Sila Lydia Bast

A piano teacher and part-owner of the Little Gem Restaurant in Milwaukee with her sister Ella, Sila Lydia Bast had many interests. Her collection of thousands of bells from all over the world is preserved today as the Bast Bell Museum, part of the Dheinsville Settlement Historic Park operated by the Germantown Historical Society.

In 1950, in honor of the centennial anniversary of her grandfather Jacob Bast's purchase of a homestead in Rockfield, Wisconsin in 1848, she and her first cousin Theodore Hieronymus Bast published The Jacob Bast Farm (Centennial Account): 1848-1949, and Genealogies of the Bast and Related Families, a comprehensive genealogy of the Bast family.

Her interest in genealogy continued with the publication of The Samuel Bertschi Family of Dürrenäsch, Canton Aargau, Switzerland in 1956, which included her brother-in-law Ernest Hunziker, and The Loos Family Genealogy 1535-1958 in 1959, focused on the ancestors of her mother Christine Loos. She updated her work on the Bast lineage with The Bast Genealogy and Related Families, published in 1971, listing over 2,000 individuals in its index and mentioning thousands more. Benjamin Bast Schultz, her second cousin four times removed, is currently working on making all of her indispensable genealogical research available on this website.