Anna Maisenbacher as a Child

This is a picture of Anna Maisenbacher Mehl as a child, with her mother, her two sisters, and her brother.

I have a new friend on the internet named Sara, and she is descended from Anna Mehl'sister, Mary Ann Maisenbacher Voight Young. Sara also has some old family pictures, and in a few cases we have prints of the same photograph. Sara is lucky enough to have identifications on her copies. This is one such case.

This photo is of Margareth Knapp Maisenbacher and her four children – Mary Ann, John, Elizabeth, and Anna. Margareth was married to John Maisenbacher in Newark, NJ at the incredibly young age of 16. He was 29. Their children were born in about 1854 (John), 1856 (Mary Ann), 1859 (Lizzie), and 1865 (Anna). Anna was born while her father was serving in the Civil War. After John's service in the war, he must have brought the family to Mercer County, for that is where this picture was taken. How long the family stayed together after that is open to question – Margareth took her children back to Illinois, while John settled in Sharpsville. Sara's family lore says the son (John) and daughter (Anna) may have stayed with John in PA. Our Mehl history is unspecific about the early years, or even how John ended up in Sharpville. However, Frances Mehl's version of the story says that Anna came to Sharpsville as a young woman, while the rest of the family remained in Illinois. Anna clearly spent her teenage years in Illinois, as she lived in Petersburg in 1880 (based on the census) and a signature book of hers that I have in my collection shows almost her friends at that time were in Illinois.

JJ and Anna Mehl's children used to visit their relatives in Illinois at the turn of the century (1900). Frances Mehl, Anna's daughter, said they visited "Uncle Frank" Markert, but she did not say how they were related to him. Sara's records show that Frank Markert's mother, Elizabeth Markert, was in fact Margareth Maisenbacher's sister. The Markerts had also lived in New Jersey before the war, and Sara's family says that Margareth and the children traveled with the Markerts to Illinois while John was serving in the war, thinking he had died.