Swiss Accounts

By Eilene Lyon

A Visit to Ancestral Homes

A couple of years before I did my DNA testing, The Putterer and I went on vacation to Switzerland, Strasbourg, and western Germany. We went to the German village, Heidelsheim, that my Springer family emigrated from in the 1800s. What I did not know at the time was that we also visited the home city of my Baumgartner ancestors: Bern, Switzerland.

I’ve only begun to research my Baumgartner line, but I’m so thrilled to have Swiss ancestry. I fell in love with the country, our four days in Lauterbrunnen being the highlight. We also stayed in Zurich, Luzerne, Lausanne, and Bern before heading to Strasbourg for a night, then on to Germany for a bike tour in the Moselle/Saar wine region.

The couple heading the immigrant family were Christian and Juliana (Berthoud) Baumgartner, my 4^th great-grandparents. I haven’t found a manifest to pinpoint when they arrived in America, and their offspring give varying dates. Most likely it was in the early 1850s. Christian probably came with the family, but it’s also possible he died in Europe and the rest of the family traveled without him.

They settled for a short time in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, which is where my 3^rd great-grandparents, Julia Elizabeth Baumgartner (known as Elizabeth or Eliza) and John Christian Arbogast, married in June 1853.¹ Around that time, Juliana and most of the other children relocated to Bureau County, Illinois. There, Elizabeth’s sister, Roseanna Baumgartner, married John’s brother, Louis Arbogast.² The Arbogasts hailed from the Alsace region of France, possibly Strasbourg.

Bureau County Connection

On my first “Dead Ancestor Tour” in 2012, I stopped in Bureau County and stayed with The Putterer’s cousin and wife. My husband has many ancestors buried in Bureau County (and this is where he was born). I also went to a cemetery there where my ancestor, John Self, a War of 1812 veteran, is buried. Or so I thought.

The DNA tests I had done (myself, both parents, an uncle), revealed that John Self is not my kin after all. But even after lopping off a huge branch of my family tree and grafting on a new one, it turned out I still had ancestors buried in Bureau County: the Baumgartners.

This is truly just a coincidence. The non-parental event (NPE) that drastically redesigned my pedigree chart took place at a much later time and in a different state. There is no connection between the Selfs and Baumgartners. But given the geographic proximity, I do have to wonder: are my husband and I more closely related than probable 12^th-15^th cousins?

I’ve never found any connection, though a surname here and there pops up on both trees. While researching the Baumgartner line, I did turn up a Baumgartner in Bureau County who married a Dremann in 1954.³ The Putterer’s aunt married a Dremann and his first cousins are Dremanns. That wouldn’t give us a genetic connection, but I could be tangentially related to those cousins.

A Bit More on the Baumgartners

I have innumerable tree branches stemming from Germany, but to my knowledge, only the Baumgartners hail from Switzerland. Christian and Juliana’s marriage appears to have taken place in France in 1833 at quite a distance from Bern. But it does appear Juliana was also born in Switzerland.⁴ All of their eight children were born in Bern.

Family trees on Ancestry suggest that Christian died in 1853 in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, but none have any records to back up the assertion. I have not found an 1860 census for Juliana, though she lived next to her son John in 1870, in Walnut, Bureau County.⁵ She died in Walnut on May 10, 1874 and is buried in the Red Oak Cemetery.⁶

My 3^rd great-grandparents, J. Elizabeth (Baumgartner) and John C. Arbogast settled first in Jersey County, Illinois, along the Mississippi.⁷ They relocated to northwestern Iowa sometime after trying a stint in South Dakota in the 1880s. They are both buried in Emmet County. John (d. 1896) was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), being a Union veteran of the war.⁸ Elizabeth died in her sleep in 1907 when she was 74, which came as a shock to her family.⁹

Elizabeth is believed to have had 15 or 16 children, which is flabbergasting! Especially since she was 47 when the last one came along. Can you imagine? I am descended from her oldest daughter, Louise Eliza (Arbogast) Schaaf who was born in Ohio in 1856.¹⁰

One big mystery to resolve is what happened to Christian Baumgartner (b. 1799). Did he come to America and die in Ohio in 1853? I also want to know: when/where/how did the family immigrate, and most important, why?

Feature image: A bucolic Swiss scene.