Wilderman Family (3) - Colonists and Pioneers

Part 3 - From Frontier to Settled Territory
Find Part 2 of the Story Here . . .
Find Part 1 of the Story Here . . .

Note, this post has been revised. The original 2-Part Wilderman Family series has been updated and more information has been added. The series has been expanded to 3 Parts with most of the new information in this part.

Jacob Wilderman and Johann Meyer, and family left their small village in Baden, Germany and came to Colonial America in 1751. Jacob would marry Elizabetha Meyer and make his home in Maryland. There he would raise a family, farm, fight in the revolution and live out his live. After the Revolution, his son George would marry and head to western Pennsylvania to live in the company of other Pennsylvania Dutch settlers. Later he would pick-up once more and venture into the frontier of the Northwest Territory and settle just east of the Mississippi River in what is now Illinois.

The Wilderman Cemetery in the countryside on Section 8 in the Town of Freeburg.
James Wilderman, Sarah Jarvis and a number of their children are buried here.

Reuben Holcomb I - Short Biography

Reuben T. Holcomb - Wisconsin Pioneer

I find Reuben Holcomb to be one of the more interesting of my ancestors. This might be in part because there is some good information available about him but I think it is also because of the times he lived in and the pioneering path he chose. Reuben was born May 16, 1816, on the western frontier in Monroe County, New York. He was the third born of five known children of Apollas Holcombe (b.1791, d.1823) and Mehitable Bunnell (b.1793, d.1853). Apollas was born in Granby, Connecticut and had come west to Bloomfield, New York, with his parents after the American Revolution. Apollas was a veteran of the War of 1812, where he was wounded at the burning of Buffalo in 1814. He would die in 1823 at the age of 32 and leave Mehitable to raise their five young children. Mehitable was the daughter of Jonathan Bunnell (b.1741) and Mehitable Morse (b.1743). The Bunnell family came west from Blandford, Massachusetts and settled near the Holcombe family in Bloomfield.



Rural Green County has changed little since first settled by
Reuben Holcomb and others in the 1840s and 1850s.