My Sixteen: Ries, Moeller, Harger & Parker
In our budding community here on Substack, genealogists (and amateur family historians like me) have been sharing the stories of our sixteen 2x great-grandparents as a way to kickstart connections.
I’ve been smitten by the stories of “My Sixteens,” including Tad’s Mightier Acorns post that started it all. I’m in debt to ’s post turned it into as a group effort, ’s encouragement through her GenStack series, and all of you who’ve shared your sixteens. In my first rendition, I shared a list with names and dates as a Substack Note. That ticket gave me entry into the tent but after reading ’ My Sixteen post, I found another hook was pulled into another rabbit hole.
In this budding genealogy community, we share a language and (for the most part) an age cohort. That has meant that these “My Sixteen” posts1 generally reflect the mid-nineteenth century across the Anglophone world.
In sharing your stories, you shared personal views of places and times I’d only ever read about in history books. Now, I have a connection to people who were there at the time. You took me into homes in the north of England during the Industrial Revolution, along with harrowing voyages to Australia and into the covered wagon trains that crossed the American prairies.
It’s been quite a ride. Now it’s my turn to double back on the list of sixteen I posted earlier as a Note.2 This time, I’ll add what I know about the times in which they lived.
The maternal side of my family came mainly from England in the mid-17th century as part of the English Great Migration. My favorite exception was George Ross, a Scot captured in the battle of Dunbar by the English and hauled to America as an indentured servant in Connecticut. His grandson fought in the American Revolution, and two hundred years later, in the mid-19th century, his descendants moved west to homesteads in Ohio, Indiana, and Kansas.
The paternal side of my family came almost entirely from Germanic Europe. My great-grandfather Paulus Ries and his wife Sophia Catharina Caroline Clasen immigrated to the US from Switzerland in the mid-19th century. I don’t have many of their stories—yet.
Maternal side
My grandmother, Lois Blanche Harger, documented her side of the family in an extraordinary family history book she self-published in 1948, Harger & Allied Families. There were just 100 copies printed, each one numbered with little hand-written corrections. Though none of the sources for her stories are cited, I’ve found the details very helpful. It’s like a treasure map — in prose form. A few years ago, I abridged the book to remove the chapter about living relatives and posted it to the Internet Archive. It is a fabulous resource for these family history books, by the way.
I now know my maternal grandmother, her mother, and her mother-in-law were members of the DAR, an American lineage society3 of the Revolutionary War. I’m guessing they all contributed notes to this book. I’m leaning heavily on my grandmother’s stories to summarize details here.
Isaac Parker 1923-1902
Hannah Mariah Newby 1825-1903
These two families hooked me and pulled me down the family history rabbit hole. Their eight great-grandparents take my family deep into my fully-documented Quaker ancestors in early American history, including the Parker, Newby, Coffin, and Dicks families. Generations earlier, their families had retreated from New England into the dismal swamps of the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina as practicing Quakers. I have many more stories and generational details as these families migrated in the early 18th century from North Carolina through Ohio to Indiana. My grandfather Parker’s family moved from Indiana to Jackson County, Missouri, to better manage asthma (an inheritance many of us share.)
Ezekiel Ross Jaques 1841-1913
Mary Evelyn Sering 1809-1916
The Jaques family was Huguenot. They left France for England and, by 1639, had sailed to America and settled in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Ezekiel Jaques was likely named for his maternal great-grandfather, Ezekiel Ross, who was also a Revolutionary War veteran.4 His wife, Mary Evelyn Sering, was the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of two other Revolutionary War veterans, John Tharp and Seth Mahurin. This may have given them a buzz for lineage societies at the centennial of the American Revolution. I now wonder if Ross Jaques had separately applied for the SAR. That would provide some context because it does seem uncharacteristically prideful. I believe to have been a very pious family.
The photos on the wall in the photo above have always been a curiosity. I assume the ovals over the mantel are portraits of their six daughters and one son. The larger portrait on their left might be of their daughter Lotta, who died of diphtheria at 14 in 1893, though I don’t know for sure. I haven’t found any other photographs of her. Ezekiel Ross moved from Ohio to settle in Indiana, and Mary Evelyn moved from one part of Indiana to another when they married. They raised their family in Thorntown, Boone County, Indiana.
I owe their eldest daughter, my great-grandmother Emma Elizabeth (“Lizzy”) Jaques, a debt of thanks for her work collecting our family history. In 1884, at 19, she started a family history scrapbook, collecting obituaries and stories about ancestors, friends, and family. Lizzy’s older sister, Susan, died when she was just two. It was the same year Lizzy was born. Heartbreaking for a young mother.
Henry Milton Harger 1840-1896
Martha Margaret Densmore 1842-1917
Martha and Henry were among the many homesteaders moving to the American prairie from the northeast. In the 1830s, Henry’s father, Milton, bought a farm and started a homestead in Phelps, New York. From Seneca Falls, New York, Martha married and joined Henry in Phelps, where their sons, Charles, Harry, and Milton, were born. In 1879, when Henry and his wife were nearly 40 and their sons were in their teens, the family packed up and moved west to a new homestead in central Kansas. I’d love to know more about what motivated them to move.
My grandmother’s book tells us that the Harger farm failed after that first year, and soon, the family moved into the nearby town of Abilene, Kansas. Henry started work in local offices, ultimately moving into real estate. His sons took odd jobs to help the family. After a brief stint as a school teacher, his eldest, Charles, worked to become the editor at the Abilene Reflector Chronicle, a role that he retained until the 1950s.
I’m still on the hunt for photos of my Bradshaw family ancestors.
John Warwick Bradshaw 1842-1924
Celena Pearson 1848-1935
The Bradshaw family moved west earlier than my other ancestors. According to my grandmother’s book, the Bradshaw family came from England to Virginia in 1760. John’s great-grandfather (also John) served as a scout in the Revolutionary War. In 1800, his great-grandfather moved the family west to Huntersville (now West Virginia). John was very young when, in 1845, his mother died. His father, Robert, moved the family and John’s grandparents to Albany, Ohio. John was 16 when the Civil War broke out, and he enlisted in the Ohio Volunteers56. He served four years in the Union Army, suffering wounds that affected the use of one arm. After the war, he married Celina “Lena” Pearson in 1866. Her father came from England, and her mother’s family came from England and Ireland. I have more work to do to research her family.
John and Lena’s story reads like an old Western. From Albany, Ohio, they migrated with friends first to Wisconsin, where their eldest son, Charles, was born in 1867. While Charles was still a baby, they traveled overland in a covered wagon train to Nebraska. They paused for a few years in Pawnee County, Nebraska, where Blanche was born. They then continued to Kansas, settling on a farm near Clyde, Kansas, before settling in Hope, Kansas, to run a store serving farmers. My great-grandmother, Blanche, met Charles and moved to Abilene once they married.
Paternal side
My records here are embarrassingly sketchy. I have names and family trees passed down by my father, corroborating what I’ve found on FamilySearch.org. I plan to return to these to collect more records and investigate their stories.
From what I know, these are classic American tales of hardship in Europe and immigration to America. Everyone was born in Europe (Switzerland, Prussia, and Germany). They all passed away in America (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Indiana.)
Paul Ries 1822-deceased
Christiane Durst 1825-deceased
Christian Friederich Christoph Clasen 1823-1902
Maria Hanna Sophia Martens 1823-1891
Johann Friedrich Moeller 1836-1906
Maria Eleonore Johann-Schröder 1842-1909
Christoph Friedrich Christian Reinker 1846-1922
Anna Marie Wiecke 1943-1926
Final thoughts
As many of you will know from other stories I’ve shared, I grew up largely overseas and far from any grandparents or cousins. My family history was both literally and figuratively boxed up and archived.7 That’s one of my primary motivations in this research. As with many families, ours had its share of secrets. Peeling them back has helped me better understand the interests and motivations of those closest to me.
If you find a connection to any of these ancestors, I’d love to hear your stories. I’m happy to share what I know and look forward to learning from you. Reach out to me in the comments, in a DM, or through the
.My focus for the community is encouraging everyone to share their stories in whatever form they can. Creative storytelling, from videos to recipes, can create the hook to bring another generation down the rabbit hole.
That’s what we’re all after, right?
By the way, here's a nerd tip: Did you see what I did there? That’s a link to a Google search that pulls up posts based on SEO, including the words “My Sixteen.” If you want to find other posts using “My Sixteen” references, use Google search. It works well if the posts include those words in the title or description.
We’ve deduced that Substack currently uses Notes posts in its algorithms to decide what else you want to see, but it doesn’t push them out to the open web with any useful SEO. This is one reason I’ve realized I should create a post instead of just the note I’d previously created. Does that make sense? I discuss these nit-noid details about Substack in the MissionGenealogy.org Office Hours sessions I host each month. Join us! MissionGenealogy.org/events.
Interestingly, it was a little more than a celebration. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) was founded in rebellion for being kept out of the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR.) That story appeals to me.
My grandmother’s book links that story to a connection to Betsy (Griscomb) Ross, though pretty clearly, that’s in error for two reasons. While it’s true that Ezekiel Ross had a brother, none of them are documented as John. It’s also true that John Ross, Betsy’s husband, had one brother. He was named for his father, Rev. Aeneas Ross. Not our guy.
Or, so it is said, I can’t find documentation in Ohio regimental records.
Update to footnote 5 based on feedback from : John W. Bradshaw enlisted on 8 Jul 1861 as a Private in West Virginia (not Ohio) in Company D of the 4th Infantry. He mustered out on 10 Dec 1864 as a Sergent, transferred. (I’m not sure what that means yet. Citation: Historical Data Systems, Inc.; Duxbury, MA 02331; American Civil War Research Database) Still in the queue to do is, as Mightier suggests, review pension documents at the NARA (gulp, now at $80). This history of West Virginia in the Civil War shows their detailed movements between 1861 and 1864.
My cousins have generously shared the artifacts and records they’ve located. Many are still missing, though we’ve identified a possible source of records in a cousin’s attic I hope to explore someday. I’ve built a separate personal archive and a private newsletter channel using Substack to reciprocate. More about that in my “Private Podcasting” project recipe.
I love this! I'm late to the "My Sixteen" party, but I'm on board. And I have Newby ancestors in North Carolina!
I love the mention of scrapbooks and other items created and saved by ancestors. We owe them a debt for collating the information we base our current research upon (and a lot of thanks!) I like the idea there have been other people in my tree before me who were also interested in our shared ancestors.