Free Mennonite Family History Articles

Sam and Anna B. (Claudon) King. John König/King was born in 1832 in Baden, Germany, and his wife Lydia (Troyer) King was born September 8, 1834, in Licking County, Ohio. (The word for “king” in German is “König.”) It was one of the families of Canton Bern, Switzerland, who traveled a familiar path to Alsace, Bavaria, and Illinois, over a 300-year span.John King and Lydia Troyer were married about 1854 in McLean County, Illinois. John King’s parents should be Christian (b. ca1804) and Phoebe (Barnet/Barnard) King. They came from Baden, Germany, to Ohio, and then in 1850 moved to Dry...

The Augsburger Orphan Trail: Seventeen Minor Children Lost From Two Generations by Mary Ann Augsburger Kristiansen Originally published in the April 2016 issue of Mennonite Family History Where does one start on this path? A good place to begin is in Sainte Marie-aux-Mines near the city of Strasbourg, Alsace (a province of France). Sainte Marie is a beautiful mining town in the mountains, named after a historical church. The year is 1839. It is a cold December day and a young Swiss Anabaptist woman is in a hospital giving birth to a baby. Her name is Magdalena. She was born...

Originally published in the January 2016 issue of Mennonite Family History     Before temperance and abstinence, whiskey was the common drink. Wealthy people drank wine, while the lower classes drank rum which is a whiskey made from sugar cane. The use of grain was the expertise of the Scot-Irish that made whiskey cheaper and more available.    Among the earliest immigrants in the 1600s and early 1700s, making distilled liquor was common. This was quite as legitimate an enterprise as milling. There was so much whiskey produced that in 1684 a tax was imposed, but was not used.    Distillers sprang up...