Finding Adolph Truskey

Adolph Truskey is an ancestor of the descendants of John Peter Brenner and Caroline Dorethea Wegner. Adolph Truskey (1830-1950) is my second great grandfather. In my mother’s family I have back to an 11th great grandfather, Antoine Tibault (1593-1639). Even the Brenner/Klamm tree goes back to a 7th great grandfather. But with the Truskeys we were stuck.

Nor could I find anyone else who knew any more about our Truskeys than we did. Trees all ended with Adolph and Gustave. Searches came up empty for all of us, everywhere. Until this week.

It all broke when I found a Troschke family with names of their children very much like our Truskey names. Fortunately, they had documented their tree and when I went to the website where they found their records and searched for Adolph, there was his birth record! Then his father’s death record. With the help of a couple of translations on a German genealogy facebook group and a link to a German genealogy website from the person who did the translation for me, we now have quite a history for the Truskeys!

So until this week we knew almost nothing about the Truskeys. According to Carolina Renner (see snippet above), Adolph was from Birnbaum, Posen Province, West Prussia and his wife from Greisenberg, Naugard, Pommern, Prussia. She had his mother’s maiden name as Stenchal. Adolph married in America. Adolph had what we assumed to be a brother in this country also: Gustave Truskey. We are not sure when they immigrated because Adolph and his brother gave varying dates… They were first found in Illinois and married and had their first children there, but had farms in Kansas near Kansas City by 1870.

We now know the parents of Adolph and Gustave. Adolph was born in Stricher Stampfmühle, Birnbaum, Posen Province, West Prussia (now in Poland). His father was Johann Gottlob Erdmann Troschke and his mother was Ernestine Wilhelmine Stenzel. We also have names for their fathers. We still know nothing more about Adolph’s wife Caroline Dorethea Wegner (or Wagner).

The history of Birnbaum, Province Posen, Prussia is too complicated to summarize (see for further reading below), but according to the Prussian census of 1860, it had a population of 45,425, of which 34,608 (76.2%) were Germans and 10,817 (23.8%) were Poles. The Germans were mostly Protestant and the Poles mostly Catholic.

The Troschke family owned a water-powered stampfmühle or stamp mill in Stricher Stampfmühle. According to Wikipedia, “A stamp mill (or stamp battery or stamping mill) is a type of mill machine that crushes material by pounding rather than grinding, either for further processing or for extraction of metallic ores.” Stamp mills can also be used for grain or flax or hemp, but we don’t know what they were milling. We also don’t know how large this stamp mill was… So I’m showing a photo of a water-powered stamp mill that was made to crush ore. Stamp mills had been used to crush grain and other things for hundreds of years.

Adolph’s father Erdmann died at the age of 35 when Adolph was only 6 and Gustav was 1. It turns out that it is very hard on your lungs to be a miller. Adolph’s grandfather also died fairly young, before Erdmann was married. Erdmann’s death left his young wife Ernestine with her three children and possibly a daughter from Erdmann’s first wife. She married again before the end of the year, to another miller, a young fellow, even a bit younger than she. So we assume they continued to operate the mill, but of course we don’t know the details.

Further reading:

• What is Prussia? Understanding Prussian History
• Kreis Birnbaum
• Province of Posen
• Stamp mill (Wikipedia)
• The Single Most Important Tool Used in the Gold Mines