanded more freedom as the eldest. Clara was forbidden from attending high school, and was used as a maid, mopping floors and preparing dinners for household members. In the desperation of a young girl, she poured out her heart of misery in a diary she kept.
It is no mystery then why Anton and his sour, embittered wife Mary Thome Wilhelm disapproved of Clara's marriage - they were losing a "slave". But they were also likely fearful that the Boylans had lost so many family members - with Arch's parents both gone, there were no Boylan grandparents to help with childcare.
Arch and Clara then essentially eloped, although they were married by a priest in the Catholic cathedral in Peoria, but with only two wedding guests and the priest in attendance.
Old Nick Wilhelm on the other hand seemed to have wished the couple well, offering his granddaughter Clara an entire houseful of beautiful marble-topped antique furniture as a wedding present. Clara was unable to accept the gift however, because she was now living in the Boylan farmhouse which had its own rich collection of furniture. Clara's grandmother, Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm, Old Nick's wife, was still living at the time as well. But since Magdalena had 45 total grandchildren to keep track of, Clara was lost in the shuffle, and never spoke of any significant relationship with her paternal grandmother.
Several grandchildren were born to Clara before Old Nick died in 1922. With the arrival of these "Wilhelm-Boylan" children, the Wilhelm and Boylan families had known each other an amazing 67 years, since the time of Old Nick's arrival in Chillicothe in 1855 as a single 21 year old, who had walked across a field and introduced himself to his 18 year old neighbor John Boylan and his parents Patrick Boylan and Mary Branigan Boylan. The German immigrant Mueller family had just arrived in the neighborhood as well, and within a short time Nick married one of their daughters. Who knew at that initial meeting of Nick and John that in 61 years Nick's granddaughter would marry John's youngest son ?
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died (named Mary Anne, for her grandmother), but the other was a healthy child (Nellie). Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child Robert, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, was pregnant, and had her firstborn Johnny the following February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of viral St. Louis encephalitis transmitted by a mosquito bite in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family. Grandmother Mary Anne, age 72, allowed it as well.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. Mary Anne lived in the biggest and nicest of the cottages, "the Big House", while Clara and her children lived in a smaller cottage next door. Neither home had indoor plumbing. There were outhouses in the back. Baths consisted of sponges and water heated on the kitchen stove. Coal was the heating fuel for the winter. There was abundant garden space that both cottages shared, where Clara and her mother Mary Anne tended asparagus, strawberries, cabbage, lettuce and flowers. Clara also had a cow that was pastured a short distance away. Mary Anne liked German beer and limburger cheese that her son Clarence brought with groceries.
Mary Anne was cared for in the last 4 years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children Johnny, and highschoolers Paul and Josephine "Jo". Johnny was a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing in 1943. Younger brother Paul had graduated from Spaulding Institute, a Catholic boys' high school in Peoria in 1941, and had enlisted in the Navy. Johnny had taken excellent care of the family since his father Arch's untimely death when Johnny was just 14. But Mary Anne did not like him, calling him "that sport", referring apparently to Johnny's attempt to maintain a nice car and clothes. Confident and mature beyond his years, Johnny was a gentle and affable man - while his grandmother was a caustic and ornery woman. With his curly blonde hair and blue eyes, Johnny probably reminded her of his Irish father Arch Boylan, who Mary Anne undoubtedly blamed for eloping with her youngest Clara, and then ruining her life by losing the Boylan farm, and dying young.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. She had had a small stroke at some point. According to her daughter Clara who took care of her, she had a prolapsed uterus, from her four home childbirths. Her silver hair was apparently never cut, long and twisted up into a bun. The day she was taken to St. Francis hospital in Peoria, she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". Amazingly, the same day of her passing, in the same hospital, her daughter Clara's firstborn daughter Marjorie, gave birth to her first baby Philip Walker. Mary Anne kept asking from her hospital bed "Has Margie had that baby yet?" That same day, Clara's youngest Josephine, a 17 year old senior in highschool, had "played hooky" from The Academy of Our Lady girls' highschool with a friend, shopping in Peoria stores, and later in the day was shocked by the news of her grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances Wilhelm Holmes (4) and Clara Wilhelm Boylan (5), and her youngest son Clarence Wilhelm (6), and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed. In 2013, Clara's youngest granddaughter was discovered to have a 1% Hungarian Jewish ancestry in a DNA study. This Jewish ancestry very likely came through Mary Anne Thome's German lines, since her lineage is almost completely unknown.
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Grandson of paternal grandparents back in Germany (Prussia) who he never met, Matthias Wilhelm & Maria Ludwig Wilhelm. This couple had married on February 14, 1831 in Germany. Matthias was born February 21, 1803 in Selback, Germany, and died March 27, 1873. Maria Ludwig was born 1800 in Buschfeld, Germany (not far from Selback, north), and died November 17, 1880.
Selbach
Community Nohfelden, Saarland
800 inhabitants
www.nohfelden.de
Strangely, the place name denies the kinship with the Nahe, which originates near the village. Apparently, the namesake had no idea that the modest brook is about the beginning of the river, which finally flows into the Rhine and has already been named "Near" in the Celtic period. The prefix "sel" could go back to the old word "seli" for "meadow."
The farm estate Imsbach, which belonged to the Selbach district since the Oldenburger period, has returned to the "territory of the municipality of Tholey" after the administrative and administrative reform.
In historical times, the place was always politically, judicially and ecclesiastically linked with the neighboring Neunkirchen.
The landmark of the place is the Katharinenkapelle.
The origins of the chapel building extend far back to the Romanesque period. Thus, the Katharinenkapelle of Selbach is not only the oldest chapel in the district of St. Wendel, but one of the oldest ecclesiastical buildings in the Saarland. There is no comparable range of chapels in the vicinity of the village. The Katharine Chapel is the germ cell of Selbach.
The Saarland or Saarland or else Shar as it was known when it was under French control ( German : Saarland , French : Sarre ), is one of the 16 federal states of Germany. The capital is Saarbrücken. And the extent and the population is the smallest German Flachenlander (area states, non-city states).
History
Initially, Saarland was inhabited by peoples of Celtic origin. Saarland, after many years spent in the hands of the Romans and Fragkonianon, the possession of the French in 1792. In 1870, after the battle of Saarbrücken, in the possession of the German Empire. In 1920, the Saarland came into the hands of France and Britain, but in 1933, following a referendum, the Saarland was an acquisition of Nazi Germany with the overwhelming proportion of 90.3% compared to 9.7% in favor of union with France. After the end of World War II, for a time, the Saarland state was autonomous until 1959, and now is part of Germany.
Geography
Bordered by France ( Department de Moselle ) in the south and west by Luxembourg in the west and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the north. The name of the state derives from the River Saar, which is a tributary of the river Moselle (tributary of the Rhine ). Most residents live in cities on the French border, surrounding the capital of Saarbrücken and the French Sargkemin (Sarreguemines).
Saarland is divided into six areas:
Merzig-Wadern
Neunkirchen
Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken)
Saarlouis
Saarpfalz
Sankt Wendel
Anton's father was:
Nicholas Wilhelm
Born February 1, 1834 in Wilhelmshaven, Niedersachsen, Germany
Son of Matthias Wilhelm and Maria Ludwig
Brother of Peter Wilhelm
Why Nicholas's birthplace has been listed as Wihelmshaven is unknown. Wilmhelmshaven is a deep water port on the north coast of Germany, quite a long ways from the Alsace region where Nicholas's parents had been born and raised, and married. It is generally believed that Nicholas did grow up in the Alsatian village of Selbach where he and his siblings are thought to have been born on a family farm. Perhaps young Nicholas lived in Wilhelmshaven briefly as a young man, prior to his emigration to the U.S. at the age of 21. Or, perhaps the entire family did leave Selbach, and relocated to Wilhelmshaven - but it seems unlikely that a large farm family would leave their land.
Besides the brothers Nicholas and Peter, there were thought to be several other brothers, all of whom emigrated to America (maybe as many as 6 or 7), except presumably the eldest son, who inherited the family farm in the Saarland-Alsace area of France. It is unknown if there were any girls in the family. Members of an American branch of the Wilhelm family (Anton's daughter Clara's McCarthy grandchildren through her youngest Josephine) visited the tiny village of Selbach, Germany in 1991, and met with Wilhelm descendants still living there. The family farm fields had been redistributed and dispersed over the years, but there was a surviving family home in the village, still occupied by the Wilhelm family, with a vintage basement that traced back at least 200 years.
In Selbach, there was also a tiny Catholic church at a crossroads in the center of town, where all of the Wilhelms had been baptized and married over several centuries. The chapel St. Antonius, better known under the name "Kathreinkapelle" (St. Katherine). It is the oldest preserved church building in the municipality. The completely preserved late-baroque Kreuzweg (crossroads) is unique in the North-Saar area. There were no cemeteries whatsoever in the area, as they had all been plowed over, due to the land being valuable as farm land.
If one studies the 1850's era wedding portrait of young Nicholas taken in Illinois, and a photo of his brother Peter as an older middle aged man also in Illinois, it is obvious that Nicholas, with his short, square face, very much resembled his mother Maria Ludwig. But his brother Peter, with a long face and deep-set eyes, looked exactly like his father Matthias Wilhelm. However, the 4 sons of Nicholas, all with longer faces, including the eldest Anton, and then later Anton's eldest son Alfred, looked very much like Matthias Wilhelm. Anton's youngest children, Clarence and Clara, had soft round faces like their paternal grandfather Nicholas and his wife Magdalena.
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Grandson of maternal German immigrant grandparents who he knew very well -- Johann Antonie Mueller and Mary Margaret Weckerle (Weckerie, Wakerley) Mueller. Weckerle, Weckerie and Wakerley may be different spellings and pronunciations of the same name due to either the choice of the family or inadvertently distorted oral history in America.
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Son of Nicholas Wilhelm and Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm. Nicholas had been born in Selbach, St Wendel, Saarland, Germany. In 2013, Selbach is still a small village in the middle of rolling farmland, a few miles southwest of the small recreational lake called Bostalsee, outside of the town of Nohfelden, Germany. Selbach is slightly less than 30 miles straight north of the German border town of Saarbrücken. Wilhelm families in the United States and in Selbach communicated, and even met each other, in the 1980's and 1990's.
Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm's Mueller family (and also the Weckerie/Wakerly, Winter, and Rinck families in her background) also originated in the Alsace region, 80 miles to the southeast of Selbach, in a village called Bremmelbach, which in 2013 is now Cleebourg, France, located on the southwestern edge of Wissembourg. Cleebourg, France is in the easternmost area of France, and lies 38 miles north/northeast of the largest Alsace city of Strasbourg, France, and 28 miles straight west of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany which sits just east of the Rhine River.
The Peoria Library has a book listing Peoria County births in the late 1800s. Under the Nicholas Wilhelm family there are the births of Nicholas (child #8, b. 1871) and Martha (child #12, b. 1877). Children of Nicholas of Wilhelmhaven, Germany and Magdalena of Alsace Lorraine, France. Sibling Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" (b. Nov 1880) married Fred Merrill.
Anton's young uncle Peter C. Wilhelm married Anton's first maternal cousin Mary Anne Ernst. Mary Anne was the daughter of Albert Ernst (of Germany) and Anton's maternal aunt Teresia Mueller, who had 10 children.
Husband of:
1) Catharine "Katie" Dornberger, married Anton Wilhelm in 1882 - children Frank and Edward Wilhelm. In 2014 there are no known photographs of Katie Dornberger, and no information about her birth family, which was probably German. Frank was the firstborn of Katie and Anton Wilhelm. He eventually married, owned his own farm not far from Chillicothe, and had three children. His only heirs at the time of his passing were 2 grandsons and 2 greatgrandsons. His firstborn in 1913 was Carl Francis Wilhelm, the first grandchild of Anton Wilhelm. Frank's brother Edward also married and was a farmer, apparently acquiring a farm through his wife Helen's Semptner family. Ed and Helen had three children, but sadly two were lost to appendicitis in middle childhood in the 1920's in Chillicothe, leaving one surviving daughter Katherine. Katherine left Chillicothe as a young woman, but returned there to her mother Helen's home to live out her life in her older years. She died in her 80's in 2005, leaving a son Gary.
2) Mary Thome, married Anton Wilhelm on July 11, 1888 - children Alfred, Frances, Clarence, and Clara. Alfred had no biological children, but raised 2 daughters Marjorie and Mary who actually belonged to his sister Clara. Frances had 4 children and many grandchildren; Clarence had 6 children and many grandchildren; Clara had 5 children (one deceased as an adult without children), and many grandchildren.
After their 1882 marriage, Anton had two sons with Katie Dornberger, Frank the oldest who was born in April of 1884, and Edward "Ed" the younger who was born in January of 1887. Sadly Katie died of unknown causes when Ed was a baby. She was buried right down the road from the Wilhelm farm, in Mooney Cemetery, then known as St. Joseph's. St. Joseph's was a tiny wooden Catholic church on a small piece of land at the edge of rolling wheat and corn fields. In 2014 the roadside cemetery is still maintained as a historic site, and consists of several dozen gravesites of mostly early Irish inhabitants of the Irish enclave known as the Mooney Settlement. Pioneer Thomas Mooney donated the land for the church and cemetery.
After his first wife Katie died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness. In contrast, his immigrant father Nicholas, who was called "Old Nick" by his 45+ grandchildren, was seemingly a simple and sweet man, who planted a peach orchard, named his farm the Lakeview Fruit Farm, and raised corn and wheat and twelve children there.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was a 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University.
A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 15, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
In 1916, the year of Arch and Clara's marriage, Old Nick's 59 year old son Anton Wilhelm was Clara's well-off father, the oldest son in a family largely comprised of girls, who had inherited Old Nick's original 160 acre land purchase of 1855. Throughout the prior years of the 1890's, Anton had been a smugly self-satisfied, arrogant man, exactly 20 years younger than his Irish neighbor John Boylan who owned double the acreage of Anton's farm. John had a son ten years younger than Anton, William Franklin Boylan, but he left to attend a medical college by 1888-90 and never returned to farm life. There was a farm recession in the 1890's that hurt many farmers so badly that many sold their farms. Young husband and father Anton was likely insulated from the recession by a very large extended family (he had 11 siblings) and by the productive peach orchard that his father Nick had planted in the early years when he first arrived from Germany. In 1892 Anton was only 35 years old. His German mother Magdalena was able to help with childcare, and his father Nick was 58 and still robustly healthy. Yet despite the falling prices of grains, the much more challenged John Boylan was able to keep his farm intact in its entirety. By 1892, John was already 55 years old, but was raising four young boys ages 12 and under who he had had in the 1880's with his second wife Eva Weber. His Irish mother Mary had been gone for years, and his father Patrick had just died in 1890. Of the five children from his first marriage to Christina Holihan, his four daughters 17 to 25 years old were still at home, but his oldest son William had become a medical doctor in 1891 and left Illinois for Kansas and then Nevada. John's two older brothers Thomas and Charles, also both lacking sons who were able to take over, would both sell their farms before 1900. Finally decades of hard labor took their toll, and in 1903 John died of heart disease at the age of just 66. His four boys were now in their late teens, and they and their mother Eva were left to farm the land alone. Oldest daughter Ella and her husband John Staab owned a farm next door.
Anton's two daughters had been a valuable source of unpaid farm labor for a decade prior to their marriages in the same year of 1916. Frances and Clara spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours picking peaches in order to enrich their father throughout their childhoods and teen years. But Frances was later allowed to attend high school at the Normal school, and was either given or demanded more freedom as the eldest. Clara was forbidden from attending high school, and was used as a maid, mopping floors and preparing dinners for household members. In the desperation of a young girl, she poured out her heart of misery in a diary she kept.
It is no mystery then why Anton and his sour, embittered wife Mary Thome Wilhelm disapproved of Clara's marriage - they were losing a "slave". But they were also likely fearful that the Boylans had lost so many family members - with Arch's parents both gone, there were no Boylan grandparents to help with childcare.
Arch and Clara then essentially eloped, although they were married by a priest in the Catholic cathedral in Peoria, but with only two wedding guests and the priest in attendance.
Old Nick Wilhelm on the other hand seemed to have wished the couple well, offering his granddaughter Clara an entire houseful of beautiful marble-topped antique furniture as a wedding present. Clara was unable to accept the gift however, because she was now living in the Boylan farmhouse which had its own rich collection of furniture. Clara's grandmother, Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm, Old Nick's wife, was still living at the time as well. But since Magdalena had 45 total grandchildren to keep track of, Clara was lost in the shuffle, and never spoke of any significant relationship with her paternal grandmother.
Several grandchildren were born to Clara before Old Nick died in 1922. With the arrival of these "Wilhelm-Boylan" children, the Wilhelm and Boylan families had known each other an amazing 67 years, since the time of Old Nick's arrival in Chillicothe in 1855 as a single 21 year old, who had walked across a field and introduced himself to his 18 year old neighbor John Boylan and his parents Patrick Boylan and Mary Branigan Boylan. The German immigrant Mueller family had just arrived in the neighborhood as well, and within a short time Nick married one of their daughters. Who knew at that initial meeting of Nick and John that in 61 years Nick's granddaughter would marry John's youngest son ?
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died (named Mary Anne, for her grandmother), but the other was a healthy child (Nellie). Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child Robert, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, was pregnant, and had her firstborn Johnny the following February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of viral St. Louis encephalitis transmitted by a mosquito bite in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family. Grandmother Mary Anne, age 72, allowed it as well.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. Mary Anne lived in the biggest and nicest of the cottages, "the Big House", while Clara and her children lived in a smaller cottage next door. Neither home had indoor plumbing. There were outhouses in the back. Baths consisted of sponges and water heated on the kitchen stove. Coal was the heating fuel for the winter. There was abundant garden space that both cottages shared, where Clara and her mother Mary Anne tended asparagus, strawberries, cabbage, lettuce and flowers. Clara also had a cow that was pastured a short distance away. Mary Anne liked German beer and limburger cheese that her son Clarence brought with groceries.
Mary Anne was cared for in the last 4 years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children Johnny, and highschoolers Paul and Josephine "Jo". Johnny was a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing in 1943. Younger brother Paul had graduated from Spaulding Institute, a Catholic boys' high school in Peoria in 1941, and had enlisted in the Navy. Johnny had taken excellent care of the family since his father Arch's untimely death when Johnny was just 14. But Mary Anne did not like him, calling him "that sport", referring apparently to Johnny's attempt to maintain a nice car and clothes. Confident and mature beyond his years, Johnny was a gentle and affable man - while his grandmother was a caustic and ornery woman. With his curly blonde hair and blue eyes, Johnny probably reminded her of his Irish father Arch Boylan, who Mary Anne undoubtedly blamed for eloping with her youngest Clara, and then ruining her life by losing the Boylan farm, and dying young.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. She had had a small stroke at some point. According to her daughter Clara who took care of her, she had a prolapsed uterus, from her four home childbirths. Her silver hair was apparently never cut, long and twisted up into a bun. The day she was taken to St. Francis hospital in Peoria, she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". Amazingly, the same day of her passing, in the same hospital, her daughter Clara's firstborn daughter Marjorie, gave birth to her first baby Philip Walker. Mary Anne kept asking from her hospital bed "Has Margie had that baby yet?" That same day, Clara's youngest Josephine, a 17 year old senior in highschool, had "played hooky" from The Academy of Our Lady girls' highschool with a friend, shopping in Peoria stores, and later in the day was shocked by the news of her grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances Wilhelm Holmes (4) and Clara Wilhelm Boylan (5), and her youngest son Clarence Wilhelm (6), and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed. In 2013, Clara's youngest granddaughter was discovered to have a 1% Hungarian Jewish ancestry in a DNA study. This Jewish ancestry very likely came through Mary Anne Thome's German lines, since her lineage is almost completely unknown.
Grandson of paternal grandparents back in Germany (Prussia) who he never met, Matthias Wilhelm & Maria Ludwig Wilhelm. This couple had married on February 14, 1831 in Germany. Matthias was born February 21, 1803 in Selback, Germany, and died March 27, 1873. Maria Ludwig was born 1800 in Buschfeld, Germany (not far from Selback, north), and died November 17, 1880.
Selbach
Community Nohfelden, Saarland
800 inhabitants
www.nohfelden.de
Strangely, the place name denies the kinship with the Nahe, which originates near the village. Apparently, the namesake had no idea that the modest brook is about the beginning of the river, which finally flows into the Rhine and has already been named "Near" in the Celtic period. The prefix "sel" could go back to the old word "seli" for "meadow."
The farm estate Imsbach, which belonged to the Selbach district since the Oldenburger period, has returned to the "territory of the municipality of Tholey" after the administrative and administrative reform.
In historical times, the place was always politically, judicially and ecclesiastically linked with the neighboring Neunkirchen.
The landmark of the place is the Katharinenkapelle.
The origins of the chapel building extend far back to the Romanesque period. Thus, the Katharinenkapelle of Selbach is not only the oldest chapel in the district of St. Wendel, but one of the oldest ecclesiastical buildings in the Saarland. There is no comparable range of chapels in the vicinity of the village. The Katharine Chapel is the germ cell of Selbach.
The Saarland or Saarland or else Shar as it was known when it was under French control ( German : Saarland , French : Sarre ), is one of the 16 federal states of Germany. The capital is Saarbrücken. And the extent and the population is the smallest German Flachenlander (area states, non-city states).
History
Initially, Saarland was inhabited by peoples of Celtic origin. Saarland, after many years spent in the hands of the Romans and Fragkonianon, the possession of the French in 1792. In 1870, after the battle of Saarbrücken, in the possession of the German Empire. In 1920, the Saarland came into the hands of France and Britain, but in 1933, following a referendum, the Saarland was an acquisition of Nazi Germany with the overwhelming proportion of 90.3% compared to 9.7% in favor of union with France. After the end of World War II, for a time, the Saarland state was autonomous until 1959, and now is part of Germany.
Geography
Bordered by France ( Department de Moselle ) in the south and west by Luxembourg in the west and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the north. The name of the state derives from the River Saar, which is a tributary of the river Moselle (tributary of the Rhine ). Most residents live in cities on the French border, surrounding the capital of Saarbrücken and the French Sargkemin (Sarreguemines).
Saarland is divided into six areas:
Merzig-Wadern
Neunkirchen
Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken)
Saarlouis
Saarpfalz
Sankt Wendel
Anton's father was:
Nicholas Wilhelm
Born February 1, 1834 in Wilhelmshaven, Niedersachsen, Germany
Son of Matthias Wilhelm and Maria Ludwig
Brother of Peter Wilhelm
Why Nicholas's birthplace has been listed as Wihelmshaven is unknown. Wilmhelmshaven is a deep water port on the north coast of Germany, quite a long ways from the Alsace region where Nicholas's parents had been born and raised, and married. It is generally believed that Nicholas did grow up in the Alsatian village of Selbach where he and his siblings are thought to have been born on a family farm. Perhaps young Nicholas lived in Wilhelmshaven briefly as a young man, prior to his emigration to the U.S. at the age of 21. Or, perhaps the entire family did leave Selbach, and relocated to Wilhelmshaven - but it seems unlikely that a large farm family would leave their land.
Besides the brothers Nicholas and Peter, there were thought to be several other brothers, all of whom emigrated to America (maybe as many as 6 or 7), except presumably the eldest son, who inherited the family farm in the Saarland-Alsace area of France. It is unknown if there were any girls in the family. Members of an American branch of the Wilhelm family (Anton's daughter Clara's McCarthy grandchildren through her youngest Josephine) visited the tiny village of Selbach, Germany in 1991, and met with Wilhelm descendants still living there. The family farm fields had been redistributed and dispersed over the years, but there was a surviving family home in the village, still occupied by the Wilhelm family, with a vintage basement that traced back at least 200 years.
In Selbach, there was also a tiny Catholic church at a crossroads in the center of town, where all of the Wilhelms had been baptized and married over several centuries. The chapel St. Antonius, better known under the name "Kathreinkapelle" (St. Katherine). It is the oldest preserved church building in the municipality. The completely preserved late-baroque Kreuzweg (crossroads) is unique in the North-Saar area. There were no cemeteries whatsoever in the area, as they had all been plowed over, due to the land being valuable as farm land.
If one studies the 1850's era wedding portrait of young Nicholas taken in Illinois, and a photo of his brother Peter as an older middle aged man also in Illinois, it is obvious that Nicholas, with his short, square face, very much resembled his mother Maria Ludwig. But his brother Peter, with a long face and deep-set eyes, looked exactly like his father Matthias Wilhelm. However, the 4 sons of Nicholas, all with longer faces, including the eldest Anton, and then later Anton's eldest son Alfred, looked very much like Matthias Wilhelm. Anton's youngest children, Clarence and Clara, had soft round faces like their paternal grandfather Nicholas and his wife Magdalena.
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Grandson of maternal German immigrant grandparents who he knew very well -- Johann Antonie Mueller and Mary Margaret Weckerle (Weckerie, Wakerley) Mueller. Weckerle, Weckerie and Wakerley may be different spellings and pronunciations of the same name due to either the choice of the family or inadvertently distorted oral history in America.
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Son of Nicholas Wilhelm and Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm. Nicholas had been born in Selbach, St Wendel, Saarland, Germany. In 2013, Selbach is still a small village in the middle of rolling farmland, a few miles southwest of the small recreational lake called Bostalsee, outside of the town of Nohfelden, Germany. Selbach is slightly less than 30 miles straight north of the German border town of Saarbrücken. Wilhelm families in the United States and in Selbach communicated, and even met each other, in the 1980's and 1990's.
Anna Magdalena (Mueller) Wilhelm's Mueller family (and also the Weckerie/Wakerly, Winter, and Rinck families in her background) also originated in the Alsace region, 80 miles to the southeast of Selbach, in a village called Bremmelbach, which in 2013 is now Cleebourg, France, located on the southwestern edge of Wissembourg. Cleebourg, France is in the easternmost area of France, and lies 38 miles north/northeast of the largest Alsace city of Strasbourg, France, and 28 miles straight west of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany which sits just east of the Rhine River.
The Peoria Library has a book listing Peoria County births in the late 1800s. Under the Nicholas Wilhelm family there are the births of Nicholas (child #8, b. 1871) and Martha (child #12, b. 1877). Children of Nicholas of Wilhelmhaven, Germany and Magdalena of Alsace Lorraine, France. Sibling Mary Elizabeth "Lizzie" (b. Nov 1880) married Fred Merrill.
Anton's young uncle Peter C. Wilhelm married Anton's first maternal cousin Mary Anne Ernst. Mary Anne was the daughter of Albert Ernst (of Germany) and Anton's maternal aunt Teresia Mueller, who had 10 children.
Husband of:
1) Catharine "Katie" Dornberger, married Anton Wilhelm in 1882 - children Frank and Edward Wilhelm. In 2014 there are no known photographs of Katie Dornberger, and no information about her birth family, which was probably German. Frank was the firstborn of Katie and Anton Wilhelm. He eventually married, owned his own farm not far from Chillicothe, and had three children. His only heirs at the time of his passing were 2 grandsons and 2 greatgrandsons. His firstborn in 1913 was Carl Francis Wilhelm, the first grandchild of Anton Wilhelm. Frank's brother Edward also married and was a farmer, apparently acquiring a farm through his wife Helen's Semptner family. Ed and Helen had three children, but sadly two were lost to appendicitis in middle childhood in the 1920's in Chillicothe, leaving one surviving daughter Katherine. Katherine left Chillicothe as a young woman, but returned there to her mother Helen's home to live out her life in her older years. She died in her 80's in 2005, leaving a son Gary.
2) Mary Thome, married Anton Wilhelm on July 11, 1888 - children Alfred, Frances, Clarence, and Clara. Alfred had no biological children, but raised 2 daughters Marjorie and Mary who actually belonged to his sister Clara. Frances had 4 children and many grandchildren; Clarence had 6 children and many grandchildren; Clara had 5 children (one deceased as an adult without children), and many grandchildren.
After their 1882 marriage, Anton had two sons with Katie Dornberger, Frank the oldest who was born in April of 1884, and Edward "Ed" the younger who was born in January of 1887. Sadly Katie died of unknown causes when Ed was a baby. She was buried right down the road from the Wilhelm farm, in Mooney Cemetery, then known as St. Joseph's. St. Joseph's was a tiny wooden Catholic church on a small piece of land at the edge of rolling wheat and corn fields. In 2014 the roadside cemetery is still maintained as a historic site, and consists of several dozen gravesites of mostly early Irish inhabitants of the Irish enclave known as the Mooney Settlement. Pioneer Thomas Mooney donated the land for the church and cemetery.
After his first wife Katie died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness. In contrast, his immigrant father Nicholas, who was called "Old Nick" by his 45+ grandchildren, was seemingly a simple and sweet man, who planted a peach orchard, named his farm the Lakeview Fruit Farm, and raised corn and wheat and twelve children there.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was a 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University.
A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 15, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
In 1916, the year of Arch and Clara's marriage, Old Nick's 59 year old son Anton Wilhelm was Clara's well-off father, the oldest son in a family largely comprised of girls, who had inherited Old Nick's original 160 acre land purchase of 1855. Throughout the prior years of the 1890's, Anton had been a smugly self-satisfied, arrogant man, exactly 20 years younger than his Irish neighbor John Boylan who owned double the acreage of Anton's farm. John had a son ten years younger than Anton, William Franklin Boylan, but he left to attend a medical college by 1888-90 and never returned to farm life. There was a farm recession in the 1890's that hurt many farmers so badly that many sold their farms. Young husband and father Anton was likely insulated from the recession by a very large extended family (he had 11 siblings) and by the productive peach orchard that his father Nick had planted in the early years when he first arrived from Germany. In 1892 Anton was only 35 years old. His German mother Magdalena was able to help with childcare, and his father Nick was 58 and still robustly healthy. Yet despite the falling prices of grains, the much more challenged John Boylan was able to keep his farm intact in its entirety. By 1892, John was already 55 years old, but was raising four young boys ages 12 and under who he had had in the 1880's with his second wife Eva Weber. His Irish mother Mary had been gone for years, and his father Patrick had just died in 1890. Of the five children from his first marriage to Christina Holihan, his four daughters 17 to 25 years old were still at home, but his oldest son William had become a medical doctor in 1891 and left Illinois for Kansas and then Nevada. John's two older brothers Thomas and Charles, also both lacking sons who were able to take over, would both sell their farms before 1900. Finally decades of hard labor took their toll, and in 1903 John died of heart disease at the age of just 66. His four boys were now in their late teens, and they and their mother Eva were left to farm the land alone. Oldest daughter Ella and her husband John Staab owned a farm next door.
Anton's two daughters had been a valuable source of unpaid farm labor for a decade prior to their marriages in the same year of 1916. Frances and Clara spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours picking peaches in order to enrich their father throughout their childhoods and teen years. But Frances was later allowed to attend high school at the Normal school, and was either given or demanded more freedom as the eldest. Clara was forbidden from attending high school, and was used as a maid, mopping floors and preparing dinners for household members. In the desperation of a young girl, she poured out her heart of misery in a diary she kept.
It is no mystery then why Anton and his sour, embittered wife Mary Thome Wilhelm disapproved of Clara's marriage - they were losing a "slave". But they were also likely fearful that the Boylans had lost so many family members - with Arch's parents both gone, there were no Boylan grandparents to help with childcare.
Arch and Clara then essentially eloped, although they were married by a priest in the Catholic cathedral in Peoria, but with only two wedding guests and the priest in attendance.
Old Nick Wilhelm on the other hand seemed to have wished the couple well, offering his granddaughter Clara an entire houseful of beautiful marble-topped antique furniture as a wedding present. Clara was unable to accept the gift however, because she was now living in the Boylan farmhouse which had its own rich collection of furniture. Clara's grandmother, Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm, Old Nick's wife, was still living at the time as well. But since Magdalena had 45 total grandchildren to keep track of, Clara was lost in the shuffle, and never spoke of any significant relationship with her paternal grandmother.
Several grandchildren were born to Clara before Old Nick died in 1922. With the arrival of these "Wilhelm-Boylan" children, the Wilhelm and Boylan families had known each other an amazing 67 years, since the time of Old Nick's arrival in Chillicothe in 1855 as a single 21 year old, who had walked across a field and introduced himself to his 18 year old neighbor John Boylan and his parents Patrick Boylan and Mary Branigan Boylan. The German immigrant Mueller family had just arrived in the neighborhood as well, and within a short time Nick married one of their daughters. Who knew at that initial meeting of Nick and John that in 61 years Nick's granddaughter would marry John's youngest son ?
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died (named Mary Anne, for her grandmother), but the other was a healthy child (Nellie). Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child Robert, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, was pregnant, and had her firstborn Johnny the following February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of viral St. Louis encephalitis transmitted by a mosquito bite in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family. Grandmother Mary Anne, age 72, allowed it as well.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. Mary Anne lived in the biggest and nicest of the cottages, "the Big House", while Clara and her children lived in a smaller cottage next door. Neither home had indoor plumbing. There were outhouses in the back. Baths consisted of sponges and water heated on the kitchen stove. Coal was the heating fuel for the winter. There was abundant garden space that both cottages shared, where Clara and her mother Mary Anne tended asparagus, strawberries, cabbage, lettuce and flowers. Clara also had a cow that was pastured a short distance away. Mary Anne liked German beer and limburger cheese that her son Clarence brought with groceries.
Mary Anne was cared for in the last 4 years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children Johnny, and highschoolers Paul and Josephine "Jo". Johnny was a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing in 1943. Younger brother Paul had graduated from Spaulding Institute, a Catholic boys' high school in Peoria in 1941, and had enlisted in the Navy. Johnny had taken excellent care of the family since his father Arch's untimely death when Johnny was just 14. But Mary Anne did not like him, calling him "that sport", referring apparently to Johnny's attempt to maintain a nice car and clothes. Confident and mature beyond his years, Johnny was a gentle and affable man - while his grandmother was a caustic and ornery woman. With his curly blonde hair and blue eyes, Johnny probably reminded her of his Irish father Arch Boylan, who Mary Anne undoubtedly blamed for eloping with her youngest Clara, and then ruining her life by losing the Boylan farm, and dying young.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. She had had a small stroke at some point. According to her daughter Clara who took care of her, she had a prolapsed uterus, from her four home childbirths. Her silver hair was apparently never cut, long and twisted up into a bun. The day she was taken to St. Francis hospital in Peoria, she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". Amazingly, the same day of her passing, in the same hospital, her daughter Clara's firstborn daughter Marjorie, gave birth to her first baby Philip Walker. Mary Anne kept asking from her hospital bed "Has Margie had that baby yet?" That same day, Clara's youngest Josephine, a 17 year old senior in highschool, had "played hooky" from The Academy of Our Lady girls' highschool with a friend, shopping in Peoria stores, and later in the day was shocked by the news of her grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances Wilhelm Holmes (4) and Clara Wilhelm Boylan (5), and her youngest son Clarence Wilhelm (6), and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed. In 2013, Clara's youngest granddaughter was discovered to have a 1% Hungarian Jewish ancestry in a DNA study. This Jewish ancestry very likely came through Mary Anne Thome's German lines, since her lineage is almost completely unknown.
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