One of my best memories as a teenager is when my grandma handed me a bunch of papers and said, "Well, here's the history of our family. It's your turn to take care of it and add to it." From that point, I've been interested, not just in the names and dates, but the stories that make up richness of the history of our families. I've collected so much information, stories, copies of pictures, and background information that I can bore the poor soul who asks, "What was great-great grandma's name?" to death with 7 hours of commentary. Posting some of the information and stories seems like a good way to share these things in small bits, and if you're interested, you can ask for the whole story!
So we'll start with a thumbnail sketch of the generation that goes back the furthest on the Beemer family tree that's posted on the Family History page. This information comes from an article written by Johannes Helmut Merz, a Hessian soldier scholar and author. The link to the article is below.
Johann H. "Henry" Dickhaut was born in 1754 in Hesse-Hanau, a province in what would become Germany. He became a Hessian soldier in the Revolutionary War, was wounded, captured, escaped, and became a schoolteacher. He married Anna Catherina Teigert on August 16, 1778. After some time in New York and then Phildelphia, he heard about land being granted in Canada to soldiers who had fought for the British a few years before. He applied for and received a 500 acre grant and moved his family to Ontario in 1797. His daughter, Elizabeth, was born in Philadelphia in 1783. Elizabeth's daughter, Esther, eventually married into the Beemer family, marrying Judson Beemer in 1863 in Lee County, Illinois. Henry died in 1804 at the age of 50, according to a sworn statement from his daughter several years later.
Read the whole article here:
A Hessian Soldier's Odyssey - Henrich Dickhaut from Dudenhofen by Johannes Helmut Merz
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