~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
According to an account completed in 2010 by a Thome family descendant and professional genealogist, Mary Anne Thome's father was an illegitimate child born in 1837 in Germany named Mathias Thome. Mathias and his young mother Elizabeth Thome, and her siblings and parents, were from the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, comprised of the southwest corner of the country, with the Rhine river and Alsace-Lorraine region of France on the western border, and Switzerland on the south.
In the 1840's when Mathias was a small boy, this family group left Germany and established residency in the farmlands outside of Peoria, Illinois. The fatherless Mathias grew up under unknown circumstances, perhaps without a stepfather or other siblings. His mother Elizabeth may be buried in a Catholic cemetery in Peoria, Illinois, under her maiden name of Thome, as there is an Elizabeth Thome documented in St. Joseph's church cemetery there.
Mathias married a German woman named Anna Rau, whose background is unknown. The union produced four children. The firstborn Mary Ann was born in 1860 when Mathias was 23 years old. Sadly, mother Anna died around the year 1865 at the approximate age of 30, of unknown causes. She left behind four children under the age of 5. Mathias remarried, but sometime after the birth of his fifth child in 1870 he was abandoned by his second wife Mary Ellen who reportedly disappeared with the single child she had had with Mathias. Mathias was apparently unable to care for his four remaining children, who were all sent to live with different German families in the area. The children were used as servants by these families, presumably to pay for their own keep.
U.S. Federal Census year 1870
Note : When handwritten records were transcribed, Thome looked like Thorne, and was sometimes misspelled in this fashion.
Name: Mary Thorne [Mary Thome]
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1860
Age in 1870: 10
Birthplace: Illinois
Home in 1870: Limestone, Peoria, Illinois
Race: White
Gender: Female
Post Office: Dowdleville
Head of house in 1870 : Mathias Thorne 33 b. 1837
Mathias's first wife and the mother of his first four children was Anna Rau, b. 1835 d. 1865. She would have been 35 in 1870 had she lived.
Wife in 1870 : Mary Ellen Thorne - Age 21 in this 1870 census. She was Mathias's second wife and stepmother to his first four children. She was documented in the census as being unable to read and write. According to a story told to Marilyn Bour Davis, a Thome descendant through Mary Catherine "Kate" Thome Bour, the sister of Mary Anne Thome, family oral history stated that "the wife of Matt Thome deserted the family". Since Mathias's first wife Anna Rau died young, this reference is to his second wife Mary Ellen.
Children :
1. Mary Thorne 10 cannot read/write b. 1860
Her full name was Mary Ann, but Ann is not on this census. Her mother Anna Rau would have been 25 years old when she gave birth to her. Mary Ann had to have been at least 5 to 6 years old when her mother died, and possibly a bit older.
2. John Thorne 8 b. 1862
3. Catharine Thorne 6 b. 1863-64 (Mary Catherine "Kate")
4. Nicholos Thorne 5 b. 1865
Did Anna Rau die giving birth to this Nicholas in 1865 ?
5. Joseph Thorne 5/12
Joseph's mother is clearly Mary Ellen Thome above, age 21, the second wife. Mary Ellen likely took Joseph with her when she left Mathias and his four children.
After his first wife died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary Anne had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary Anne had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary Anne being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family (the Ambergs) who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary Anne's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary Anne, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary Anne developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary Anne arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University. A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 16, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died, but the other was a healthy child. Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, had her firstborn in February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. She was cared for in the last years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children including Johnny, now a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. The day she was taken to the hospital she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". She had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances and Clara, and her youngest son Clarence, and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed.
Mary Anne had a brother Nicholas Thome, seen in his wedding photo at right, with sister Mary Anne on his right. The professional baseball player Jim Thome is descended through the line of Nicholas.
Mary Anne had a sister named Marian Catherine (or Mary Kathryn) who seems to have been called "Kate". She may have been the first of three wives of John (or Jean) Nicholas Bour. She appears to have died at the young age of 39 in 1902, several months after the birth of her last child who lived until the following year.
Name: Marian Catherine Thome, 20 OCT 1863 - 03 MAY 1902
Birth: 20 OCT 1863 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Marriage: 03 APR 1888 at Pekin, US-61554, Tazewell County, Illinois to Jean Nicolas Bour, 10 SEP 1864 - 14 SEP 1944
Death: 03 MAY 1902 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Burial: ? at Peoria, US-61601, Peoria County, Illinois,St. Joseph Cemetery
Children:
Anna Katherine Bour 09 OCT 1888 - 03 MAR 1889
Oscar Nicholas Bour 07 APR 1890 - 06 MAR 1942
Frank Joseph Bour 05 JUL 1893 - 08 NOV 1975
Madalina Maria Bour 05 DEC 1895 - 19 JAN 1981
Charles Adam Bour 30 JAN 1898 - 26 AUG 1977
Louis John Bour 23 JAN 1900 - 29 JAN 1900
Barbara Lucille Bour 26 JAN 1902 - 16 FEB 1903
The surviving children of John and Kate Bour:
1. Oscar Bour
2. Frank Bour (wife Theresa, children: Marilyn Bour Davis - the family genealogist, d. May 22, 2007 in Peoria, and her sister Geraldine Bour)
3. Madeline Bour
4. Charles Adam Bour (wife Marie Cecilia Pettyplace, children: Gloria Marie Bour Everett).
The Bour brothers Frank and Charles and their families lived within walking distance of each other in Peoria, Frank on Butler Street and Charles on Howett Street.
According to an account completed in 2010 by a Thome family descendant and professional genealogist, Mary Anne Thome's father was an illegitimate child born in 1837 in Germany named Mathias Thome. Mathias and his young mother Elizabeth Thome, and her siblings and parents, were from the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, comprised of the southwest corner of the country, with the Rhine river and Alsace-Lorraine region of France on the western border, and Switzerland on the south.
In the 1840's when Mathias was a small boy, this family group left Germany and established residency in the farmlands outside of Peoria, Illinois. The fatherless Mathias grew up under unknown circumstances, perhaps without a stepfather or other siblings. His mother Elizabeth may be buried in a Catholic cemetery in Peoria, Illinois, under her maiden name of Thome, as there is an Elizabeth Thome documented in St. Joseph's church cemetery there.
Mathias married a German woman named Anna Rau, whose background is unknown. The union produced four children. The firstborn Mary Ann was born in 1860 when Mathias was 23 years old. Sadly, mother Anna died around the year 1865 at the approximate age of 30, of unknown causes. She left behind four children under the age of 5. Mathias remarried, but sometime after the birth of his fifth child in 1870 he was abandoned by his second wife Mary Ellen who reportedly disappeared with the single child she had had with Mathias. Mathias was apparently unable to care for his four remaining children, who were all sent to live with different German families in the area. The children were used as servants by these families, presumably to pay for their own keep.
U.S. Federal Census year 1870
Note : When handwritten records were transcribed, Thome looked like Thorne, and was sometimes misspelled in this fashion.
Name: Mary Thorne [Mary Thome]
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1860
Age in 1870: 10
Birthplace: Illinois
Home in 1870: Limestone, Peoria, Illinois
Race: White
Gender: Female
Post Office: Dowdleville
Head of house in 1870 : Mathias Thorne 33 b. 1837
Mathias's first wife and the mother of his first four children was Anna Rau, b. 1835 d. 1865. She would have been 35 in 1870 had she lived.
Wife in 1870 : Mary Ellen Thorne - Age 21 in this 1870 census. She was Mathias's second wife and stepmother to his first four children. She was documented in the census as being unable to read and write. According to a story told to Marilyn Bour Davis, a Thome descendant through Mary Catherine "Kate" Thome Bour, the sister of Mary Anne Thome, family oral history stated that "the wife of Matt Thome deserted the family". Since Mathias's first wife Anna Rau died young, this reference is to his second wife Mary Ellen.
Children :
1. Mary Thorne 10 cannot read/write b. 1860
Her full name was Mary Ann, but Ann is not on this census. Her mother Anna Rau would have been 25 years old when she gave birth to her. Mary Ann had to have been at least 5 to 6 years old when her mother died, and possibly a bit older.
2. John Thorne 8 b. 1862
3. Catharine Thorne 6 b. 1863-64 (Mary Catherine "Kate")
4. Nicholos Thorne 5 b. 1865
Did Anna Rau die giving birth to this Nicholas in 1865 ?
5. Joseph Thorne 5/12
Joseph's mother is clearly Mary Ellen Thome above, age 21, the second wife. Mary Ellen likely took Joseph with her when she left Mathias and his four children.
After his first wife died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary Anne had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary Anne had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary Anne being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family (the Ambergs) who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary Anne's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary Anne, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary Anne developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary Anne arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University. A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 16, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died, but the other was a healthy child. Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, had her firstborn in February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. She was cared for in the last years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children including Johnny, now a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. The day she was taken to the hospital she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". She had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances and Clara, and her youngest son Clarence, and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed.
Mary Anne had a brother Nicholas Thome, seen in his wedding photo at right, with sister Mary Anne on his right. The professional baseball player Jim Thome is descended through the line of Nicholas.
Mary Anne had a sister named Marian Catherine (or Mary Kathryn) who seems to have been called "Kate". She may have been the first of three wives of John (or Jean) Nicholas Bour. She appears to have died at the young age of 39 in 1902, several months after the birth of her last child who lived until the following year.
Name: Marian Catherine Thome, 20 OCT 1863 - 03 MAY 1902
Birth: 20 OCT 1863 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Marriage: 03 APR 1888 at Pekin, US-61554, Tazewell County, Illinois to Jean Nicolas Bour, 10 SEP 1864 - 14 SEP 1944
Death: 03 MAY 1902 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Burial: ? at Peoria, US-61601, Peoria County, Illinois,St. Joseph Cemetery
Children:
Anna Katherine Bour 09 OCT 1888 - 03 MAR 1889
Oscar Nicholas Bour 07 APR 1890 - 06 MAR 1942
Frank Joseph Bour 05 JUL 1893 - 08 NOV 1975
Madalina Maria Bour 05 DEC 1895 - 19 JAN 1981
Charles Adam Bour 30 JAN 1898 - 26 AUG 1977
Louis John Bour 23 JAN 1900 - 29 JAN 1900
Barbara Lucille Bour 26 JAN 1902 - 16 FEB 1903
The surviving children of John and Kate Bour:
1. Oscar Bour
2. Frank Bour (wife Theresa, children: Marilyn Bour Davis - the family genealogist, d. May 22, 2007 in Peoria, and her sister Geraldine Bour)
3. Madeline Bour
4. Charles Adam Bour (wife Marie Cecilia Pettyplace, children: Gloria Marie Bour Everett).
The Bour brothers Frank and Charles and their families lived within walking distance of each other in Peoria, Frank on Butler Street and Charles on Howett Street.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
According to an account completed in 2010 by a Thome family descendant and professional genealogist, Mary Anne Thome's father was an illegitimate child born in 1837 in Germany named Mathias Thome. Mathias and his young mother Elizabeth Thome, and her siblings and parents, were from the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, comprised of the southwest corner of the country, with the Rhine river and Alsace-Lorraine region of France on the western border, and Switzerland on the south.
In the 1840's when Mathias was a small boy, this family group left Germany and established residency in the farmlands outside of Peoria, Illinois. The fatherless Mathias grew up under unknown circumstances, perhaps without a stepfather or other siblings. His mother Elizabeth may be buried in a Catholic cemetery in Peoria, Illinois, under her maiden name of Thome, as there is an Elizabeth Thome documented in St. Joseph's church cemetery there.
Mathias married a German woman named Anna Rau, whose background is unknown. The union produced four children. The firstborn Mary Ann was born in 1860 when Mathias was 23 years old. Sadly, mother Anna died around the year 1865 at the approximate age of 30, of unknown causes. She left behind four children under the age of 5. Mathias remarried, but sometime after the birth of his fifth child in 1870 he was abandoned by his second wife Mary Ellen who reportedly disappeared with the single child she had had with Mathias. Mathias was apparently unable to care for his four remaining children, who were all sent to live with different German families in the area. The children were used as servants by these families, presumably to pay for their own keep.
U.S. Federal Census year 1870
Note : When handwritten records were transcribed, Thome looked like Thorne, and was sometimes misspelled in this fashion.
Name: Mary Thorne [Mary Thome]
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1860
Age in 1870: 10
Birthplace: Illinois
Home in 1870: Limestone, Peoria, Illinois
Race: White
Gender: Female
Post Office: Dowdleville
Head of house in 1870 : Mathias Thorne 33 b. 1837
Mathias's first wife and the mother of his first four children was Anna Rau, b. 1835 d. 1865. She would have been 35 in 1870 had she lived.
Wife in 1870 : Mary Ellen Thorne - Age 21 in this 1870 census. She was Mathias's second wife and stepmother to his first four children. She was documented in the census as being unable to read and write. According to a story told to Marilyn Bour Davis, a Thome descendant through Mary Catherine "Kate" Thome Bour, the sister of Mary Anne Thome, family oral history stated that "the wife of Matt Thome deserted the family". Since Mathias's first wife Anna Rau died young, this reference is to his second wife Mary Ellen.
Children :
1. Mary Thorne 10 cannot read/write b. 1860
Her full name was Mary Ann, but Ann is not on this census. Her mother Anna Rau would have been 25 years old when she gave birth to her. Mary Ann had to have been at least 5 to 6 years old when her mother died, and possibly a bit older.
2. John Thorne 8 b. 1862
3. Catharine Thorne 6 b. 1863-64 (Mary Catherine "Kate")
4. Nicholos Thorne 5 b. 1865
Did Anna Rau die giving birth to this Nicholas in 1865 ?
5. Joseph Thorne 5/12
Joseph's mother is clearly Mary Ellen Thome above, age 21, the second wife. Mary Ellen likely took Joseph with her when she left Mathias and his four children.
After his first wife died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary Anne had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary Anne had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary Anne being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family (the Ambergs) who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary Anne's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary Anne, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary Anne developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary Anne arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University. A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 16, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died, but the other was a healthy child. Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, had her firstborn in February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. She was cared for in the last years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children including Johnny, now a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. The day she was taken to the hospital she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". She had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances and Clara, and her youngest son Clarence, and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed.
Mary Anne had a brother Nicholas Thome, seen in his wedding photo at right, with sister Mary Anne on his right. The professional baseball player Jim Thome is descended through the line of Nicholas.
Mary Anne had a sister named Marian Catherine (or Mary Kathryn) who seems to have been called "Kate". She may have been the first of three wives of John (or Jean) Nicholas Bour. She appears to have died at the young age of 39 in 1902, several months after the birth of her last child who lived until the following year.
Name: Marian Catherine Thome, 20 OCT 1863 - 03 MAY 1902
Birth: 20 OCT 1863 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Marriage: 03 APR 1888 at Pekin, US-61554, Tazewell County, Illinois to Jean Nicolas Bour, 10 SEP 1864 - 14 SEP 1944
Death: 03 MAY 1902 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Burial: ? at Peoria, US-61601, Peoria County, Illinois,St. Joseph Cemetery
Children:
Anna Katherine Bour 09 OCT 1888 - 03 MAR 1889
Oscar Nicholas Bour 07 APR 1890 - 06 MAR 1942
Frank Joseph Bour 05 JUL 1893 - 08 NOV 1975
Madalina Maria Bour 05 DEC 1895 - 19 JAN 1981
Charles Adam Bour 30 JAN 1898 - 26 AUG 1977
Louis John Bour 23 JAN 1900 - 29 JAN 1900
Barbara Lucille Bour 26 JAN 1902 - 16 FEB 1903
The surviving children of John and Kate Bour:
1. Oscar Bour
2. Frank Bour (wife Theresa, children: Marilyn Bour Davis - the family genealogist, d. May 22, 2007 in Peoria, and her sister Geraldine Bour)
3. Madeline Bour
4. Charles Adam Bour (wife Marie Cecilia Pettyplace, children: Gloria Marie Bour Everett).
The Bour brothers Frank and Charles and their families lived within walking distance of each other in Peoria, Frank on Butler Street and Charles on Howett Street.
According to an account completed in 2010 by a Thome family descendant and professional genealogist, Mary Anne Thome's father was an illegitimate child born in 1837 in Germany named Mathias Thome. Mathias and his young mother Elizabeth Thome, and her siblings and parents, were from the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, comprised of the southwest corner of the country, with the Rhine river and Alsace-Lorraine region of France on the western border, and Switzerland on the south.
In the 1840's when Mathias was a small boy, this family group left Germany and established residency in the farmlands outside of Peoria, Illinois. The fatherless Mathias grew up under unknown circumstances, perhaps without a stepfather or other siblings. His mother Elizabeth may be buried in a Catholic cemetery in Peoria, Illinois, under her maiden name of Thome, as there is an Elizabeth Thome documented in St. Joseph's church cemetery there.
Mathias married a German woman named Anna Rau, whose background is unknown. The union produced four children. The firstborn Mary Ann was born in 1860 when Mathias was 23 years old. Sadly, mother Anna died around the year 1865 at the approximate age of 30, of unknown causes. She left behind four children under the age of 5. Mathias remarried, but sometime after the birth of his fifth child in 1870 he was abandoned by his second wife Mary Ellen who reportedly disappeared with the single child she had had with Mathias. Mathias was apparently unable to care for his four remaining children, who were all sent to live with different German families in the area. The children were used as servants by these families, presumably to pay for their own keep.
U.S. Federal Census year 1870
Note : When handwritten records were transcribed, Thome looked like Thorne, and was sometimes misspelled in this fashion.
Name: Mary Thorne [Mary Thome]
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1860
Age in 1870: 10
Birthplace: Illinois
Home in 1870: Limestone, Peoria, Illinois
Race: White
Gender: Female
Post Office: Dowdleville
Head of house in 1870 : Mathias Thorne 33 b. 1837
Mathias's first wife and the mother of his first four children was Anna Rau, b. 1835 d. 1865. She would have been 35 in 1870 had she lived.
Wife in 1870 : Mary Ellen Thorne - Age 21 in this 1870 census. She was Mathias's second wife and stepmother to his first four children. She was documented in the census as being unable to read and write. According to a story told to Marilyn Bour Davis, a Thome descendant through Mary Catherine "Kate" Thome Bour, the sister of Mary Anne Thome, family oral history stated that "the wife of Matt Thome deserted the family". Since Mathias's first wife Anna Rau died young, this reference is to his second wife Mary Ellen.
Children :
1. Mary Thorne 10 cannot read/write b. 1860
Her full name was Mary Ann, but Ann is not on this census. Her mother Anna Rau would have been 25 years old when she gave birth to her. Mary Ann had to have been at least 5 to 6 years old when her mother died, and possibly a bit older.
2. John Thorne 8 b. 1862
3. Catharine Thorne 6 b. 1863-64 (Mary Catherine "Kate")
4. Nicholos Thorne 5 b. 1865
Did Anna Rau die giving birth to this Nicholas in 1865 ?
5. Joseph Thorne 5/12
Joseph's mother is clearly Mary Ellen Thome above, age 21, the second wife. Mary Ellen likely took Joseph with her when she left Mathias and his four children.
After his first wife died, Anton Wilhelm needed a nanny for his baby and other small son, so he hired a young German-American woman named Mary Ann Thome to come and live at the farm. Mary Anne had grown up across the Illinois River in Tazewell County, a motherless child seemingly selected by fate to live a life of suffering and servitude. By the time she arrived at the Wilhelm farm, Mary Anne had endured a grim childhood, during which her mother had died and was replaced by an illiterate teen stepmother, who had her own baby and then fled the marriage, abandoning the four stepchildren. This childhood abuse was followed by Mary Anne being indentured or given away by her father Matthias Thome, finding herself at the age of 14 spending what was left of her youth working as a live-in maid and nanny to a German family (the Ambergs) who may have been distantly related to her. According to a census, she seems to have been illiterate until she was a young teen, and probably only semi-literate the rest of her life.
Within a short time of 26 year old Mary Anne's arrival at the Wilhelm farm in 1887, 30 year old Anton decided to marry her. One might imagine that Mary Anne, not having any better prospects in life due to no social standing, no education, and no family, probably accepted her fate as preordained, by God or man, or both. The circumstances of her "engagement" were obviously coercive -- it was definitely not the Sound Of Music. We will never know to what degree she had even a tiny bit of dignified choice in the matter. What is well known is that Mary Anne developed a personality that can only be described as bitter, punitive, and cold. Though Mary Anne arrived damaged, if Anton had been a thoughtful and kind man, the story may have played out differently. There are few stories representative of Anton's character, as all around him in his home life seem to have taken a vow of silence. But the man who emerges out of the shadows seems to have been defined mainly by a pronounced arrogance and callousness.
Anton and Mary married on July 11, 1888. Two years later Mary had her firstborn, Alfred, in August 1890. The witnesses to the marriage of Anton and Mary Anne were Nicholas Thome (one of her brothers) and Emma Herky. The marriage license was issued in Tazewell County where Mary Anne had grown up, but where the actual ceremony took place is unknown. Mary Anne wore a dark blue silk taffeta wedding dress.
Anton was 42 year old prosperous farmer at the turn of the new century in January 1900. His firstborn Frank was 16, and his youngest Clara was 3 years old.
In January of 1913 and January of 1914, Anton became a grandfather for the first time at the age of 55 when his oldest child Frank had his first two children, Carl Francis and Bernice.
In 1916 Mary and Anton's two daughters both married. The eldest Frances married John Holmes, the son of Zealy Moss Holmes, who was among the descendants of Lydia Moss Bradley, the founder of Bradley University. A short time after her sister's marriage, the youngest Clara eloped at age 19 with a young Irish-German Boylan-Weber man, Arch Boylan, who had grown up on his now deceased father John Boylan's farm a short distance from the Wilhelm farm. John Boylan and Clara's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had befriended each other as young men in 1850-55 when Nick had just arrived from Germany and John was assisting on his father Patrick's 10 year old farm in Chillicothe. John Boylan had died in 1903 when his youngest child Arch was 16, and little Clara Wilhelm was just 6. But both Nick Wilhelm and his wife Magdalena lived into their 90's, and they seemed to be pleased with Clara's and Arch's marriage, as they offered the young couple an entire houseful of furniture as a wedding present.
Mary Thome became a biological grandmother for the first time in 1916 when her eldest daughter Frances gave birth to twin girls on September 30. Sadly one of the babies died, but the other was a healthy child. Around 1917 Mary's and Anton's youngest son Clarence departed for Europe to fight in World War I, thankfully returning unscathed. In April of 1918 Frances had her second surviving child, and that summer, in July of 1918, Anton's mother Magdalena Mueller Wilhelm died in her 90's, leaving her widowed husband Nicholas Wilhelm. Mary's and Anton's youngest child Clara, age 22, had her firstborn in February of 1919.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney, who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage.
The stealing of these children was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters ripped away from him when he was just 7, for no real reason. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Anton died in 1931 at 74 of unknown causes; his wife Mary Anne was 70. Mary Anne lived to be 82 years old, dying in St. Francis Hospital in Peoria, Illinois in May of 1943. Clara and her mother Mary Anne lived next door to each other, in a small group of Anton and Mary Wilhelm-owned cottages in the riverfront village of Rome just outside of Chillicothe. She was cared for in the last years of her life by her widowed daughter Clara and Clara's three children including Johnny, now a man of 24 serving in the Marine Corps at the time of his grandmother's passing.
Mary Anne was perfectly sentient up until her passing, apparently from complications of chronic vein and heart disease. The day she was taken to the hospital she insisted on taking a final walk through her large vegetable garden, to "see this place one last time". She had 15 surviving grandchildren through her two daughters Frances and Clara, and her youngest son Clarence, and four surviving step-grandchildren through her stepsons Frank and Ed.
Mary Anne had a brother Nicholas Thome, seen in his wedding photo at right, with sister Mary Anne on his right. The professional baseball player Jim Thome is descended through the line of Nicholas.
Mary Anne had a sister named Marian Catherine (or Mary Kathryn) who seems to have been called "Kate". She may have been the first of three wives of John (or Jean) Nicholas Bour. She appears to have died at the young age of 39 in 1902, several months after the birth of her last child who lived until the following year.
Name: Marian Catherine Thome, 20 OCT 1863 - 03 MAY 1902
Birth: 20 OCT 1863 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Marriage: 03 APR 1888 at Pekin, US-61554, Tazewell County, Illinois to Jean Nicolas Bour, 10 SEP 1864 - 14 SEP 1944
Death: 03 MAY 1902 at Peoria; US-61601; Peoria County; Illinois
Burial: ? at Peoria, US-61601, Peoria County, Illinois,St. Joseph Cemetery
Children:
Anna Katherine Bour 09 OCT 1888 - 03 MAR 1889
Oscar Nicholas Bour 07 APR 1890 - 06 MAR 1942
Frank Joseph Bour 05 JUL 1893 - 08 NOV 1975
Madalina Maria Bour 05 DEC 1895 - 19 JAN 1981
Charles Adam Bour 30 JAN 1898 - 26 AUG 1977
Louis John Bour 23 JAN 1900 - 29 JAN 1900
Barbara Lucille Bour 26 JAN 1902 - 16 FEB 1903
The surviving children of John and Kate Bour:
1. Oscar Bour
2. Frank Bour (wife Theresa, children: Marilyn Bour Davis - the family genealogist, d. May 22, 2007 in Peoria, and her sister Geraldine Bour)
3. Madeline Bour
4. Charles Adam Bour (wife Marie Cecilia Pettyplace, children: Gloria Marie Bour Everett).
The Bour brothers Frank and Charles and their families lived within walking distance of each other in Peoria, Frank on Butler Street and Charles on Howett Street.
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