Stuckey Stuff

[Janice writes:]

Tom and I are first cousins. His father and my mother were part of the family of nine children of Aaron and Sarah (Eicher) Stuckey.

On June 2, 2019, 27 of the 40 first cousins met, to share memories of their grandparents and aunts and uncles. Tom and I are some of the older ones, but even we have fewer memories of our ancestors than we would like to have. There are almost no memories of our great grandparents. On the Eicher side, they died when our grandmother was 3 years old, and on the Stuckey side our great grandfather (John P. Stuckey) died in 1921, and our great grandmother (Anna Lugbill) died one month after the oldest cousin was born. The Sauder Village in Archbold has the "Stuckey farm" which is a replica of our great great grandparents' farm, but it can only reflect an approximation of what it was like. Even more remote is knowledge of what the Stuckeys did in France.

Being in France over the years has made me curious about the Stuckey's time here. They lived in France for about 100 years, after leaving Switzerland because of their Anabaptist religion. Our ancestor, Christen Stucky [sic] was in France with his two, probably younger, brothers Nicholas and Bénédict by 1744, when he signed a lease for a farm at Wintzenheim (near Colmar), but Christen was likely in France earlier. According to an article by Robert Baecher in the 2006 issue of Souvenance anabaptiste, the three brothers may be descended from Christen Stucky from Diemtingen, Switzerland, who died before 1729. Our Stuckey line goes like this: Christen, Benedict, Pierre/Peter, Peter, John P., Aaron. I wouldn't want to lose the wives' names: Lugbill and Luginbuhl, Yoder, Hochstetler, Richard, Eicher, Staufer, Schlatter, Klopfenstein, and Graber. Oops, we also have Eicher and Stuckey featured on our grandmother's side. That's known as pedigree collapse.

Here is the mill that Pierre/Peter leased from 1806 or 1807 until 1832 when he left for Ohio. It was quite a landmark, but in December 2017, much of it was destroyed by fire. It is the Moulin de Notre Dame, near Lure in the Haute Saône region.

So much for the genealogy lesson for today!