One of my connections to Wisconsin is through my Müller family from Chicago. After my second great-grandparents, Emil Müller and Hulda Wach divorced, Hulda married John Severing and removed to Harvard, Illinois, which is about five miles from the Wisconsin / Illinois border. Emil and Hulda’s daughter Ida, married Charles Brunner, and at various times throughout their life, they were either living in the Harvard, Illinois area, or in Sharon, Wisconsin (just north of the border).
The other day, in preparation for this post, I decided to do a little more digging into the Brunner clan in both Illinois and Wisconsin. I found more obituaries in the Rockford, Illinois newspapers at GenealogyBank, as well as some memorial pages at Find A Grave.
What I didn’t expect to find was a familiar surname. A friend of mine and I both have family from the same area of Luxembourg. Those families ended up in and around Kane County and Kendall County in Illinois, so we expected one day to maybe find a connection. Well, we did, but not with our own Luxembourg families (at least not yet).
Instead, that familiar surname was that of my friend’s husband. This person that I found married one of Charles Brunner’s nieces. And since someone placed the obituary in the Find a Grave memorial, I was shocked to learn that although he was connected to my family in McHenry County, he was originally from the same town as my friend’s husband’s family in Kendall County. An email to my friend confirmed that the man I found is a cousin of her husband. Talk about a small world. Although we haven’t found a “blood” connection yet, we did find a unique connection through a chain of events that brought that married couple together.
Don’t ya just love genealogy?!?!
Genealogy By the States is a theme created by Jim Sanders over at the Hidden Genealogy Nuggets blog.
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