Wilhelm Mendelsohn

Wilhelm's birth name was Wilhelm Mendelsohn. His military records name was William Mendleson. His family changed the name to Mendelssohn because they thought they were related to the famous composer, Felix Barhtoldy Mendelssohn. (EHM)

William was believed to have served in the Civil War. He lived to the great old age of 102. He must have been quite a story teller as he was in great demand to speak at various womens club meetings. I have a photo of me at about age 4 or 5 with him in uniform with a beard down to his chest standing with my father. He and his wife Rebecca had 12 children. (EHM) His Civil War records are under the name of Mendleson. I have ordered and received his Military Records: He was enrolled into Company D, 29 Regiment of Ohio Volunteers as a Private on 10 September, 1861 at Akron, Ohio to serve for 3 years. He was wounded in battle of Port Republic, VA. In hospital in Washington Jun 9, 1862. Certificate of Disability show him discharged at Washington, DC on July 31, 1862. His children changed the spelling of their last name to Mendelssohn to convey the conception that they were somehow related to the Felix Mendelssohn line, though no connection could be found by Clinton Brown when he went to Austria and found the records of William Mendelson. [Ed Maurer[ [William Mendelssohn.FTW]

These Notes from Clinton Brown: !William Mendleson (as his name was recorded on his military records) was born Wilhelm Mendel sohn, 7 Oct 1834 in Hohenems, Austria. It was thought by some of his descendants that he wa s part of the famous family descended from Moses Mendelssohn and a cousin to Felix and Fann y Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. I found that the only members of that family having a son named Wil helm in the time frame of the 1830-35 period were Alexander and Marianne [Seligmann] Mendelss ohn. Alexander was son to Joseph, the senior partner of the wealthy banking firm of Joseph a nd Abraham Mendelssohn, the elder sons of Moses. Alexander was also a banker, having followe d his father into the management of the bank, and was a man of considerable wealth. It has a lways seemed to me that his eldest son would have been brought up in rather well-privileged c ircumstances whichwould have led to memories of a childhood which was unlikely to have includ ed such things as the game of Kick-the-Mayor which he shared with me as we were walking pas t a vacant lot in which a group of kids were playing kick-the-can near his home in Lomita, CA . He described the game as being played with a small bundle of rags instead of a tin can an d with a slightly different set of rules. The object was to see which team could capture th e mayor [bundle] and kick it to pieces before the other team could rescue it in order to hav e the privilege to themselves. He also described the community in terms which indicated tha t it was a much more rural scene than that which would be encountered in the environs of Berl in where his supposed father, Alexander, must have lived. For this and other reasons, includ ing the pursuit of truth, I took my beloved wife, Pauline to Europe where we visited Hohenems , going to the town offices at the Rathaus Hohenems for information. There we were treated w ith the utmost politeness and consideration. An English-speaking clerk, Barbara Burtscher, w as appointed to conduct us to the site of the house where Wilhelm was born. She also share d a luncheon with us at one of the good restaurants there, following which she showed us th e Jewish cemetery and obtained a key to it for us and took us to the Burgermeister's office w here the good chief of the town's government spent an hour with us which was shared by the co mpiler of a book entitled "Hohenems Kultur." Barbara bought and gave us the gift of a copy ofthis beautifull y illustrated volume which is treasured by us even though it is very difficult for us to rea d since it is entirely in Deutsch.

      Barbara also directed us to the Judisches Museum, Villa Heimann-Rosenthal, Schweizer S trasse 5, A-6845 Hohenems, Tel 05576/3989, Fax 05576/77793; where Johannes Inama placed all o f his facilities at our disposal, furnished us with every bit of genealogic information quick ly available and has mailed us more material which has been made a part of this record.  We w ere not allowed to pay for any of the costs and we were treated with the utmost kindness at e very turn.

  The data we were provided indicates clearly that Wilhelm's ancestry was very different fro m that which we have been led to accept.  The fact that he had a deep love for plants and fo r the land and became a Nebraska farmer who raised his family to appreciate the sorts of thin gs he valued are more in keeping with a humble origin than that of a banker's son.  He told m e that he came to America when he was sixteen years of age in order to avoid being impresse d [drafted] into the Imperial Army to fight in one of their foolish wars.  In other words,h e was a draft dodger.  He worked at any job he could get to support himself, and became a ski lled meat cutter, working in Cleveland, Cuyahoga, Ohio.

    The War of The Rebellion which we Americans commonly call the Civil War was in progres s and William, who, through living and working in the society had become an enthusiastic an d patriotic American who believed in the principles embodied in the Constitution and Bill o f Rights, volunteered for service in the Twenty Ninth Ohio Volunteers which was known as "Th e Squirrel Hunters."     [this was printed and pictorially represented on his official Discha rge, which was framed and hung on the wall of his home in Lomita, CA, and has been preserve d in possession of Lloyd Craybill Mendelssohn, 2453 Gaspar Ave., Commerce, CA.]

   William served well and honorably and took a rifle ball in the leg 9 Jun 1862 at Port Rep ublic, Virginia.  As he lay wounded among the dead and dying for 24 hours, it became apparen t that if any of the wounded were to be cared for, they were going to have to provide the care themselves.  He heated his pocket knife ove r a small flame started by a match from a Government-issue match case which he later gifted m e with [I have it among my most cherished possessions], and dug the rifle ball out of his leg, bandaging it with strips of a dead comra de's shirt which he boiled in his mess kit and dried over his fire.  He then cut a crutch fro m a nearby shrub with the same pocket knife and proceeded to organize those who could be helped into a company of hobbling wounded and as man y as could do so walked for days toward what they hoped would be the Union lines.  Some of th em made it and he was discharged on 20 Dec 1862.  He walked with a limp for the rest of his l ife.  But it never slowed him noticeably.  He also giftedme with a malacca cane which he use d for years.  I have it in my home and it is much admired by my own grandchildren.

      After his discharge from the "Squirrel Hunters" he returned to Cleveland where he marr ied on 23 Feb 1863 Rebecca Burfield, a lovely girl from Torronto, Ontario, Canada.  They rais ed a family of eleven very vital and interesting people, the first of whom was my grandfather .  The twelfth died a child.

    I never had the pleasure of meeting my grandfather, Bartholdo Samuel, fondly called "Unc le Sam" by most of his surviving kin, since he died of "consumption" before his youngest chil d was born.  However, to know the father was to appreciate the son and I deeply enjoyed my gr eat grandfather.

      He became one of the last five survivors of the Civil War (North and South) before h e died at the age of 103 years as a result of an accident, not of old age.  He was travelin g from his home in Lomita, CA by bus to be the featured speaker at an afternoon meeting o f a women's club.  As he stepped off the bus, it's driver moved the bus ahead, dumping him on to the concrete curb and breaking his hip.  Grandpa died of the pneumonia he contracted fro m being immobilized in the hospital rather than as a result of aging.  He told me the day bef ore he died that he was bitterly disappointed that he missed that speaking engagement because the ladie s were always loving and considerate toward him AND THEY FED HIM WELL!

     He still had five of his own teeth and he knew how to take best advantage of them.  I r emember vividly the grin on his face as he sat at the table one evening shortly after he ha d enjoyed his first airplane ride on the centennial anniversary of his birthday.  My mother had served him his first artichoke with melted butter .  He had to work rather carefully with his few teeth to get the good stuff off the petals o f that odd vegetable-flower, but he was enjoying it.  He said to me as I sat beside him, "I s eem to be trying a number of firsts this week and I'm enjoying all of them; I wonder what the next one will be."  I was a junior in hi gh school at the time and I suggested he might like to go dancing with me and a couple of m y girl-friends on Saturday night.  He chuckled and said, "I think I'll leave the dancing to you youngsters but I'll go and tap my toes while yo u dance."  Understandably, we who knew and loved them well are looking forward to the day w e are able to be reunited with him and his sweet wife.

  Marriage date from Cleveland, Cuyahoga, OH Marriage Licenses 1841-1845

  LDS film #0332417

  Military dates and locations are from Journal History of the TWENTY NINTH  OHIO VETERA N          VOLUNTEERS 1861-65 by J. Hamp SeCheverell, Cleveland, 1883 and from the OFFICIAL R OSTER of the       SOLDIERS OF THE STATE OF OHIO in the WAR OF  THE REBELLION, 1861-1866 vo l III, LDS       microfiche call # 6051200 #100 We initially concluded that my great grandfather was the Wilhelm who was Alexander Mendelssoh n's son for the following reasons:

  1. Numerous newspaper articles stated that our William was a cousin to Felix  Mendelssohn , the famous musician     and composer,

  2. It was spoken of among my mother's and grandparent's generations as a true fact,

  3. My great grandfather was born in 1834, when Alexander was 34 years of age  and havin g a family,

  4. My great grandfather's first son, Bartholdo Samuel, appeared to have been  named in hon or of the name       "Bartholdy" assumed for their children at the time of those children's b aptism as Christians by the parents of        Alexander's cousins, Fanny, Felix, Rebecca, an d Paul.  Abraham and Leah (Salomon) Menddelssohn were     strongly pressured by Leah's brothe r over a period of years to have the children baptized Christians and give           them th e name "Bartholdy."  This was the name Leah's brother, who had become a Christian in order t o advan-     tage his career in Prussia's diplomatic service, urged Abraham by letter to use .  He wrote, "You may remain     faithful to an oppressed, persecuted religion, you may leav e it to your children as a prospect of lifelong martyr- dom, as long as you believe it to be absolute truth.  But when you have ceased to believe tha t, it is barbarism.  I     advise you to adopt the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy as a distinctio n from the other Mendelssohns.  At the same time, you would please me very much, because it would be the means of preserving my memo ry in the         family.  Thus you would gain your point, without doing anything unusual, fo r in France and elsewhere it is the        custom to add the name of one's wife's relations a s a distinction."  Abraham followed this advice eventually after     further urging and a pro mise, which Bartholdy kept, to will a portion of his estate to some of Abraham's family.

        Further investigation reveals that Bartholdy adopted the use of the name after purch asing a lovely garden tract of land along the banks of the River Spree at Berlin which loca l residents called Bartholdy's, after its former owner.  The Mendelssohns, who evidently enjoyed spending pleasant hours there, all called i t "The Meierei."

      The purely coincidental close correspondence between the name "Bartholdy" and the firs t given name of my    mother's father, Bartholdo Samuel Mendelssohn has been responsible fo r some understandable confusion and a        great deal of true pleasure for me in the succes sful effort to learn as much as possible of the history of the family     of geniuses which i ncluded Moses Mendelssohn who was the brilliant philosopher credited with being the     emanc ipator of Prussian Jews of  his generation and who conducted his life in such a fashion tha t he is venerated by Jews of today and deeply respected world-wide; his daughter, Dorothea, who was a gifted wr iter with deep    understandings and knowledge who demonstrated her capability to keep pace w ith the best minds of her time and   surpass many of them;  her brothers,  Joseph and Abraham , both brilliant in business and in the skills of    parenting  since they also raised famili es that included some of the best of their generation which included Fanny    and her  younge r brother Felix who were, in Felix's words, "co-equals in musical performance and composition ;"      and their even younger brother, Paul, who was the scientist who developed the photogr aphic system later sold to    A. G. Farbenindustrie which we now know as AGFA; their cousin , Alexander, who quite successfully carried on     the banking business founded by his father , Joseph and brother Abraham, while raising a son named Benjamin       who was a professor o f geography at the University at Bonn, Prussia.

         When in September 1994 my wife, Pauline, and I traveled to the birthplace of  Wilhe lm, in Hohenems,       Austria with the purpose of verifying his parentage we learned that hi s parents were named Berthold       Levi-Mendelsohn, born in Hohenems, 27 Nov 1791, and Clar a Levi-Sager, born in Hohenems, 8 Mar 1808.  Their   parents and grandparents have been trace d for five and four generations respectively and the records are on file at    the Judische s Museum Hohenems in that city.  There is no doubt of the authenticity of that record.

       It is possible that a connection exists between this Austrian group of the family an d part of the group which    migrated through Poland to Dessau and finally to Berlin in Pruss ia since they all came, no doubt, from the original   palestinian Jews imported by the Roman s to slave in the mines in Sardinia, from whence they migrated under the    most difficult ci rcumstances we might imagine to all parts of Europe.

      We have a copy of an Italian document replete with official stamps of various jurisdic tions and impressive    signatures which the Jewish Museum has preserved and described a s a  passport  issued to  Berthold       Levi-Mendelsohn.   We,  following the reasoning tha t in our experience ONLY countries of origin issue passports    to their citizens and desirin g to authenticate the true nature of this document,  took the oportunity to have it         t ranslated in part  by an Italian friend and her associates in an internationl organization i n her home city.  In this      manner we discovered that this is a record of the arrest of Be rthold in Italy and the written account of the food        and transportation to each succeed ing jurisdictionprovided him until he was ejected from Italy and urgently    requested not t o  return.  In this document Berthold is desribed as a "Merchant."  It may be that in additio n to       his efforts to sell his merchandise he was also taking advantage of an opportunit y to visit and carry on some            discourse with other descendants of the original fami ly.  We may be able to learn more with proper effort.  We    shall see. [Clinton Brown][MAURER4.FTW]