Radical Henslers

It's been frustrating doing research on our great x2 grandmother, Dorothea Hensler. Both she and her sister, Marie, who came over on the same boat in 1858, are thoroughly documented, along with their husbands and children, in the Brandenburg, Prussia Emigration Records, the Hamburg Passenger Lists, and in the U.S. Customs Manifests in New York. Maybe I should be satisfied with that and let it go. After all, that's as far as I got with Johann. But Dorothea is different.

Clara Friedrich-Taylor (Dorothea's daughter and our great aunt) said her grandmother, the mother of Dorothea and Maria, was "Maria Marge" and that she died in Beaver Dam on "February 15th, 1885". You'd think that with that amount of specificity, it would be an easy task to find her. I always assumed that the other Henslers were sent for after Dorothea's and Marie's husbands had accumulated enough to pay their passage. But census data for all the other Henslers in Dodge County has them mostly arriving earlier, with that first wave of German refugees from the revolutions of 1848. And what's more, they all seem to have emigrated from other parts of Germany, those parts most affected by the revolutions and far from the rather placid East Brandenburg where our ancestors originated.

So now I'm thinking that the Friedrichs and the Henslers were on opposite sides of the revolution, and that Dorothea and Maria fled to East Brandenburg with their (titled and upperclass) husbands while their (untitled and lower class) family members fled to America. This makes sense; Clara believed the Friedrichs were of the Prussian nobility (likely the Junker class, a less auspicious class of small landowners) and that there was French blood in the family. Clara also tells us that Johann emigrated when his father remarried and left him out of the inheritance. Marie's husband, Christian Reichert, was probably in a similar situation, and both were faced with the only two options open to the younger sons of nobles: a civil service position, or a post in the military. They took the third option, and I'm grateful to them. The Junker class of eastern Prussia was notoriously militant. They fought on the wrong side (and the very wrong side) of two world wars. And, when it was all over, the Russians came in, sent them off to internment camps and plundered their estates.

Maybe the reason I can't connect the other Henslers in Dodge County to Dorothea and Marie is because, as far as the family was concerned, those connections had long been severed.