Why would anyone want to leave a beautiful, civilized little town like this?
Not sure, but like many of our son's ancestors, Augustus (referred to as August in the 1880 US Census) was a pioneer. He moved to Wisconsin in 1848, at about age 18. That was the same year Wisconsin became a state. He traveled west to California in 1851 and returned on muleback from San Diego four years later.
He started a family with Amalia Busch, from Hamburg, Germany, whose father's middle name was also August. They raised nine children, eight of which survived to adulthood, but sometime between 1873 and 1880, Amelia died. In 1880, there were still seven children living in the household, from age seven to 20. Augustus was a lawyer, by trade, and figures prominently in the early legal history of the state of Wisconsin.
Augustus Finkelnburg's Prussian blood represents only about 1.5% of our August's entire genetic pie chart, but I hope our son will have inherited a much larger share of the man's spirit. I'd have liked to have met Augustus Finkelnburg, the widower immigrant from Prussia who raised nine children. A man like that could teach you things!
Latest pie charts for August are below. This is after further research: not appreciably different, but hacking away at that "Unknown" slice. Note that Augustus Finkelnburg's Prussian 1.5% isn't the only Prussian contribution. There's some on my side as well, and anecdotally it's possibly that a large section of the Unknown pie slice will turn out to be Prussian.
More on other pioneering ancestors and still more namesakes in future!
Much of my information about Augustus Finkelnburg comes from this page.
Update from Mary's Dad, Dave Finkelnburg:
Waldron,
Regarding your blog post, my understanding is that AFF came to the US with his mother and two siblings as a result of the 1848 rebellion in Germany, in which his father had taken the wrong side, politically speaking, and was therefore convinced Germany was no longer a fit place to raise a family. This was, as I understand it, when he was mayor of Badgodesburg (I think that is the name), which is an old pre-Roman town (I've walked a portion of the Roman-era wall which at that time surrounded the town) upriver and west of Bonn not far from the Belgian border. Eventually, so the family story goes, the wife and one sibling returned to Germany to live. Thus two Finkelnburgs remained in the US, one as a judge near St. Louis. The other two carried on the family line in Germany. This is my recollection of what was told to me by my distant cousin Wolf-Dieter Finkelnburg as he guided us through the town the year Mary was a student in Paris.
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