Standing: Emilie and Alexander Mathey, Sitting: Rosalie and Joseph Mathey Standing: Lucy, Louisa, Josephine, Joseph, Catherine, Mary Antionette. Sitting: Joseph and Marie Rosalie. The Mathey family were my Swiss ancestors who immigrated to Manitowoc, Wisconsin before the Civil War. One of Mathey's granddaughters, Louisa Greenwood, recalled what she knew of the Mathey family history. "Joseph Antoine Mathey was a young soldier in France who, while on duty, met and fell in love with Maria Rosalie Teraze, a Swiss girl who tended sheep on the mountainside. When his father heard about it, he told him to go to his Swiss girl and not to ever bring her near him. They married and then came over here with a bunch of Swiss friends" It's not clear if Joseph was a French soldier or a Swiss soldier, but he identified himself as Swiss in all his records in the U.S. from the New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists, Ship Brother Jonathan, Le Havre, France ...
Mary Woodruff was born 1843 in Bohemia. Her father was Martin Woodruff and she had a sister named Sophia(1842) and a brother, Frank(1851). Mary and her family immigrated to Milwaukee in 1860. 1870 Census of Milwaukee, Wisc. She met and married fellow Bohemian Frank Peshek. They had seven children together before divorcing sometime after 1882; Sophia (1863), Frank (1868), Mary (1869), John Albert (1872), William (1875), Robert James (1879), and Rose M (1882). By this time, they had moved north, to Green Bay. 1880 Census of Fort Howard, Wisc. Mary Woodruff remarried sometime after Rose is born, to a Frank Joseph Jolley, who then adopts Rose. It's unclear what happened between Mary and Frank Peshek, and why they separated. The Federal census of 1890 was destroyed by fire, and the next census I have to go on is the state census of 1895. In 1895, Mary Woodruff Peshek is now Mary Jolley and she is living in Appleton, a widow, wi...