Abraham Fickeisen and Margaret Mueller

The history of the Abraham and Margaret Fickeisen family has fascinated me since I was a child. Abraham and Margaret are the parents of Eva Fickeisen Noe, pictured to the right when she was about 25 years old. Eva was the fifth child of the Fickeisens, born March 4, 1857, in Wheeling, (West) Virginia. Eva was the beloved maternal grandmother of my mother, Ella Lorene Sullivan Andris.

If it were not for my mother, this history would never have been told. Over the sixty years of my life, I have heard her tell and retell stories of the Fickeisens, the Noes, the Bartells, the Biehls and the Beckers, sometime deinzens of Pleasant Ridge in Washington County, Ohio. In my younger years, I thought I hated history, and I let these stories pass in one ear and out the other. But as I have grown older, I not only have begun to treasure this family lore that Lorene passed on to me, I have become an active genealogist in search of a family history. More than that, I love these old German immigrants who forged a new life for themselves in the New World in the middle of the 19th Century.

As I began, late in my life, to search for confirmation of mom's tales, I discovered that she was remarkably accurate in her recollections. And as is true of any family lore--some of it hearsay, some of it heard as a child, and some of it inferred--I discovered some inconsistencies and errors. I also uncovered an amazing wealth of detail in the Berg Church Records. But let me begin with the story where it is the most alive, in my mother's telling of the family legends.

The Saga of Abraham and Margaret Fickeisen

• How they came to America
• What the census data tells us
• Bringing in the land records
• The Roots of Abraham Fickeisen and Margaret Mueller
• The Abraham and Margaretha Mueller Fickeisen children (drawing freely on my mother's memory and photographs, census data, the Berg Church Records, and information, including obituaries, from Catherine Sams.)
• Catherine (1850), Margaretha (1851), Carolina (1853) and Adam (1854)
• Eva (1857 and my mother's maternal grandmother)
• Anna Marie (1859), John (1862) and Luisa (1864)
• Abraham, Jr. (1866 or 1867), Jacob (1868 or 1869), Charlie (1871), and Daniel (1873)
• The Jacob Fickeisen children (brother of Abraham)