In my Voigt family tree, I have a second cousin twice removed named Charles William Teasdale. He was born in 1896 in Cassville, Wisconsin, the town my great great grandfather Anton Weiss lived in, and grew up there until the early 1910s. In 1913 his mother Clara Voigt died, and in 1914 his father Alonzo B. Teasdale died. Charles and his brother Harold made their way to the Chicago area, where Charles married Mae Alice Vonasek in 1920, whose father had also died while she was young.
Charles became involved in an evangelical church as well, and this is where the genealogy gets interesting. In 1924, Charles and Mae went to Kijabe in the British Kenya Colony and became missionaries. The key records for many of my relatives are census records. Not so with the Teasdales. Their missionary work kept them out of the U.S. during the 1930 and 1940 U.S. Censuses. However, they left a long trail of migration records with frequent exits from the U.S., transit through the United Kingdom, returns to the U.S., and even one stop in Brazil.
In 1924, the first left Oak Park, Illinois for Kenya, traveling via New York and Southampton, England. They returned in 1931 with one child, traveling through Bremen, Germany and re-entering the U.S. at New York.
In 1933, they again left Oak Park for Kenya. They also traveled through Southampton, England on their way to British East Africa. The family returned in 1938 via Le Havre, France, this time with two additional children.
They only stayed until 1940, when they again went to Kenya. This time they traveled via Rio de Janero, I assume in part because World War II made travel through Europe too dangerous. The Brazilian records for their 6 day stay in Rio included the passport photos used at the top of this post.
In 1947, they came back to the U.S. again. This time they embarked in Mombasa, British East Africa and sailed directly to New York City on the Great Falls Victory cargo ship.
The pair left again in 1949, this time traveling back to Kijabe through Southampton, England back. They returned in 1955, flyinf Pan American Airlines from London.
And in 1957 they left the U.S. for Kenya for at least the 5th time.
U.S. and U.K. passenger manifests after about 1960 are not public, so I don’t know how many more times they passed through our borders. Nowadays international travel is much more common, but back then it was rare. This currently the largest amount of travel records I’ve got for one couple in my family tree.
Mae Vonasek Teasdale died in Kijabe in 1970 and is buried in the cemetery nearby. Charles remarried in 1972 before retiring to a retired missionaries community in Florida where he died in 1985. I haven’t read up on the Africa Inland Mission in Kijabe, so I don’t know how integral the Teasdale’s were to their work, but they obviously spent a lot of time there. At least two of Charles children became missionaries, and there are several more generations after them. As some of them are alive, I’ve not written any identifying information about them.
