By Julie Huebel, Pierce County Historical Association
ELMWOOD, WI – X is for…I mean what IS X for? I’m going to have to cheat on this one. The first thing that comes to mind is a name with an ‘X’ in it and one just came up in a previous article, so X is for…er…Weix. I ended up being so glad I chose this family, as I was able to identify another area Civil War veteran that wasn’t on a list I have been working on to help Elmwood’s Crain-Ottman American Legion Post. They are working on a special project to honor the Civil War veterans buried in the Elmwood area cemeteries.
Joseph Weix (1823-1907) was born in Germany. He and Theresa Molter (1831-1893) married in 1853. Their daughters were mentioned in last week’s article, Theresa and Mary both married Wild brothers. Interestingly, another set of their daughters, Barbara and Katherine, also married brothers, Charles and William McKernon, respectively. They have 10 children linked to them on the Findagrave website, with six buried in the Catholic Cemetery at Farmhill (Ellen Kohl, Frances Sperger, Barbara McKernon, Frank, Caroline Kroseman, Kathern McKernon) and the other four buried in the Poplar Hill Cemetery (Theresa Wild, Mary Wild, Sebastian, John).
Joseph’s parents were Andreas (1794-1880) and Catherine Preisser (1801-1838). I don’t know the original source, but Kristin Neubauer had shared a photo from a document labeled, “Family History of Julia Weix Budde” that gave the following information about Andreas/Andrea Weix:
“Andrea Weix operated a baker shop in a village named Strohn, located between Weiszenburg and Munich, in Upper Bavaria, Germany. He was born on August 12, 1794. The family name of his wife Catherine is unknown today. The couple married about 1821. They had five sons, Joseph, Michael, Andrew, Lorenz, and Frank; and two daughters, Catherine and Mary. Andrea’s wife died when her youngest child Mary was about two weeks old. The brothers Joseph and Lorenz Weix emigrated to America in 1848. Joseph traveled on to Wisconsin and began to work on a farm in Dodge County. Lorenz stayed in New York and worked in a flour mill for about three years. Then he worked on a railroad being built from New York to Michigan. In 1853, he was working in a lumber mill in Muskego, Michigan where he received minor injuries in a boiler explosion. He went to Milwaukee to recuperate where he met Barbara Bachuber who became his bride in 1854. Joseph Weix returned to Germany to marry and in about 1854 brought his wife, his father Andrea, and his brothers Michael, Andrew, and Frank and his sisters Catherine and Mary back to the United States. Andrea Weix and his sons purchased a 160-acre farm in Dodge County near LeRoy on which was a store, a tavern, a sawmill and a grist mill.”
Joseph and his brother Lorenz (Lawrence) both served in Company A of the 45th Wisconsin Infantry. We are very lucky to have this photo of these brothers while they served. The unit participated in the Battle of Nashville in December of 1864, then performed garrison and guard duty in Nashville until being mustered out in July of 1865. (Dennis Skalstad shared it to their Findagrave pages. Dennis has worked tirelessly to collect and share photos of Wisconsin’s Civil War veterans for many years. He runs a Facebook page, Wisconsin Volunteers 1861-1865.)
Early on in this series, before they were being published in the Sun-Argus, I was posting them on the Elmwood, WI History Facebook page and printing off a copy to hang in the window of the PCHA History Center in Elmwood. I wasn’t sure if anyone was reading them from the window, but I continued to put them there just in case. I had taken a break from posting while on vacation and Sandra Weix stopped in shortly after inquiring about the next article in the series. Sandra regularly walks by the office, and I was delighted to learn she had been reading the articles on her walks. I hope she enjoys this one.
Doing all this research and writing the articles has been quite a lot of work, but it was encounters like this along the way that fueled me to keep going. So, thank you to everyone who told me they enjoyed the articles or those that commented such nice feedback on the Facebook posts.
