Genetic Genealogy

Although my only planned book on the Wehners, Bier und Brot,* has long been completed and published, I still dabble in Wehner genealogy, while working on other, unfinished studies.

One thing that has remained undiscussed in these pages is the application of Genetic Genealogy (DNA studies) to the Wehners. There was little reason to do so as long as we stuck to descendants of the immigrant brothers Nicholas and Lorenz Wehner. Their history was, for the most part, quite straightforward. With no “brick walls” and relatively few puzzles, there was little or no doubt about descendancies and relationships. Reliable records were abundant. DNA testing was unnecessary

Nevertheless, my wife, Mary Frances (who is the Wehner descendant, not me), did take an autosomal DNA test several years back. The test was not to determine ethnicity, for which DNA is not all that accurate. From classical paper studies we knew that she was almost solely European (German and English), just like me. But we were curious whether DNA results might show relatives and branches we knew nothing about. One thing that surprised us was that her early matches included no claimed Wehner relatives. No, she was not adopted. It just turns our that Wehner descendants have had little interest in DNA studies, resulting in an absence of Wehner relatives to match with. With more and more people undergoing DNA studies, this has now changed.

Mary Frances now has Wehner descendant matches. She is a Wehner! And her matches confirm (or at least do not contradict) the contents of Bier und Brot. Of particular interest is that she shows a distant match to a descendant of Lorenz Wehner. Mary Frances, on the other hand, is descended from Nicholas Wehner. This lends credence to our conclusion that Lorenz and Nicholas were brothers, a conclusion based largely (but not quite solely) on a single newspaper article stating that in June 1884 Nicholas had visited his brother “Lawrence” in Pilot Knob, Missouri. And we found four matches for people in the Nicholas line, three of them descended from Nicholas’s oldest son, John George (always called just “George”). And one a close match to a second cousin. So it all fits.

Mary Frances also shows distant matches with three people descended from Johann Michael Wehner, born in Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, Germany in 1796, who immigrated to Boston in 1838. Was Johann related to Nicholas, who was born near Fulda, Hesse, Germany, 3 May 1825 and immigrated to Baltimore, arriving 31 May 1847? Perhaps, even probably. But autosomal testing includes so many ancestors (32 GGG grandparents for Mary Frances by the time one gets to Johann George and Flora (Müller) Wehner, parents of Nicholas and Lorenz), matches may occur because of non-Wehner connections. Nevertheless, it might be a starting point for an investigation of Wehner genealogy in Germany, something I have no intention of doing.

*There are no more paper copies of Bier und Brot available, but I am offering electronic copies free of charge. Just email me with information about who you are, and I will return the email with a digital copy attached

Old St. Vincent Church

Steamboats arriving at Cape Girardeau.

On 19 Jun 2017 aboard the Queen of the Mississippi, Mary Frances and I docked at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where one hundred seventy years earlier, in the fall of 1847, Mary Frances’s great great grandparents Nicholas Wehner and Clara Schneider ended their riverboat journey. Nicholas and Clara claimed to have been married there, but their 26 Dec 1847 marriage probably occurred in neighboring Scott County.

Marriage record for Lorenz and Flora.

It was, however, in Cape Girardeau that Nicholas’s brother Lorenz and his bride-to-be Flora, freshly arrived from Germany, were wed at St. Vincent de Paul Church 14 Sep 1848. A Latin record of the marriage of “Laurentius Wehner et Flora Grisner” is preserved in the parish archive.

Only known view of the original
St. Vincent de Paul Church
(courtesy of Ronald F. Kirby).

As part of our recent paddleboat trip, Mary Frances and I had hoped to see the church where her GG Granduncle was married, but such could not be. On 27 Nov 1850 a tornado had destroyed the original church. We did, however, get to tour the present 1853 structure. Ronald F. Kirby, an author of the 2009 book Old St. Vincent Church, was our guide.

Present day St. Vincent de Paul from
the Queen of the Mississippi (2017). 

Louisville and the "Falls of the Ohio"

Extensive locks and dams are found at Louisville today (2017).

As one heads downstream from Pittsburgh, the land on either bank becomes increasingly flat, from the mountains of West Virginia, to the hills of Ohio and Indiana, to the flatlands below Louisville, the great way station for early boating on the Ohio. At Louisville a series of rapids announce a drop of twenty-two feet over two miles, and it was precisely because of these rapids that Louisville was the major Ohio River city (excluding, of course, Pittsburgh), surpassing even Cincinnati. In the early days of steamboat travel, boats often stopped to wait, sometimes for weeks, for water to rise sufficiently to traverse the “Falls of the Ohio,” and even then pilots were required for larger boats. Passengers often portaged around the rapids, changing to a different vessel on the other side. Even after the Louisville and Portland Canal, bypassing the rapids, was dug in 1830, Louisville remained a major terminus and embarkation point for steamboat trips, a persisting role because the canal was too small for larger boats, because the locks were often closed to clean out mud and debris, and because many steamboat owners were unwilling to pay what they felt was an exorbitant fee for canal passage. Today, a complex system of locks and dams, through which Mary Frances and I traveled on our recent trip, allows boats to traverse the “Falls of the Ohio.”

Paddlewheelers still dock at Louisville today, but

these are used for day trips and dining (2017).

Louisville was a major stopping point for Nicholas and Clara on their trip to Cape Girardeau. Though this break could have been for a portage around the falls or to await a river rise, Louisville appears to have been an actual destination or, at least, a planned break. Nicholas may have been looking for work. And he may have had relatives there. For at the time, there were Wehners in Louisville.

Related or not to the local Wehners, Nicholas and Clara stayed in Louisville only a few months. In the fall of 1847 they continued on to Cape Girardeau.

Riverboat Journeys

Bier und Brot, The Wehners of Southeast Missouri has been published and future editions are not anticipated. But additional postings will appear here from time to time.

Our boat, Queen of the Mississippi, a diesel-powered

sternwheeler with no crates, barrels, or bales (2017).

Mary Frances and I just finished a paddlewheel boat trip from St. Louis, Missouri, down the Mississippi and up the Ohio to Pittsburgh, duplicating (except for St. Louis) in reverse, a journey made by Nicholas Wehner 170 years ago.

Today, Pittsburgh's Point State
Park marks the meeting of the
Allegheny and Monongahela (2017).

On 31 May 1847, 22-year-old “Nicolaus” Wehner, arrived in Baltimore on the Barque Virginia from Germany with a gun, two chests, and his bride to be, Clara Schneider. Nicholas and Clara traveled from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, where the Ohio River (“Gateway to the West”) begins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. From there they traveled 981 miles westward by boat to the Mississippi, and then 52 miles upriver to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. They journeyed by a steam-driven sidewheeler (rather than a diesel-driven sternwheeler used today), probably accompanied by caged chickens, barrels of lard, bags of coffee, bales of cotton, crates of cabbages, hogsheads of tobacco.

The next few postings continue with Nicholas and Clara's journey and its contrast with ours.

Book

I am making Bier und Brot available as pdf files by email for those requesting copies. You must be able to accept a 25 mb file. Contact me through my email at this blog.

Signing Off

I am going on to other family history projects and leaving the Wehners behind. I was planning to get rid of this site; however, the information posted thus far may be of interest to some. Right now I plan to post nothing more on the Wehner family. I do have, however, one problem that readers may be able to help me with. I have accumulated a large amount of files, records, and documents on the Wehners. I would like to pass these on or at least store them so that others can access them. Any ideas?

Bier und Brot

Today I shipped out the last copies of Bier und Brot, the Wehners of Southeast Missouri. I apologize to those who are still requesting copies. There are no more. I may start a list for a possible reprint, but right now I am hoping to avoid that since I am moving on to writing about other families.

I'll keep this Wehner site open for a couple of months and will then close it. My new activity is shown on http://tapscottfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the interest. It was much, much more than I had expected. I should have printed twice the number.