The Lines That Made Foggy

A narrative of the ancestry of Don “Foggy” Krumpos, traced across ten countries, three centuries, and one recurring fact: everyone ended up in Wisconsin.

I. The Old Countries

In 1745, a man named Eastes Kendall was living in Kent — the Garden of England, the hop fields and orchards of the southeast. His son Stephen Eastes Kendall married Ann Forstall in the parish church at Wingham on December 15, 1819. The Forstalls took their name from a hamlet just outside town. These were people who had been in the same few square miles for centuries. Their son William was born in 1822 and did something nobody in the family had done before: he left. He crossed the Atlantic and landed in Minnesota.

Forty years earlier and five hundred miles north, Margaret Laing was born around 1783 in Rhynd, a small parish near Perth in the heart of Scotland. At sixteen she traveled south to Newcastle upon Tyne — the industrial city on the English-Scottish border — and married William Miller at St. Nicholas Church on September 4, 1799. Their daughter Sophia was born in 1805, by which time the family had emigrated to Canada, part of the great British migration to Upper Canada. Sophia married Thomas Hutcheson, an Englishman, and their daughter Eliza was born around 1830 on Canadian soil — a child of Scotland, England, and the New World all at once.

In County Down, in the northeast of Ireland — Ulster, the Protestant north — a family named Martin was preparing to leave. Henry Martin was born on August 18, 1830. His mother was Nancy Storm, a woman with an English surname in an Irish county, almost certainly descended from the Plantation settlers who had been placed in Ulster by the English Crown two centuries earlier. The Martins were Protestant, not Catholic. They were Irish by geography, but English and Scottish by blood — the complicated inheritance of the Plantation.

In Wittenberg, Germany — Martin Luther’s city — John Pfister was born on June 19, 1830, the same year as Henry Martin in Ireland. In Mecklenburg, in the flat north of Germany near the Baltic, John Schmidt was born in 1822. In Hanover, Christian Vollmer was born in 1815. In Baden, in the southwest, Anna Maria Kurtz was born in 1837. In Domazlice, in western Bohemia, Mary Katherine Kadletz was born around 1822, and Joseph Wenzel Stefl was born in nearby Klattau in 1818. In Bohemia too — the exact town unrecorded — Joseph Krumpos was born in 1845.

In the village of Melin, in the Walloon region of Belgium, a family named Coppersmith was established. And in the parishes along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec — Boucherville, Vercheres, Sorel — French-Canadian families named Beaudoin, Lajeunesse, and Surprenant had been rooted since the 1600s, their names gradually anglicizing as they moved west: Beaudoin became Bodoh, Lajeunesse became Young, Surprenant became Surprise.

All of them were about to converge on a single state.

II. The Crossings

They came in waves.

The French-Canadians came earliest, drifting south and west from Quebec into Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley in the early 1800s. They brought their faith, their language, and their enormous families. By the time Wisconsin achieved statehood in 1848, the Bodoh and Young families were already settled in the eastern counties.

The Irish came next. Henry Martin arrived in New York around 1853 — he was twenty-three, and the Great Famine was still a fresh wound. His eldest son Elias was born in New York that same year. Within three years, Henry had moved west to Door County, Wisconsin — raw frontier, dense forest, Lake Michigan shoreline. He was among the first settlers. By 1858 he was farming in the town of Sevastopol. He would become postmaster, town treasurer, a pillar of a community he helped build from nothing.

In Door County he found Eliza Hutchinson — or she found him. She had come from Canada, the daughter of an Englishman and a Canadian-born woman of Scottish descent. An Irishman and a Canadian met on the Wisconsin frontier and married on November 12, 1862, while the Civil War raged to the south. They would have ten children. Their youngest, born in 1869, was given the biblical name Eliphalet — “God is my deliverance.” Everyone called him Life.

The Germans came in the same years, in larger numbers. John Pfister and his brother Phillip arrived in Door County in the late 1850s. Phillip died in the Civil War in 1863; John stayed behind to care for both families, raised eight children, and was buried at Blossomberg Cemetery in Fish Creek in 1908. John Schmidt settled in Joliet, Illinois. Christian Vollmer came to Illinois too, then moved to Minnesota. Anna Maria Kurtz left Baden and found him in America — they met in a new country, from different corners of the old one.

The Bohemians came later. Joseph Krumpos arrived in 1867 and settled in Oconto County. Joseph Wenzel Stefl came from Klattau and was naturalized in Wisconsin in 1884. They brought a different language, a different culture, but the same pattern: cross the ocean, find land, build something, stay.

The Belgians came from Melin and Beauvechain to Dyckesville and Robinsonville, in the Belgian Settlement east of Green Bay — a community so concentrated that Belgian-accented French was spoken there into the twentieth century.

By 1870, all of these families — Irish, English, Scottish, German, Bohemian, Belgian, French-Canadian — were within a hundred miles of each other in northeastern Wisconsin. They didn’t know it yet, but they were building toward one person.

III. The Wisconsin Generations

The first American-born generation worked the land and built the towns.

Henry Martin farmed in Sevastopol for thirty-eight years. His house burned down a few weeks before he died of stomach cancer in 1896, age sixty-five. He was taken to his neighbor Rudolph Zettel’s home, where he spent his last days. His funeral at Bayside Cemetery drew “a very large number of sorrowing friends and neighbors.” Of his ten children, only three sons survived him.

But the youngest — Life — survived. Life Martin married Mildred Amelia Guernsey, a woman from Ionia, Michigan, whose father John Loami Guernsey had lost his own father at age two and his first wife at twenty-three. Mildred had lost her mother at three. Life and Mildred settled on Peter Street in Sturgeon Bay and raised four children. Life worked as a laborer. The family attended the Christian Science Society — unusual for Door County, where the churches were Lutheran, Moravian, and Catholic. Life lived to eighty-seven.

Meanwhile, the Schmidt and Kendall lines were converging in Minnesota. Charles Frederick Schmidt — son of John from Mecklenburg and Elizabeth Rabe — married Maria Katharina Wilhelmina Vollmer, whose parents had come from Hanover and Baden. Their son Frederick married Mary Jane Kendall, whose father was descended from the Kendalls and Forstalls of Kent, England, and whose mother Margaret Schindler was the daughter of German immigrants. Frederick and Mary Jane’s son Clifford would become Foggy’s maternal grandfather.

And on the Krumpos side, Lawrence Antone Krumpos — son of the Bohemian immigrant Joseph — married twice. His second wife, Matilda Schneider, gave him a son named Donald. Donald married Dorothy Coppersmith, whose family traced to the Belgian Settlement and the French-Canadian parishes of Quebec. Dorothy carried the gene for Huntington’s disease, though no one knew it yet.

IV. The Short Lives

There is a pattern in these lines that repeats like a wound.

Justus George Guernsey died at twenty-four. His son John Loami was two.

Almeda Hinson died at twenty-three. Her daughter Mildred was three.

Gerald Martin died at twenty-eight. His daughter Helen was seven.

Three consecutive generations where a parent was taken young. Mildred Guernsey grew up without a mother, watched her own son die at twenty-eight, and lived to ninety-one carrying all of it.

Gerald Martin — Foggy’s great-grandfather — was a rivet heater at the Leathem D. Smith shipyard in Sturgeon Bay. He married Hazel Mielke of Clay Banks on January 29, 1921. They were both teenagers. He died at home on North Church Street on a Sunday morning in June 1931, after two months of illness. His youngest son Gerald Jr. was two months old. The funeral was held at his parents’ house on Peter Street. The Door County News called him simply “Gerald Martin, age 28.”

Hazel remarried within a year — Clarence Lau, on May 7, 1932. She lived to eighty-four. Her daughter Helen — Gerald’s daughter, Foggy’s grandmother — married Clifford Schmidt, had a daughter named Betty, and died in 1974 at age forty-nine. Betty married Keith Krumpos, had children including Don, and died in 1993 at forty-six.

Donald Howard Krumpos — Foggy’s paternal grandfather — died in 1964 at thirty-nine. Dorothy, his wife, succumbed to Huntington’s in 2002.

The short lives are not the whole story. But they are part of the inheritance.

V. The Map

Stand at the intersection of all these lines and look backward. Here is where Don Krumpos comes from:

Scotland — Margaret Laing, born around 1783 in Rhynd, Perthshire. The oldest ancestor with a specific birthplace. She married an Englishman in Newcastle and their descendants crossed to Canada, then Wisconsin.

England — The Kendalls and Forstalls of Wingham, Kent, traced to 1745. Thomas Hutcheson, born 1808. William Miller of Northumberland. Nancy Storm, whose English surname ended up in County Down.

Ireland — Henry Martin, born August 18, 1830, in County Down, Ulster. Protestant Irish — not Famine Catholic, but Plantation stock, English and Scottish blood planted in Irish soil two centuries before Henry was born. He became a farmer, a postmaster, a town treasurer in Door County, Wisconsin. His great-great-great-grandson lives seven miles from where he farmed.

Germany — The largest single thread. John Schmidt from Mecklenburg. Christian Vollmer from Hanover. Anna Maria Kurtz from Baden. John Pfister from Wittenberg. The Mielke family. The Schindler family. The Schneider family. Margaret Pfister’s people. They came from every corner of the German-speaking world — the Baltic coast, the Saxon heartland, the Black Forest borderlands — and reassembled in Wisconsin as if the state were a German reunion that nobody planned.

Bohemia — Joseph Krumpos from an unknown town. Joseph Wenzel Stefl from Klattau. Mary Katherine Kadletz. The Czech thread, arriving in the 1860s, settling in Oconto and Shawano counties.

Belgium — The Coppersmiths of Melin, in the Walloon country. The Belgian Settlement east of Green Bay.

France — The deepest line of all. Jacque Beaudoin, born around 1645 in La Rochelle. Helene Desportes, born in 1620, one of the first Europeans born in Quebec. Jacques Surprenant, from Mortagne-au-Perche, who came to New France in the 1660s. These lines run thirteen generations deep, from the banks of the St. Lawrence to the Fox River Valley.

Canada — Eliza Hutchinson, born around 1830, daughter of the English-Scottish migration to Upper Canada. The French-Canadian families who became the Bodoh and Young lines.

VI. One Person

All of these lines — Scottish parish records and Irish potato fields, German ships and Bohemian villages, French fur traders and English hop farmers, Belgian settlements and Canadian homesteads — converge in a single person who lives in an 1890s brick building in a small Lake Michigan town, paints murals, builds fantasy worlds, works for a land trust, and raises a six-year-old son seven miles from where his Irish great-great-great-grandfather farmed.

Don Krumpos carries genes from at least eight European countries. His mother told him they had Irish blood. She was right. She just didn’t know it came from County Down, through a man named Henry who was postmaster of Sevastopol, through a son named Eliphalet that everybody called Life.