Remi and Adele Emond

My Grandma Pilot’s parents were Remi Emond and Adele Emond. They were married September 25, 1877 in Riviere du Loup, Quebec, and according to my mother they were cousins, thus had the same last name. They had 11 children; the second to youngest was my grandmother, Marie Anne Laura Emond Pilot.

A report from Ancestor Seekers lists the names and birth dates of 10 children as follows: Marie Albertine, March 19, 1879; Marie Josephine, July 6, 1880; Marie Juliana, May 25, 1882; Joseph Silvo, October 13, 1887; Joseph Aime Marzanod, January 26, 1889; Joseph Philippe, September 3, 1891; Marie Eva, January 15, 1893; Joseph Adelard Albert, May 24, 1894; Marie Anne Laura, May 17, 1896; and Louis Joseph Alphee, August 24, 1897.

Ancestor Seekers did research on Remi and Adele Emond. They found a Canadian Census record which placed them in Fraserville, Temiscouta, Quebec in 1881. (Fraserville later changed its name to Riviere du Loup.) Remi was 28 and was listed as a journalier (day laborer). At the time they had two children listed as Albertine, 2, and Olivine, 9 months. Remi immigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts in 1899.

In June of 1900 a US Census taker found the Emond family at 795 Lakeview Ave and listed all 11 children. He did misspell the name of the family as “Emon”. They had been in the US for one year. Remi and all the children aged 14 and up were working in the mills on hosiery.

The 1920 US Census placed 63-year-old Remi Emond at 176 Ludlam St, Lowell, MA. Adele was listed as were the following children: Adolphe, 34; Philippe, 27: Joseph, 25: Laura, 23 and a granddaughter, Anna, who was 10. Remi’s occupation was shown as a dyer. My grandmother, Laura’s occupation was listed as a stamping.

Emond Family Photo

Photograph of Remi and Adele Emond with their 11 children taken around 1900 at Lowell, Massachusetts. Front Row: Julia, Remi Emond, Laura, Adele Emond, Alphee (behind Laura), Joseph (lower right), Eva (behind Joe). Second Row: Silvio, Adolphe, Olevine, Albertine, Phillip and Robert. Laura in the front row is my maternal grandmother. She was 4 when the photo was taken.

Setschan

At about the same time in history that the American colonies were struggling to free themselves from England and develop the frontier, another frontier was being colonized in Eastern Europe. The Austrian Imperial Army defeated the Ottoman Empire and claimed The Banat, an area now divided between Hungary, Romania and the country formerly known as Yugoslavia.

The Banat became a crown territory of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1700’s and colonial plans were made and administered from Vienna. According to a paper written by Sue Clarkson, the aim was to develop farmland, defend the border of the empire against invasion and to spread the Roman Catholic religion. They used inducements of free land, construction materials, livestock and exemption from taxes to bring in German settlers.

The German colonists ultimately built about 1,000 villages. They had to build dykes and dams, drain marshlands and build roads. The area of the Banat was flood plain and is subject to devastating flooding to this day. Those settlers became known as the Danube Swabians. They were the ancestors of my German-speaking grandparents.

The Banat grew and prospered during the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It became a breadbasket of Europe. Mechanization, industrialization and competition from American farmers, and others, caused economic decline by the end of the 1800’s. As a result thousands of the young Danube Swabians immigrated to the United States.

According to Dave Dreyer, there was a pattern of migration when members of a Danube Swabian village went to the same areas of the United States. He tracked ship manifests and identified over 700 Danube Swabians who settled in Mansfield, Ohio. Among them were my great-grandparents: Vogels, Gildes and Eichofs.

A large number of the Danube Swabians in Mansfield came from the Village of Setschan, including the Eichof’s and the Gilde’s. The Vogel family came from the area around Temesvar; however, most of them married Setschan villagers and their descendants, including my grandfather, Michael Vogel. They all had similar backgrounds, belonged to St Peter’s Catholic Church and for a time maintained their cultural heritage within the Mansfield community.

Setschan still exists. It is now a part of Serbia and is called Secanj. An elaborate website is maintained by a German organization of genealogy researchers. The text is all in German, but it is loaded with pictures. Scroll through the pictures under “Fredi’s Reisen” to see current photos of the homes, workplaces and church in Setschan. There are loads of pictures from the early 1900’s as well.

If you read the Clarkson paper about the Banat you will see why all of the villages have at least three different names. The Germans founded the villages and maintained their language and separate schools. When the Hungarian government took over the Banat in the mid-1800’s there was pressure to “Magyar-ize” the German community. Each village has a Hungarian or Magyar name. After World War I the Banat was divided among Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. The borders were shifted again after World War II and again after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.

The Village of Setschan can be listed under the following names:
German: Setschan, Setschany, Petersheim
Hungarian: Szecsany, Torontalszecsany
Official: Secanj

Eichof Sisters

My grandmother, Catherine Gilde Vogel, came to the United States with her mother in November 1907. Her mother, Catherine Eichof Gilde, was traveling with her sister Teresa Eichof Keipp, who also had two young children with her. Their husbands, Jacob Gilde and Anton Keipp, immigrated to Mansfield, Ohio together the previous July.

This photo of Teresa (left) and Catherine was probably taken in Setschan, Hungary before they were married. In spite of the formal clothes they look very young.

According to the Ellis Island record of their arrival, Catherine Eichof Gilde was 24, and her sister, Teresa, was 21. They each had two small children. My grandmother was three and her brother, John, was 10 months old. Teresa’s children were three-year-old Anton and three–month-old Elizabeth. In addition they appear to have been accompanying a 16-year-old neighbor, Joseph Subich. The ship manifest records listed the last address of the immigrants. Joseph’s father lived next door to Teresa and Catherine’s father in Setschan. It also appears that Joseph was a half-brother to Teresa’s husband Anton Keipp.

The record shows that their ship, the SS Main, departed from Bremen, Germany. They had to travel from Setschan in what was then in Hungary, across Hungary and Germany to reach the North Sea port of Bremen. The likely mode of transportation for that trip would have been by train. They sailed as second class passengers to New York, went through the immigration process at Ellis Island and then made their way to Mansfield, Ohio probably by train.

A first cousin of Grandma Vogel, Magdalene Keipp Goettl, passed along a memory of the day they arrived at New York. Her mother, Teresa Eichof Keipp, was carrying the baby Elizabeth and told her son, Anton, to hang on to her skirt. Magdalene said her brother, Anton, was a "nosey boy" and before they knew it, Anton was gone. They searched all over for him and finally found him walking up and down the docks with his hands in his pockets and not a care in the world. He was looking at the ships and the people passing by.

The passenger manifest of the SS Main listed the final destination of the Eichof sisters as 147 Lily St, Mansfield. The U.S. Census of 1910 found the Gilde family at that same address. Jacob Gilde was a section hand for the railroad, according to the census. The Keipp family was in Crestline at the time of the 1910 census, where Anton Keipp was also working for the railroad. The Gilde’s later moved to Crestline as well.

Maurice Pilotte Family

My mother's side of the family came to the United States from Quebec, Canada. Maurice and Claudia Dionne Pilotte immigrated to the United States in 1887. They came from the Riviere Du Loup area of Quebec. It is located on the shore of the St Lawrence River due north of the northernmost tip of Maine. They were part of the French-Canadian migration of workers to the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.

According to the 1900 census data, Maurice Pilotte was born in November 1860 in Canada. He immigrated to the United States in 1887 and was living in Lowell, Massachusetts. His occupation was listed as a cotton spinner. He was not a US citizen in 1900. Claudia Dionne Pillote was listed as his wife of 14 years. The census indicated that they had 5 children -- 3 of them living. The children listed at the address were Lumina Pilotte, daughter, born August 1887 in Canada; Marie Pilotte, daughter, born June 1889 in Massachusetts; and a son, Alphonse Pillote, born January 1897 in Massachusetts. The son would be my grandfather, Joseph Pilot. This is a photo of the Maurice Pilotte family. Grandpa Pilot is a young teen, so it would have been taken around 1910.

Claudia and Maurice were married at Richmond, Quebec in October, 1886. A Richmond Church record was of the August 12, 1887 baptism of Marie Claire Pilotte, legitimate daughter of Maurice Pilotte and Claudia Dionne Pilotte. The godparents were Charles Pilotte and Adele Boivin.

The census listed the next door resident of Maurice and Claudia Pilotte as Charles Pilotte and his wife Emma. This was Maurice's brother. Charles was born in December 1861 in Canada. He and Emma had 4 children, all living at the time of the census. The children were Charles Pilotte, 7; Emma Pilotte, 6; George Pilotte, 4; and Alphaise Pilotte, 1. Charles was a brick mason. Another resident listed next door was 70-year-old George Roleau, who was listed as a father to the head of the household. His occupation was listed as a carpenter and in 1900 he had been widowed for 40 years. Marriage records indicate that George Roleau was the father of Emma Pilotte.

In 1920 the U.S. Census shows Maurice and Dionne living at Dana St in Lowell, MA, along with their daughter Lumina Pilotte Lussier, her husband Wilfrid Lussier and their four children. Lumina and Wilfrid Lussier's eldest children were twin girls, Claire and Alida. The two girls inherited that property and owned it up until 1976, according to Massachusetts property records.

Grandpa Pilot kept in touch with his sisters. I can remember meeting them on a visit to Mansfield when I was a child. They were still alive when he passed away in 1968.

Michael and Catherine Gilde Vogel

My grandparents Michael and Catherine Gilde Vogel both came to the United States when they were children. Their families came from a part of Europe called The Banat, which was part of the Austria-Hungary Empire of the Hapsburgs. Their documents listed their citizenship as Hungarian, but they were German ethnically. This photo is from 1977.

Grandma and Grandpa were married 14 June 1922 and had two children, my dad and Mary Vogel Graf. Both of my grandparents spoke German in their households when they were growing up and continued to speak German at home to their children. According to my father, he did not speak English at all when he started shcool. I can remember my grandmother telling me that "Bobby felt bad because he couldn't speak English." She said that it was a relief to stop speaking German at home. They still used it when they wanted to say something to each other that they didn't want us kids to hear.

Grandpa went to for Ideal Electric in Mansfield. He took a course and became a draftsman. I remember that Grandma worked as a bookbinder for a printing company in the 1960's and perhaps into the 1970's. They were both very hard working and kept an immaculate house.

Foreword

This Vogel Family history traces the ancestors of my parents, Robert E Vogel and Jacquelyn Pilot Vogel, who were married at Mansfield, Ohio in December 1950. This photo is from 1952 when I was about 1 year old.

Dad's family is ethnic Germans who were part of the Austria-Hungary Monarchy when they came to Mansfield about a hundred years ago. Mom descends from French-Canadians who immigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1890's. Mom's parents moved to Mansfield when she was a child. They both belonged to St Peter's Catholic Church and attended the parochial school there.

Dad was finishing his degree at Case (now Case Western Reserve) in Cleveland when they were married. He graduated and went to work for Ohio Edison as an electrical engineer in Lorain, Ohio. I was born the following fall.