The Story of Carl

 

Maybe I am alone in this.  As a young boy when I asked my father about where our family came from, he would tell me what he knew, which only went back as far as his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States prior to the First World War.  My aunts both researched the family tree, exploring the various feeders to the family back to the colonial period, with one exception, the Baksa’s.  For my entire life there has been an impenetrable wall in the research named Matias Baksa.  We know that the family is of Magyar descent.  The Magyars are an Asiatic tribe, a branch of the Huns, who arrived in Europe during the later Roman Empire.  This information was fuel to the fire of my childhood brain but the stories I dreamed of were not based in truth.

I know of at least one other man who faced a similar dilemma, my father-in-law.  He was abandoned by his mother and lost his father all by the age of eight.  He told his children and grandchildren stories of his ancestors.  Men who fought for this country in the Revolution and during the Civil War.  The patriarch during the Revolution was captured by the British, sent to Australia, escaped and rejoined the Army, spending the infamous winter at Valley Forge, but eventually settled into Pennsylvania after the war.  He could never produce any proof for these stories, and as he is a bit eccentric, the stories seemed more legend than reality. 

However, working through his story, asking the right questions, I was able to bridge the gap.  Tales told to an eight-year-old were winnowed for names and timeframes.  Once the facts concerning his immediate family were clarified, I was able to begin adding my wife’s family to my family tree.  Each generation unfolded, as I checked names to towns in the Ozark area, double and triple checking each name I found to maintain the trail.  Drawing on the research of others, I found digitized photographs of men and women from the 19th century that remind me of my in-laws.  Finally, I landed on a name in the correct time period, yet he seemed a little old to have been a soldier.  In the midst of tax and census records there was a ship’s passenger manifest containing the name of Joseph Carl Geissinger.  Attached to the record was also a story, previously researched, of his life.  The reality was actually closer to the tale than I had hoped.  Born in Austria in 1740, he had fought as a member of a German army in Portugal in the 1760s.  Arriving in the American colonies in 1762, Carl was indentured, but ran off twice.  When the revolution did start, Carl volunteered to serve in a Pennsylvania Regiment.  This regiment invaded Canada and was captured in a delaying action following the Battle of Three Rivers.  Released a short time later, Carl rejoined and served under General Anthony Wayne, including the winter at Valley Forge.  Following the war, Carl became a flax farmer in York County, Pennsylvania.  His son did fight in the war of 1812.  The family moved steadily west into the Ohio Valley and ultimately the Ozarks.  Many were farmers, one was a preacher, but all had families that bore the early loss of children and spouses.  Names appeared again and again in varying combinations, with periodic additions, such as my father-in-law's middle name is the maiden name of a great-great grandmother.

I have been able to share this story of an American family with its descendants.  My wife and daughters were excited to hear the reality of where they come from and the stories that ultimately shaped who they are.  They even found the “actual spelling of the name”.  As with many Anglicized names, there are many versions in the records, from Guyssinger to Geissen to Geissinger.  However, on the back of his photo, John Thomas Geisinger had written “actual spelling is GEIS”. 

Now if I could only find evidence to support or refute my father-in-law’s claim that someone in the tree ran with the James gang…

 

Pennsylvania German Pioneers: A Publication of the Original Lists of Arrivals in the Port of Philadelphia from 1727 to 1808, Vol. I

Pennsylvania in the War of the Revolution: battalions and line, 1775-1783

Research: details regarding the life of Charles Geissinger from http://www.mowerfamily.org/notes/charles2.html

 

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