Hacking through the Camp/Gehner Farm Cemetery

Note: This post isn't related (at least by blood) to any of the families.  It is however related by land; the descendents of Henry Gehner, Jr.  will know at least part of the story of the cemetery out in the pasture on the Gehner Farm.

The Camp/Gehner Farm Cemetery

Camp/Gehner Cemetery
December 2013

As kids, many Gehner cousins have hiked out there; played in the trees and walked around the cemetery in the back of the pasture.  They've looked at the stones, traced their letters. We've all wondered "who are all these people and how did they end up here?"

A combination of plants going dormant for the winter and my brother-in-law's summer project to clear some of the brush and make the trails accessible again made it possible to walk to the cemetery again for the first time in a couple years.

The trail of land ownership

Bureau of Land Management records for the purchasers of the land from the government after it was surveyed are available online from http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/. The quarter of land that will become the core of the Henry Gehner, Jr. farm was sold by the government as three separate land parcels. Clicking on the purchaser's name below will take you to the original patent records

Parcel	Purchaser	Purchase Date	Highlighted
NW quarter of the NE Quarter	Pickens Camp	2 Dec 1839	Red
SW quarter of the NE Quarter	William Henderson	25 May 1841	Yellow
East half of the NE Quarter	Telemachus Camp	15 October 1835	Blue

FYI: The SE quarter of the section (the square mile of land) was part of the thousands of acres of land in Macoupin and Madison Counties purchased by Elias Dorsey, father of Benjamin L. Dorsey.

Gehner Farm (1993) with original patents overlaid.
"Grandma Gehner's house" and the outbuildings are on the line between blue/red.
Source image from Google Earth

Telemachus Camp was one of the earliest settlers to southern Macoupin County, settling near Staunton around 1820 with quite a history. While Telemachus' land purchases adds up to some 20 parcels from the government, and possibly more from other buyers, his son Pickens Camp has a smaller operation, all in Cahokia Township. (one piece is just east of the Gehner farm, while the other is the section to the northwest)

The Burials

The best source on this cemetery is the WPA report on the cemetery, done sometime around 1938-1939 as part of WPA's historical records project.  The original reports for Macoupin County are available at the County Archives and have been transcribed and put on line by volunteers of the county genealogy society.

The Camp Family

A detailed listing of burials from the WPA shows infant twins of Pickens Camp were buried here in 1847, the first burials in the cemetery. This stone is somewhere out there, probably buried under a couple inches of sod.

Telemachus Camp, father of Pickens Camp appears to be next in 1849. His stone is one of the ones that has survived, but not in its original place- it was leaning on one side (partially sunken into the ground) against the cedar tree in the middle of the photo at start of this post- which is why the one side is discolored.

Four more of Telemachus' grandchildren (Pickens' kids)  are buried out here until Pickens dies and is buried out here in 1867.

Other burials

The WPA report from 1938-1939 lists additional family names buried out there including Garowne, Allen, Ozment, Henderson, McPeek, Dunce and Stull. In an editorial moment, the WPA report says "the names are strange" and aren't those of anyone living in the area then.

One potential clue:

Mary Stull's headstone

Peter H Stull purchases 40 acres in section 36  (this would be across the road to the east of the farm) on 1/1/1851.  Mary Stull is one of the burials listed on the WPA report, with her stone being the oldest identified from September 1851, aged 68. She's listed as the wife of John Stull in the cemetery records; could this be Peter's mother?

Other Details from the WPA Report

A transcription of the WPA report is available from the Macoupin County Genealogy Society's website.
The condition of the cemetery when the WPA staff inventoried the cemetery was about the same is it is now-"The cemetery on the Gehner farm is really in an abandoned condition.  Livestock are free to run over the burial grounds" 

This isn't the only pioneer cemetery in this shape.  The MCGS cemetery list has entries for 15 cemeteries in Cahokia Township- of these seven more are in condition similar to the Camp/Gehner Farm Cemetery.

A Day of Research....

I've seen t-shirts that say "a bad day of fishing is better than a good day working."  I don't know if that's necessarily true, but a bad day of genealogy research is still a good day- even if you don't find everything you had hoped.

The headquarters of the St Louis County Library has amassed a large collection of genealogy resources and has a special focus on regional populations, including Germany. While we were at the Gehner Farm for Christmas, I had a chance to to spend a morning digging into their genealogy collection. I had a to-do list of things I wanted to use to try to find out more about the families; some things were successful, some not

1. Henry Gehner Sr's lost brother?

Swing and a miss.
Baptism records in Borgholzhausen list two Frederich Wilhelm Gehners born in 1824 and 1827 to the same parents as Henry Sr. (Given the short time between their births, I suspect the first one died young), and an intriguing possible match kept appreaing in St. Louis for a William Gehner. Unfortunately his death notice in the Post-Dispatch lists him as about 4 years too young.

2. Henry Gehner Sr- Marie Schweppe wedding?

Found it.
St Louis City/County Marriages for 1857
bottom of page 452. 

Notice this entire page are marriages performed in the past couple months by the same pastor (Fr. Picker??), all recorded by the clerk on the same day. A quick Google search lead to this forum on Rootsweb that Pastor Franz Picker founded the Independent German Evangelical Protestant Church in downtown St. Louis, now in Florissant which split off of Holy Ghost Church in 1856. 

Sidebar: Given the timing of the split, it is quite possible Henry Gehner, Sr who was living in St. Louis at the time was a member of one if not both of these churches. If Henry, Sr. was part of the founding of the Independent German church, this would make the number of churches he help found as the result of splitting off another congregation two. It would appear he took his theology seriously.

3. Deutsches Geschlechterbuch 

Nein.

Deutsches Geschlechterbuch (German Lineage Book) is an ongoing series of published family histories; researchers have been submitting their family histories to be published in this series since 1898, which now is in 220 volumes.  The focus of this series are German non-noble, middle class families- often farm families.  Each article includes an introduction about the family (the meaning of the name, a narrative history) and then a family tree as far back as recorded documents go.

Luckily, the first 160+ volumes are on CD and as they digitized them, they indexed the names listed in the old volumes.  Even then, there are hundreds of thousands of names (common names like Schwartz are 20+ pages of index entries).  Having relatively unique names helped, there were few entries for each family.  However, I didn't hit the mother lode of a published genealogy for the Wegehaupt, Geidel or Gehner families.  The entries I did find were for marriages of women in the family subject to the article to men with these last names.  The Geidel and Wegehaupt lines did have mentions of men in the right areas of Germany in the early 1600's, but without any lineage to the families when they arrived in the 1800's, this isn't much to go on.

4. New Haven, MO books.

Really cool stuff.

While not related to us directly, New Haven, Missouri has some information for us.  About 100 miles west of St. Louis, New Haven, MO has a sister city relationship with Borgholzhausen, Germany- the ancestral home town for Henry Gehner and his first wife Maria Schweppe.  The reason?  Many of the settlers in New Haven came from Borgholzhausen in the late 1840's- just before Henry Gehner, Sr.  The St Louis County Library has two books written about the settlers in New Haven which describe the conditions and daily life they had in Borgholzhausen.  Short of finding Henry Sr.'s diary or a stack of letters from him, this is probably as close as we'll get to a detailed description of Gehner life in Germany in the 1830's and before.  That's the next post.