Thanks to whatever organization has been scanning City Directories, some new facts have helped to trace Paul during that 20-year span between censuses (well, between censuses which didn’t get burned).
On ancestry.com now, a simple search for “Paul Pierce DeVeny” reveals the following:

* A scan of The Herald’s Directory to Mansfield and Richland County, Ohio, 1884-5 shows listings for
>>> Deveny, Paul  blacksmith  S Parker  h. Shiloh   and
>>> Parker & Deveny (Samuel Parker, Paul Deveny) mfrs shifting rails  cor Plymouth and High.

Both items above are within the “Plymouth Directory” section. In the first listing, I’m not sure about “h. Shiloh.” Other nearby listings make me think it’s Shiloh Street, but no such street seems to exist today. Possibly he lives in the village of Shiloh SE of Plymouth.  In Plymouth, there actually IS a Plymouth St. and it still intersects High St. not far from the center of town. Obviously they are trying to put their patent to good use.

* A scan of The Mews Printing Company’s Mansfield and Richland County Directory 1891 shows
>>> Deveny, Paul  blacksmith  Platt Carriage Co.  bds Keller House, and
>>> The Platt Carriage Company cor Surry and Newman

These are in Mansfield city proper. Surry and Newman almost intersect nowadays… but not quite. A stream or river keeps them apart. Why Paul is boarding at the Keller House is unknown to me. His family has a number of kids at this point. One guess is that the family is up in Plymouth or Shiloh and he spends the work-week in Mansfield. By Grama Hazel’s birthdate of 25 May 1892, the family has relocated to Bellefonte, Ohio, so Paul’s time in Mansfield and Richland County is almost over in 1891.

Thanks to cousin Pat Moir for finding the following:
US Patent #280660 was awarded to Samuel R. Parker and Paul P. DeVeny on Jul 3, 1883 for a “Shifting-Rail for Buggy-Seats.”

The images are available on the website of the US patent office.

This suggests that he might have been back in Plymounth, OH in 1883 or so. In the 1880 Census his family was in Cleveland. By 1893 he was in Bellefontaine, OH.

There’s no evidence (yet) that this invention went any further. As we saw at an “inventor’s” meeting a friend dragged me to a decade ago, tons of people had patents but few ever “got” anything from them at all.

A few days ago my wife & I traveled to Indiana, just southwest of Cincinnati, Ohio. I dropped Kris off for a session at the casino while I went to the nice new Genealogy Room at the public library… paid for, somewhat, by the same casino.

No stunning new facts were unearthed this time. This post is to summarize what I did learn.

A number of documents delved deeply into the Willman(n) families. For all I know, they are related to my Maria Ilsbe Willmann Metting who was on the (famous in my mind) boat Marianne in 1843. Nothing shows a specific connection, but Maria was buried in Farmers Retreat. One extensive family tree [found at this library] begins with a Christian Wilhelm Willman, born in 1770, who immigrated from Bonn Germany in 1785 with his parents. Maria was born in about 1779, so they might have been siblings or cousins but I suspect they came from different regions.

The Willman info was compiled by a Jack R. McGuire, Sr. of Cincinnati (as of 1995). McGuire is a family name of mine, but with nothing to do with Farmers Retreat stuff. So why, among the many pages of Willman genealogy, was there a picture labeled “Frank Snow and Ethel Marie Willman” which was taken in Sabina, Ohio!? [My McGuires were a big part of Sabina Ohio in the 1880s.] If Jack is still with us and able to be contacted, I’ll have to ask.

The church records were what I had hoped for, although there is absolutely no trace of the 3 siblings I was looking for, i.e., the Bussdickers traveling as Mettings.

Included in the burials at St. John’s Lutheran Church were:

John Henry Metting, died 22 Jul 1844, age 41+

John Henry Metting (son), died 22 Jul 1844

John Henry Metting, born 1814, died 30 Jun 1846

Marie Metting, died 19 Feb 1853 at age 73+

along with Lickings, and Kuhlmans.

Many marriages, Baptisms, and confirmations were listed which involves the key families, but none of the results looked especially promising.

A History of Dearborn & Ohio Counties, IN mentions a Mart Matting as an early member of the church.

I did read another interpretation of the name “Farmers Retreat.” This one had to do with earlier settlers. A very early settler was named James McGuire and he has built a blockhouse on his land. According to this story, nearby settlers would race to this blockhouse when Indians were “on the warpath.” Hence the Farmers’ Retreat. The other story was Civil War base, so eventually I’ll find out just WHEN they began using this name instead of Opptown.

Thanks to the librarian/genealogist Joyce Baer, I found a 1860 map of Cesar Creek in Dearborn County, IN. Various pieces of property were owned by Kuhlmans and Lickings and one farm was owned by J. Metting. The land wrapped right around St. John’s Church! He was, I think, named Johann/John. Ms. Baer reminded me (if I ever knew) that in order to buy land at the Cincinnati Land Office, you had to be a citizen. So the German immigrants shown on the map had to have become naturalized. A Henry Metting “declared” in 1838 — i.e., stated his intention to become a citizen, and he did become a citizen in 1845. So he was not one the Marianne with my 25 relatives. I wonder if he handed the property down to a son named Johann.

It looks like I “need” to get to Newport, KY if I want to fill in the years 1843-1855 for Henry Mathias Bussdicker and his siblings. A cousin in MN has found a very intriguing 1850 Census record for Cincinnati proper which just might reveal the location of Henry Mathias’s siblings when he was with his (possible/probable) step-mother and Myres, the tailor. I had seen the record years ago, but it included a William Boozdegger (maybe my favorite crazy spelling) which didn’t seem useful. Lo & behold, there’s a Mary Busdicker in the household too… living with a tavernkeeper named Phola. Pretty intriguing stuff.

The ship which sailed from Bremen and arrived in Baltimore on 25 Sep 1843 carried an amazing number of my relatives. The ship’s passenger list is available on ancestry.com and a distant cousin named Nancy Cutter of Washington Courthouse, OH provided much valuable information about the people who ended up in a little village of Farmers Retreat, IN, just west of Cincinnati, OH.

On board were Willmans, Lückings, Mettings, and Kuhlmanns (and, of course, 3 Bussdicker siblings traveling under their uncle’s surname — their Mom’s maiden name). Twenty-five people that I know of. A mass of Moms and Dads and uncles and aunts and cousins. And many ended up in Indiana. Some were in Newport, KY for a while.

Nancy Cutter (Koetter) has traced many of their lives through records of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Farmers Retreat. Suddenly I find 1000 new cousins! Well, she edited out living individuals to respect their privacy, but the potential is there.

Among the many fascinating facts is the death date of the 3 siblings’ uncle Johann Heinrich Mathias Metting. Apparently he lived only a short while after they arrived — until 22 Jul 1844. This means that my theory of his wife (married name Marie Metting) would be free to remarry W. H. Myres, the tailor, taking one of the Bussdicker brother s to live with her there. The uncle died in Farmers Retreat, Dearborn County, Indiana.

So, I’ve been working FORWARD in time on the descendants of Henry Mathias Bussdicker and Margaret Maess. As I suppose I’ve said many times, forward is weirdly different.

On ancestry.com, I was looking for details about the birth of Henry M., Jr. and they had a great copy of the Campbell County, KY birth records. They sent me to a certain page and I looked and looked and could not see it.

BUT I saw the damnedest thing: a birth of Catherine M. Myer on 22 Sep 1857 to H. W. Myer and M. M. Matting. One of the brothers who arrived in 1843 was living with a “Taylor” named H. W. Myres in Newport. The 14-yr-old kid was listed as Henry Beshdigger… the second-coolest misspelling so far, IMHO. And “Matting” … well that sure sounds close to the Mettings who escorted the 3 siblings to America!

So I ran back to the 1850 census for the H. W. Myres family and, lo & behold, there was a Mary, listed just below H. W. along with 2 kids, Henry 3 and Eliza 2, and, apparently, Mr. Myres’s mom, Mary. Plus Henry Beshdigger… could he be my Henry who was really age 18? Note: by 1860, all of this family’s ages got really weird, so maybe they were messin’ with the census enumerator.]

But on the passenger list — which I also hurried to revisit — Mathias Metting was age 40 and listed next was Mary Metting, age 25. I thought she was his wife, although it only labels her as “Women.” It appears that Mathias Metting died in 1844 in Farmers Retreat, so she would’ve been free to marry again. Yet she’s buried (ca 1896) back in Farmers Retreat.

Amazing! And, after one last look at this page of Newport births, I did indeed find Henry M. Busdecker (hard to tell what spelling they were shooting for though) born 10 Aug 1857 to Henry M. Bussdicker and Margaret Me*s where the * is actually the long, tall, script S used in German. They indexed her as “Mess.” Six slots away in this record book! I wonder why.

As I say in every 3rd post, my interest in genealogy has been digging further & further back in time. My focus has been 90% on following the bloodlines/pedigrees back as far as I’m able.

In the past few days I’ve switched gears. Similar to Cousin Pat Moir’s big project of finding as many descendants of John DeVeny and Anna Wolgemuth [including me], I’ve picked a pair of my ancestors which I’ve been exploring lately. And I’m apparently going to see how far forward in time I can take them. They are Henry Mathias Bussdicker and Catherin Margaret Maess.

Why them? Maybe because someone (possibly cousin Harriet Bussdicker Burris out in CA) gave Mom that great photo of Henry M. and Margaret which included all of their children who didn’t die early.The picture is here in my blogsite somewhere. So the project becomes finding THEIR descendants. Or maybe the timing was right (psychologically) for me because — unexpectedly — I’ve found both of the ships they arrived on in the mid-1800s. Or maybe because I continue to try to correct the many crazy Family Trees done early on (early in the history of the internet, I mean) with information I’m very certain of. Some of these folks have even publically slammed the BUSSDICKER “misspelling” in the past. Sheesh!

That spelling has at least been used consistently by the descendants I’m looking for. I guess it’s fully natural to keep on keepiong on, spelling-wise. It happened with Pat’s pair: when WOLGEMUTH is seen in a document, etc. (in America) it virtually always refers to the family members who were in Dillsburg, Pa and thereabouts… and their descendants. Searches done demanding exact spelling can just about always be relevant and interesting. BUSSDICKER works the same way.

Oh! Of course. One more reason for choosing my two ancestors is that their shared surname is not at all common. Doing this for “David Gray” would be maddening.

To me the downside of working forward in time is that many people do not want their data splashed all over the internet. I fully understand that concern. So this works against my urge to write Cousin Jane Doe in Ypsilanti asking for all the details about every Bussdicker descendant she knows of. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

But at the moment, there are masses of facts and people that I don’t know yet. Even without flirting with security issues with “live” cousins.

The ship’s list posted last time, when enlarged, shows a fairly clear umlaut (double dot) symbol over the “a” in Mäʃs. I hadn’t seen it before. At first I thought it was just a  flaw in the copy of a microfilm. This helps explain why Margaret did not use “Mass” in English. Family members who didn’t choose Margaret’s “Maess” spelling tended toward Mace, Maes, or even Mays… always preserving the long-A sound. One more tiny little clue.

Margaret is the single hold-out among my great-great-grandparents. She refuses to reveal her parentage to me. So far. In June of this year, I did learn about her arrival in the U.S. The ship was the “Olbers” and it left Bremen and arrived in New Orleans [the same general route the Rudy family used] on 26 Oct 1852. She’s shown in line 254. Notice the spelling of her surname. It’s precisely the way it’s spelled on her marriage document. And translating into English has left the Maesses with dozens of spellings. She’s as listed as an 18-year-old maid-servant. Nothing insists that she’s traveling with the family listed near her, but I noted the name Kuhlmann on the line below hers. Someday that name is going to cause her to meet her husband. There were many Kuhlmanns and their relatives on board Henry Mathias’s ship in 1843. And they were all headed to Cincinnati and/or the suburb, Farmer’s Retreat, Indiana. Somehow, whether in Newport, KY or in Indiana, Henry Mathias Bussdicker met Margaret Maess and I’ll bet Kuhlmanns were involved. Stay tuned.

That ship’s list also introduced me to the name Catherin ( for her). It might help explain how her granddaughter and other female descendants got that name!  Oops! I discovered the name long ago & it slipped my mind.

I’ve just added a couple of pages. One is called “Royalty! Really?” and it contains (in PDF form) a little article I wrote for interested relatives. A second page called “Jeff’s Royals” is a PDF of an Excel file which summarizes quite a few of my probable ancestors who are somewhat famous. In other words, these are the folks I’m currently obsessing about. I cannot quit feeling that since they are my father’s mother’s mother’s ….. that I should know as much as I can about them. It’s starting to feel like the ancestor worship I hear about around the world.

Do a Search for “Royalty! Really?” or “Jeff’s Royals” (but without the quotation marks) to find them.

In July of 2011 I found some fascinating records which answer a few mysteries of my ancestral tree (pedigree). Except when quoting specific sources, I will use the spelling favored by my ancestor who came to America in 1843, namely Henry Mathias Bussdicker. The Dayton, Ohio-based Bussdickers have consistently used this spelling ever after. Also, I will use “Germany” to mean “areas which would now lie within modern Germany.”

More or less in chronological order, here are some recent discoveries.

Bussdickers from MN (and others) who descend from the brother of ”my” Henry Mathias Bussdicker have a family story which gives the name Amalia Dorn to the German mother of these brothers. All attempts (that I have heard of) to pursue her ancestors have failed. But this seems to be the popular theory in family trees appearing on the internet.

In 2005, I hired a German genealogist to track down the ancestors of Henry Mathias Bussdicker.  The genealogist’s name is Jens Th. Kaufmann and he operates out of Braunschwieg. He eventually found exactly what I was hoping for within the Records Office of the Lutheran Church in Hannover.

He sent photocopies and translations of the following:

1. A marriage record for Buschdiecker-Theves in Buer, 3 May 1798
2. A baptismal record for Johann Friedrich Buschdiecker in Buer, 18 Mar 1805
3. A baptismal record for Catherina Elisabeth Metting: Born in Wetter, 10 Nov 1807; Baptized in Buer, 15 Nov 1807

4. A marriage record for Buschdiecker-Metting in Buer, 22 Apr 1830
5. A baptismal record for Christian Heinrich Bussdiecker in Buer, 12 Dec 1830
6. A birth + baptismal record for Heinrich Matthias Bussdiecker: Born in Buer, 25 Nov 1832; Baptized in Buer, 28 Nov 1832

7. A birth + baptismal record for Maria Ilsabe Busdiecker:Born in Wetter, 1 May 1835; Baptized in Buer, 10 May 1835

The last 3 records listed the parents as #2 and #3 above ( whose marriage is line #4).

Also, the last 3 records include a column for god-parents.

Christian Heinrich’s godfather was Christian Heinrich (unreadable surname)

Heinrich Matthias’s godfather was Heinrich Matthias Metting.

Maria Ilsabe’s godmother was Maria Ilsabe Metting.

Kaufmann speculated that the father, Johann Friedrich, emigrated to the U.S. in 1835. He agreed with speculation on the busdkr.net website that the three siblings might have emigrated in 1839 after the death of their mother. Yet he could find no record of such a death. So a lot of details were filled in, but nothing was known about the mother’s demise (?) or about the immigration to the U.S. of the three siblings. The father seems to have arrived, but where were his children?

From time to time, I pick a not-very-common name from my Ancestor Tree and do a Google search on that name. I DO NOT try this with an ancestor named ‘David Gray” for example. Way too many hits. But in July 2011, I tried this with the name “Jürgen Florenz Metting” who is the father named in Catherina Elisabeth’s birth record.

The first few Google results referred to my own ancestree.wordpress.com genealogy blog. But then, amazingly to me, the next site was http://www.buer-us.de/ — a website devoted to the Buer area in Germany… and detailing how former residents emigrated to the U.S. And because the search was specifically for Jürgen, it took me right to a listing of a family which emigrated from Germany to the U.S. The ship “Marianne” sailed from Bremen to Baltimore, arriving on 25 Sep 1843.

This family was destined for “Cincinnaty.” Between the ship’s passenger list (found on ancestry.com) and the listing on the buer-us.de website, the family consisted of:

Johann Heinrich Matthias Metting,a farmer  born 2 Apr 1805 in Wetter

(whose father Jürgen Florenz Metting was deceased)

His mother Marie Ilsabe Metting (born Willmann in 1779)

His wife, Marie Elisabeth Lücking, born 28 Jul 1818 in Wetter

His child, Matthias Metting, born ca. 1841 in Buer

And his “relatives”:

Margaret Metting, born ca 1821

Henry Metting, born ca 1830

Martin Metting, born ca. 1832, and

Marie Metting, born about 1835

By the way, the website mentioned numerous times that “Martin” was a common translation for “Matthias” – something I had never heard before.

By virtue of having the same pair of parents, JHMM was the brother of the three siblings’ mother. It does seem that she has died. Or at least she is not on this ship’s list. The person making the ship’s list simply kept using ditto marks for the surname, so maybe this was not an attempt to hide anything.

I assume this uncle is the “Henry Matthias Metting” who is explicitly listed in the birth record as Henry Matthias Busdiecker’s god-parent. I’m guessing that both boys greatly valued their uncle. The elder brother seems to have used the name Henry Matthias at some times.

As an added bonus (since my genealogy is mostly about my direct ancestors), Johann’s mother – being also the mother of Catherina Elisabeth Metting – is a direct ancestor of mine… and she came to the U.S. at the age of 64; something I had never imagined.  Some or all of these people headed for Farmers Retreat, Dearborn County, Indiana, a place I had never heard of before.

A 1909 obituary of our Daytonian Henry Matthias Bussdicker talks about his parents dying but being well taken care of, and educated, by family members. Whether this occurred in Indiana or in Newport, KY where he was married in 1855, I don’t know. The sister Marie Ilsabe married Christian Henry Book in Indiana and hard a large family which included a famous psychologist and author, William Frederick Book [1873-1940].  A simple Google search can turn up many references, quotations, etc. I have seen no facts supporting another marriage to a Mr. Bleecher, as is reported in some family trees.

One last thing: Dayton’s Henry Matthias married a Margaret Maess in Newport, KY in 1855. She was recently found in a ship’s list arriving in New Orleans (from Bremen) in 1852 and destined for Cincinnati. She was a “maid-servant” and it was not clear what family she was traveling with. Nearby on the list was a Kuhlmann family. Just today, on that same http://www.buer-us.de/ website, I saw that another Metting came to the U.S. in 1842 and eventually died in 1846 in Farmers Retreat, Indiana during a visit to his brother Ernst Kuhlmann. Very intriguing! Genealogy never stops! Each answer is accompanied by many new questions.