Author: Philip Weiss

So here’s an interesting mystery. My grandmother was Lillian Solle. She was the daughter of William Solle, born in Springfield, Illinois in 1865, but moved to Madison sometime between 1900 and 1905. His father was an German immigrant from the Kingdom of Hanover (before Germany was a country), also named William Solle. Germany never centralized all the various records from all the principalities and kingdoms after it federated into the German Empire. So there’s not a whole lot of genealogy records online from Germany. If I ever want to dig into the German branches of the family, it’s not going to be easy like it has been with Sweden or Denmark. Consequently, I haven’t pursued much about the Solle family.

But now I kinda want to.

Solle is not a very common name in the U.S. Searching for “Solle” in Madison newspapers brings up only 732 hits. I haven’t looked through all of them, but I have poked around a lot. One was an item from the 26 Jun 1924 Capital Times about the Solles (Flora, Lillian, and William Jr.) visiting relatives in St. Louis. Much of the text is faded in the microfilm and unreadable. But it mentions a cousin, Dr. Walter Solle. I’d previously noted that and promptly forgot about it. Found my notation yesterday and searched a bit.

The first thing I did was search for Walter Solle in the immigration databases on Ancestry.com. Though I can’t read the text of the article, it mentions Germany so I assumed he was visiting from Germany. And there are a lot of passenger manifests post 1900. Bingo. He arrived from Germany in New York on the ship Albert Ballin in May 1924, a month before the trip to St. Louis. And the manifest lists William Solle of Madison as his cousin, so I know this isn’t a different Walter Solle.

The interesting thing here is that he lists his occupation as political economist. Which would be cool, because the world of political economy really wasn’t that large in the 1920s.

There’s also a second manifest with him on it from 1927, coming from Germany again. This time he’s listed as a merchant, and he’s also a resident alien.

I did a narrower search for Walter Solle in the Madison newspapers. If he’s living in Madison now, they were likely to have written about him at some point. Bingo. On 28 July 1924, the Capital Times had an article about him moving to the U.S.

Only instead of being a political economist list he was a couple of months earlier, now his profession is a composer. The article goes into some detail about his exploits in the German Army during World War I. Since the source for those tales was likely Walter Solle himself, I’d tend to take them with a grain of salt.

Anyhow, all I know about Walter Solle is contained in those four items. He doesn’t show up in the 1930 Census. No other mentions I could find quickly in the Madison newspapers. Did he return to Germany? Did he die? What was his real profession?

A great source of information for my family genealogy has been burial records. I don’t mean lists of tombs in cemeteries, though those have been a good source too. Some cemeteries have put their burial records online, and they have been awesome.

The first relevant cemetery I found that did this is Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison. I stumbled on this last summer. They don’t put original copies of their records online, but at some point they transcribed everything into electronic form and that is there. Here’s what they had for my great grandfather, William Solle:

Prior to finding that, I’d thought he’d died in 1945, as that’s the year I was told. Mind you, the information isn’t all correct. For instance, the record states that there is no monument and no marker. I’ve been there and have photographed the marker.

Brigham City Cemetery and Ogden City Cemetery in Utah have also transcribed their records, including parents and spouses of the deceased. Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs put a listing of their burials online too. Theirs has plot location and year of burial, and sometimes birth and death dates.

Even though I don’t have any relations buried at the grounds, Lake View Cemetery locally put their records online.

Most of the ones that put their records online are government owned cemeteries. A lot of private cemeteries will charge anyone but family wanting to look up where a grave is. I find that kind of irritating.

I found a really fun one last week though. The Solle family originally settled in Springfield, Illinois. There are a number of them buried in Calvary Cemetery. I came across a set of interment records for Oak Ridge Cemetery last week. Curiously, all the Solles are listed in their records. I don’t know why this is, but perhaps the two cemeteries were jointly managed for a while. I don’t know. Anyway, this was an awesome find because this set of records are scans of the original burial log books. They include age, date of death, location of death, and cause of death.

Edit: I found out why they are listed in Oak Ridge Cemetery in the official records but Calvary Cemetery elsewhere. The two cemeteries abut each other, and there isn’t clear demarcation in all places. Years ago, someone inventoried graves in Calvary Cemetery and the Sangamon County Genealogical Society posted their list. However, due to the lack of a good boundary, they included some markers from Oak Ridge in their list, including my family. Then people copied that list to other places, and so the misinformation spread.

Here’s the page for my second great grandmother, Maria Solle.

One obstacle to using these records is that the Illinois Digital Archives decided to display these images one section at a time.

No problem. I downloaded all the pieces and started lining them up. But that was very time consuming. Thanks to the lazyweb (specifically Fes) I found Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It’s made for stitching together panoramas, but these is a very easy case of the same problem. I simply dropped in all the pieces and it sorts and merges them, though I had to adjust things once or twice. There are a few old maps that I can get pieces of online the same way, so this is gonna be a great tool.

And here’s a bonus for reading this far. Oak Ridge Cemetery is where Abraham Lincoln was buried. Like everyone else there, the cemetery entered his information in the log book. Here’s the re-assembled page. I’m sure someone else on the internet has already done this, but I couldn’t find it.