Mary Ann Knoke and Jim Andris: Second Cousins Once Removed

A grandfather found

In February of 2002, I received an email message from Mary Ann Knoke. She had been searching on the internet for information on her grandmother, Lillian Covey. In Mary Ann's own words:

I have reason to believe that Daniel Fickeisen was my grandfather. My grandmother, Lillian {Covey} Baltz, told my mother, Goldie, that she fell in love with a young man named Daniel Fickeisen and when she became pregnant he disappeared.

LIllian Baltz and her daughter, Goldie, lived with Lillian's parents, George and Sarah Midkiff Covey on their farm in Marietta, Ohio until Lillian married Ed Baltz. Ed ran a sawmill in Marietta. Ed and Lillian had two other children, one of whom is still living in Marietta at this writing.

I was cautious about Mary Ann's proposal at first, mainly because I knew how many Daniel Fickeisens there could have been around the area at that time, and I also knew of a Daniel Fickeisen from Pittsburgh. However, as I began to research the subject, the possibility became a probability. For one thing, the 1900 census records showed that Dan Fickeisen was living on Pleasant Ridge in Washington Co., Ohio as the head of the household. This is about 15 miles from Marietta. He was unmarried at the time, although he later married a Margaret Burris around 1908 and had a child, Lula Fickeisen.

I ventured this story to my mother, Lorene, and she was even more skeptical. I could tell by the tone of her voice. However, as the year rolled on, I continued to correspond with Mary Ann. She wrote that she and her sister were looking through a journal that their mother kept and came across some names, pictures and a place named Sitka. Goldie had written in her journal that

his [Ed Baltz, her stepfather] saw mill is inside a large building where he sawed lumber in all sorts of pieces which you use in building a house etc. He had a planing mill, a gristmill where he ground corn into meal in the winter and folks from all around would come and buy his stuff.

There was also a picture of Ed Baltz's house, built very near the sawmill, in Goldie's journal, and Mary Ann wondered how close this was to where Daniel Fickeisen was living.

As a matter of fact, there is very good reason why Dan Fickeisen might have been in Sitka at the time in question. His sister, "Aunt Mag Becker," had married Jacob K. Becker, and raised a family of two boys in a farmhouse right near the town of Sitka. Their oldest boy, Jacob Daniel, was born in February of 1878. Dan Fickeisen was 21 years younger than his sister, Margaret, being born in 1873. So he was five years older than young Jake Becker. Apparently, they were very close in their young adulthood, as this picture shows. (Dan is on the left.) Even if we hadn't found "the smoking gun," the circumstantial evidence of Dan's grandparenthood to Mary Ann was now quite convincing.

In October of 2002, Mary Ann, her husband and her son were in Marietta to visit the aging aunt and to see the Sitka cemetery. I arranged to have them meet with my 88 year old mother, Lorene, for lunch. It was obvious from the beginning of the meeting that Lorene was delighted with the visit. Mary Ann shared with us her mother's journal and her own genealogy research, which included some printed pages from this website. My mother told me afterwards that she was certain that this was her second cousin, and that she was very glad to have met her.

In February of 2003 I heard from Mary Ann again, and she sent me the pictures of her mother, Goldie, and of she and my mother, Lorene, shown on this page. I have looked closely at these pictures, and I think the family resemblance is there, especially between Mary Ann and my mother, and some of my mother's first cousins.