Shoofly Pie: A Dane Amongst the Amish?

Although Jake's background through me is a long line of Amish and Amish Mennonites from the upper Rhine, there is at least one fairly recent wild (sort of) card in my ancestral line: my father’s grandfather, a Dane who left Copenhagen around 1870 reportedly to escape conscription. Setting out impossibly across the North Sea in a small open boat with several friends who also wanted to avoid conscription, they were picked up somewhere by a larger vessel on its way to America.

My Dane eventually found his way to Chicago and a job with the B&O Railroad and then to a traveling track crew that boarded at an Amish bishop's home just west of Nappanee, Indiana. My Dane fell in love with that Amish bishop's daughter and changed his name and faith in order to marry the girl. Thus was my wild card Dane tamed from Augustus Walbus to John Anderson, who married the aforementioned Amish bishop's daughter, Lovina Hochstetler; and thence eight offspring, with their second child being a daughter named Elizabeth, who would marry Phineas Miller and become my father’s mother. Except everybody knew my grandmother as "Bettie," not Elizabeth.

There is a brief character sketch of my great-grandfather, John "Augustus Walbus" Anderson in Sharon Leichty's exhaustive History of the Jasper-Newton County, Indiana Amish Settlement (2011), which was where my great-grandparents lived:

"John's grandchildren remember his ability 'to speak seven or eight different languages,' which included Pennsylvania Dutch, German, English, and Danish, his native tongue from Denmark. According to granddaughter, Susie Hochstetler, 'Dawdy Anderson spoke Dutch with a Scandinavian accent.' This created smiles and chuckles for the younger German-speaking generations. Another granddaughter, Millie (Anderson) Hostetler, said that, as children, John 'would tell stories' while they helped their 'grandfather herd the cattle along the road' to feed. When there was a little child in the family, John would 'take the baby into the living room, rock it, and sing in different languages, but as soon as someone approached the door, he would quit singing....'" (p.48)

Then comes a most intriguing sentence:

"Although John corresponded with his sisters in Denmark, he did not talk about his family. One of his siblings was named Amelia Walbus." (p.48)

While my Dane's life as an Indiana Amishman is an open book, his Danish life remains very much in the shadows, as the last quote notes. Walbus is not a common Scandinavian name and searches of on-line censuses don't give any results. John did tell the U.S. census folks one year that his father was German and his mother was Danish, but another year he told them that both parents were Danish.

If the German father part is true, we may have a clue to his departure from Denmark. The Danish army suffered a humiliating defeat in 1864 when the Prussian army took the southern-most Danish territory, Schleswig-Holstein, where most the residents were German-speaking despite their political status as Danish subjects. Germany was enroute to creating the German Empire ("Deutsches Reich") in 1871, and military service became universal and compulsory—and by all accounts, brutal.

The Danish army, on the other hand, was almost literally winding down, as the Danes recognized that they were simply outnumbered and that they couldn't muster enough manpower to defend their territory any more. If our John/Augustus had a German military obligation by virtue of German parentage or even residence, then his desire to escape German conscription makes more sense than a desire to escape conscription into a Danish army that was ceasing to exist as a defense force.

Somewhere in our extended family is a picture of one of John "Augustus Walbus" Anderson's sisters in Denmark. The other artifact we have from him is pictured below. Sharon Leichty again gives us the setting:

"John and Lovina settled northwest of Mt. Ayr [IN] in a log cabin east of State Road 55, just north of 100S, which was also known as the North Star Road. Only a silo encompassed by a field of corn remains to mark the site of their first home, since a fire destroyed the house and much of the contents. John wore wooden shoes, like many of his Denmark ancestors. One shoe was consumed by the fire. The remaining shoe was purchased at an estate auction by Elmer and Pauline (Frey) Kauffman for $2.10 and has been passed down to Elmer's daughter, Aileen Jeanette (Kauffman) Reimer as an heirloom...." (p.45) 

John Anderson/Augustus Walbus's wooden shoe.
Photo courtesy of Sharon Leichty.

John "Augustus Walbus" Anderson died on January 20, 1921, and is buried in the Miller Amish cemetery in Newton County, IN, just west of Mt. Ayr.

Source:

Sharon Julia Leichty, History of the Jasper-Newton County, Indiana Amish Settlement and the Miller Amish Cemetery. (Argos, IN: 2011)