iGenealogy Blog

I’m planning on using the Wickli family for my accreditation from ICAPGen, so I thought it appropriate to talk about this family on my first blog.  I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, so I’ve been procrastinating sending my research report etc. in for the long (8 hour) test for the accrediation. 

I always thought it was kinda sad that no one really knew what happened to this Wickli family, most of whom joined the LDS Church.  The parents, Johann Jakob Wickli and Margaretha Haab had seven children; all lived to adulthood.  However, it seems out of those seven children, only 2 had descendants.  I’d wanted to contact the descendants of these children, but I haven’t been successful.  Anyway, I made it sort of a goal to find out what happened to the kids.  This is what I found:

 1. Elisabetha (Elizabeth) (1828-1906) ended up having seven children, most of who moved up to Idaho.  I went to Carey, Idaho this past week, and tried to find her headstone in the Carey Cemetery, but I don’t think she had one.  She married 3 times.  The first was Adam Gubler.  The old family group sheets listed a Mr. Moss and a Mr. Iverson as her other spouses, I found she married William Moss, who died in 1872 (she was listed in his will and her brother-in-law was an executor) and she married Jeppe Iverson, who died 1898.  No marriage records exist for these marriages, unfortunately.  She died in Carey, Idaho, in 1906.

2. Johannes Wickli (1830-1884) never joined the LDS Church, but stayed in Switzerland.  He married twice, and had 5 kids - I don’t know what happened to his son or daughter.  It was kind of sad, it said in his family sheet in the archive in Glarus that he murdered his 4 month old daughter.  I always wondered what exactly happened but I’m not sure how to find that out.  I don’t know if he even had descendants.

3. Rudolf (1832-1860) joined the church and died in Switzerland 8 months later.  He never married.

4. Kaspar (1835-abt. 1868) joined the LDS church with his brother Rudolf, and ended up emigrating to the US with his younger sister Barbara Karolina (see #6).  He settled in Payson, Utah, where he died about 1868.  He was found there in the church records.  That was SUCH a good day when I found him listed next to his sister, as no one had any idea what had happened to him. 

5.  Anna Margaretha (1841-1896) - this is my ancestor.  She married Heinrich (Henry) Gubler in 1870, a few months after she got to the US, had 3 children, and was a widow 5 1/2 years after her marriage.  She remarried the englishman Thomas Webb, by whom she had three more children (one died as a child).  She’s got a lot of descendants in the St. George area, and throughout the US.

6. Barbara Karolina (1841-1867) - Anna Margaretha’s twin.  She immigrated to the US with her brother Kaspar in 1863, and went to Payson.  She married another Swiss, named Johann Jacob Kocherhans.  They had 2 children who died in infancy, and she died after the birth of her second child.  No living descendants.  I was very happy to have found her. 

7. Anna Barbara (1849-1865) was baptized but died childless in Switzerland.

The matriarch of this family was Margaretha Haab Wickli.  She joined the LDS church after her husband died in 1860, and came to the US in 1870 with her daughter Anna Margaretha.  I never knew that she even made it here, but she did, when she was 68.  She only lived in Utah for 5 months before she died.  It was kind of sad to find out that she was buried in the paupers’ section of the Salt Lake City Cemetery.  I’ve been compiling money for a headstone to at least mark the final resting place of this woman who for 145 years lay there forgotten.  It seems sad to me that no one remembered her.  I don’t want that to happen again. 

If you’d like to donate, I’m just getting the funds together, and still about $100 short.  I’d like to get this compiled before the Gubler family reunion (Henry Wickley and Susanna Pickett Gubler) next summer (2007), so we can dedicate the grave and have a remembrance ceremony for her. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Wickli. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.