Balthazar Nicklaus (1831-1900)
Balthasar Nicklaus and Margaretha Schmitt, not yet married, emigrated from their home village of Üchtelhausen, in northwest Bavaria in 1859. Sailing from Hamburg, Germany on June 1, they arrived in New York aboard the Ship Deutschland on July 13, 1859.
They apparently married soon after arriving and had their first child while in New York. Shortly after this, they came to Jo Daviess county, in the northwest corner of Illinois, where they are listed in the 1860 census. Balthasar settled in Guilford Township of Jo Daviess County Illinois, and had a farm in Section 3 there. Scales Mound was the nearest town.
Balthasar bought his first land in Jo Daviess Co. on May 22, 1861. On that date he bough the ``SW 1/2 of the S 1/2 of the SE 1/4'' of Section 3, Guilford Twp. for $500. He added to that on Nov 25, 1862 when he bought the ``SW 1/4 of the SE 1/4'' of Section 3 for $250. I think the description of the first purchase may be incorrect since it is an unusual land description (containing the ``SW 1/2'' phrase) and by 1872, Balthazar owns all 80 acres of the south 1/2 of the SE 1/4 of Section 3. He also owns 40 adjoining acres in the NW 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of Section 10, which he acquired Feb. 26, 1866 for $600. All those pieces of land form 120 acres in an L shape. He sold all 120 of them on Aug. 28, 1874. The SW 1/4 of the SE 1/4 of Section 3 was sold to ``Nicklaus Miller'' (whose first name is normally spelled Nicholas) for $900 and the SE 1/4 of the SE 1/4 of Section 3 was sold to Valentine Schoenhardt for $900. The NW 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of Section 10 was sold to Ernest Schoenhardt for $1200.
The Jo Daviess land records also show B. Nicklaus selling 40 acres in the NE 1/4 of the SW 1/4 of Section 15, Guilford Twp three separate times in 1882-1883 (apparently the first two sales didn't work out?). I don't have any purchase information on that parcel of land. It would have been about a mile and a half south of his other farm.
Balthasar Nicklaus filed his intention to become a citizen of the United States on 22 November 1867 in Jo Daviess Co. Circuit court. In it, he states he immigrated in June of 1859 from Hamburg to New York. He was age 36 at the time of the filing. On Feb. 22, 1870, the Jo Daviess County (Illinois) court declared him a naturalized citizen. There is a waiting period between the filing of intention and the granting of citizenship. Balthasar's brother George filed his intention the same day Balthasar's citizenship was granted.
While living near Scales Mound, the rest of their children were born. His first wife Margaretha died while they lived in Jo Daviess County and Balthasar remarried. In 1874, the family came to Butler County, Iowa.
At this point, the story becomes much more familiar to most of his descendents, so I'd like to explain now how this early history has been pieced together.
All of our searching turned up a few clues about Balthasar's origins. An 1883 Butler Co., Iowa history book contains the following passage about a ``P. Nichlaus'' who is almost certainly Balthazar:
P. Nichlaus came to Butler county in 1874. He was born in Germany, March 15, 1831, and in 1856 emigrated to America. He first settled near Galena, Illinois, where he rented land, and from there came to Monroe, Butler county, buying land on section 10. He now has one of the largest farms in the township. He was married in 1855 and has four children -- Peter, George, Joseph and Annie.
However, many of the details of that short passage have proven to be not quite right (including his first initial). Recall, in particular, the naturalization record which states Balthasar immigrated in 1859.
I found Balthasar and his first wife on a passenger list of a ship arriving in New York in 1859. The Ship Deutschland from Hamburg arrived in New York July 13, 1859. Among its passengers (mostly German immigrants) were listed ``Nicolaus, Balth., male, age 27, farmer, from Germany, destination of USA'' having space ``between decks''. Immediately after him in the log was ``Schmidt, Magtha., female, 21, unmarried.'' Nobody else of either surname is listed with them in the list of over 200 passengers.
The same two people are in the ship emigration lists from Hamburg. The Hamburg list for the Ship Deutschland is dated June 1, 1859, so apparently the voyage took about 6 weeks for them. In the Hamburg list, first is listed ``Nicklaus, Balthasar'', age 27, male, occupation of Bauern (farmer). The next line down is ``Schmidt, Marg.'', age 21, female. Her occupation is most likely ``ledig'' (German for single, unmarried), but it is very hard to read.
On the Hamburg lists, there are columns for birthplace (town and state). The town and state for Balthasar is sort of blank. I say ``sort of'' because the town name looks like it contains the overflow for the town name of the person above Balthasar. (It has the ``hausen'' part of what I read as ``Weipolsshausen''.) The state column is blank, but it looks like it appears that the intent is that Bayern (Bavaria) is carried down from above through ditto marks. However, the line with Marg. Schmidt's entry does contain a town name. I read it as Uchelhausen, and Bayern is carried down from above through ditto marks. There isn't any such place (that I can find in several gazetteers) called Uchelhausen, so it appeared that the entry meant Üchtelhausen (which is the only placename I found which is even that close). Üchtelhausen is in northwest Bavaria, near Schweinfurt, north of Wurzburg. It also appeared that the place name of Uchelhausen applied to both Balthasar and Margaretha, from comparing how place names are used to apply to whole families on the rest of the list.
Interpreting the town as Üchtelhausen is reinforced by that fact that above them in the Hamburg list is Barbara Kopp from Weipolsshausen and below them in this list are Ridamar and Hess families, both also from Weipolsshausen. There is a small town adjacent to Üchtelhausen named Weipoltshausen (also spelled Weipoldshausen). These are both very small places: the 1870 population of Üchtelhausen was 312, and Weipoltshausen was 228. The current (1998) population of Üchtelhausen is about 1100.
I believe this was our Balthazar and his first wife, Margaretha, despite the conflict with what was printed in the 1883 history book. There is a series of books with the title ``Germans to America'' which is an index to Germans found on US passenger ship arrival lists. This is the only Balthasar Nicklaus (with any number of spelling variations) I could find there. These indexes do have some mistakes and omissions of course, but they are pretty complete. (I did verify the US arrival listing with the actual passenger list, not relying on just the index entry.)
The ages of the couple on the passenger lists match well with our Balthasar and Margaretha.
From these passenger lists, it seems that Balthasar and Margaretha didn't actually marry until they got to America. If they married in 1855, (according to the Butler Co. history book), it was a little odd that there wouldn't have been any children born until 1859, so the fact that they came to America still unmarried does make some sense. (Of course there may have been infants who died in Germany who were never recorded anywhere...)
There is one more piece of evidence connecting Balthasar with this part of Germany. I was given a photocopy of a paper which I believe was written by Elizabeth (Nicklaus) Heger (but maybe her sister Margaret or Anna?) which says that Balthasar was from ``Swinefort, Bavaria''. The city of Schweinfurt is about 4 miles SW of Üchtelhausen.
The final step in this quest was to match up what we knew about Balthasar here in the USA with the records of his hometown in Germany. In 1997, with a lot of help, we were successful in doing this!! Through a family friend, we were put in touch with Albrect Scheuring of Üchtelhausen. Mr. Scheuring is also a descendent of this same Nicklaus line and has worked on his family history. However, before getting in contact with us, he had never researched his Nicklaus ancestry. He was able to locate the church records which identified the parents of this Balthasar, who turn out to be the common ancestors between us and Mr. Scheuring.
The name Nicklaus gets spelled in a variety of ways, so it is no surprise to see it spelled differently in old records. Hans Schenke, a German friend of my family did some investigating for us about Üchtelhausen. There are about a dozen Nicklaus families in the small town of Üchtelhausen. According to Albrect Scheuring, whose grandmother was a Nicklaus, all the Nicklauses at Üchtelhausen had formerly written their names ``Niklaus'' and the spelling of ``Nicklaus'' came in after WW II. The Üchtelhausen telephone directory has twice as many with the Niklaus spelling as Nicklaus. Also, with the spelling of the name Balthazar: The German spelling would normally be Balthasar. Balthazar with a `z' would be an anglicized spelling due to the german pronunciation of the `s'.
There's always been a family story that Balthazar settled in Ohio for a time after he first arrived in the US. No one has ever found any proof of that, though. He's in Illinois by the 1860 census, which says they have a 1 year old daughter, Dorothea, born in New York, so that would have made it hard for him to settle in Ohio for very long.
As stated above, Balthasar and his second wife Maria and family came to Iowa in 1874. The farm he bought in 1874 stayed in the Nicklaus family for over 100 years and was named an Iowa Century Farm in 1976. His farm was the east one-half of Section 10 of Monroe Township in Butler County. He bought it from M. I. Powers on October 27, 1874. The farm had recently changed hands several times before Balthazar bought it. Powers had bought it from Maurice Brown May 16, 1874. Brown had bought it September 27, 1873 from Richard A. Babbage, who had acquired it May 27, 1858 from the original owners, Austin J. Goss and Frederick Bissell, who bought it from the US Government in 1855.
Balthazar's homesite was in the extreme southeast corner of the half section, which remained the building site for rest of the time the farm was occupied. Water has always been furnished by simple sand point wells driven into an underground vein of water which runs diagonally through the building site.
After settling in Butler County, he repeatedly mortgaged his own farm to increase his holdings of Iowa land, and each time was able to pay off the mortgage. Besides farming, Balthasar traveled around the area doing butchering and making sausage for others.
By 1895, Balthazar owned 780 acres of land (well over a square mile), all connecting, in sections 10, 11 and 14 of Monroe township.
In their later years, Balthasar and his wife, Maria E. moved to a home in Parkersburg. His son George then lived on and worked the farm. After they had retired and moved into Parkersburg, a malfunctioning hard coal stove caused their deaths. They were killed by coal gas (carbon monoxide?) escaping from the stove.
One of Balthazar's obituaries mentions that he and Maria were found by Balthazar's brother ``Carl'' after the gas poisoning. Carl is more officially known by his name of George. Mr. Scheuring found no evidence of a brother named Carl in this family in the Üchtelhausen records.
According to Fred and Rue Nicklaus, there was a major rift in the family over religion. George Nicklaus (Fred's dad) remained Catholic; as the family had grown up, but George's brother Joseph married an Ostendorf, a primarily Protestant family that was very anti-Catholic, and Peter married a Brocka, a very wealthy family that was also anti-Catholic. Anna (Sophie) married Thole Cramer, and they were also Protestants, but they weren't anti-Catholic, so the family was split. One of Joseph's sons - Ralph, the butcher, however, married a Catholic girl.
Fred also says his dad didn't talk much about when he was growing up, but he remembers that his dad told him that Balthazar (Fred's grandpa) was very much into politics. When Balthazar lived in Illinois, he was active in political parades, and used to ride on a white horse, shouting the Democratic candidate's slogan - something like ``vote for the Democrat, to heck with the Republican''.
Fred says Balthazar arranged for the church to buy the land that the cemetery is on so that Parkersburg would have a Catholic cemetery.
One might be curious as to how Balthazar happened to come to Jo Daviess County. About 20 miles SE of where Balthazar farmed is the town of Massbach, Illinois. Massbach, IL was a large German/Bavarian settlement founded by emigrants from the town of Massbach, Bavaria in the 1850s. Massbach, Germany is about 12 miles north of Balthazar's home town of Üchtelhausen. So it seems possible that these Bavarian settlers are what drew Balthazar to Jo Daviess County.
%
Sources for this individual: @S7@ @S8@ @S9@ @S10@ @S11@ @S12@ @S13@ @S14@ @S15@ @S16@ @S17@ @S4@ @S18@ @S5@ @S345@