The Hyphen Family Lineage

[Article "David Forst" from Huntington County, Indiana History & Families 1834-1993, pp252-253.]

David Forst, his wife Mary, son George, and wife Eliza moved to the north side of Warren Twp., Huntington County, IN before 1850. David's daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Conrad Forst (a cousin of David), had moved to that township sometime before. Samuel Forst, another son, moved to Huntington, IN several years after his father and sister. Later he moved with his family to somewhere in Michigan.

David was born in Pennsylvania, as were his parents. He moved from there to Starke [sic] County, OH, where he lived a number of years. He finally moved to Indiana where he died sometime between 1880 and 1890.

George was born in Starke [sic] County, OH in 1830. He married Henrietta Miller who was German born in 1850. They lived with George's parents for some time, then moved to Roanoke, then on to Bluffton where both died.

George and Henrietta had seven children: Melissa Forst Stuver, Sophia Forst Kitt, Benjamin, Salome Forst Wilson, Emory, Albert and Edwin. Edwin lived only one year.

Melissa married Alfred Stuver and they were parents of Effie Bayha, my grandmother. Benjamin, Emory and Albert all moved to Bluffton where they were in business together. Their history is covered in the recent Wells County History Book. Sophia married Jefferson Kitt, but died in childbirth with their first child. Salome married James Wilson. They lived in Union Twp., Huntington County. Their history is covered in the 1887 Huntington County History Book.

Sarah and Conrad had seven children and Conrad had a son by a former marriage. Their children were: David (step-son), Louise Forst Herndon, Emma Forst Rothermel, Sara Jane Forst Brandenburg, Alfred, Emmet, Maria Forst Campbell and George Washington Forst.

Conrad was a farmer and worked his land until his death. Sarah Jane moved to Marion with her daughters after Conrad's death and died in a tragic accident in 1901.

Samuel married Elizabeth Miller, a sister of Henrietta who was George's wife. They had at least one child and may have had more.

George was a volunteer from Huntington County during the Civil War, but never saw active duty because of an injury suffered during training.

The Forst's [sic] seemed to have been better read and educated than many of their period. I hope someday to find more of their history. (Submitted by Jane Anne Thomas, Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter of David Forst.)

[Obituary for David Furst, from the Andrews Express, 24 Apr 1884, p2; posted online to the FindaGrave.com website.]

Daniel(David) Furst, a blind man, and Lucinda Grewell, both living northwest of LaGro, and both charges upon the county, died last Saturday.

Note: Researching David Forst

Despite outliving his first wife by nearly three decades, not much more information is available for David at this point. Jane Anne Thomas had written some pieces about David that were contained in her files and published in a county history text, but I have had some difficulty finding records to both verify what she'd written and supplement the history she'd crafted for David.

David's full name is unknown, as I have yet to find any confirmed record or document that reports any middle name, or even an initial. Likewise, the original spelling of the family surname is unknown at this time. Multiple phonetic spelling variations for the name can be found over the years, easily attributed to the difficulty native English speakers had with many German surnames as well as the variations in literacy on both sides. As the name often appears recorded as First or Furst, this suggests the original spelling contained an umlaut, and was likely Först or Förrst. Occasionally, the name will appear as two syllables, spelled as Forrest or similar. By the time David's grandchildren were born, the family seems to have settled on the anglicized spelling of Forst.

The larger Forst family was one of several German-descended families that seem to have migrated more-or-less together from their initial American settlements in Pennsylvania to eastern Ohio and then eventually to northeastern Indiana in its first few decades of statehood and settlement. There are records of a man with the surname of Forst corresponding with General Washington during the War, reporting on troops and supplies; copies of transcriptions of some of these records were contained in Jane Anne's files, though little information seems to be available to indicate as to whether this man was an immediate relative or ancestor of our David Forst.

David's birth year is generally held to be 1795, as most of the census records report his age as ending in four or five. The census records also all give his reported birthplace as Pennsylvania, and Jane Anne writes that he was born in York Cty, Pennsylvania, though I have yet to verify that. One potential substantiation is that the couple that might be the parents of his first wife, Mary Schlosser, were resident in York Cty in 1790, not long before David's birth, and were among the families migrating into eastern Ohio by the time of David's marriage to Mary. Their wedding date is given in Jane Anne's notes (and repeated in the work by her cousin, Franklin Harry Bayha) as 1 Sep 1822 in Stark Cty, Ohio, though I have not yet found any records that substantiate this. Their youngest son, George Washington Forst, was presumably born in Greentown, Stark Cty, Ohio, in 1830, which may help corroborate the family's residence history once confirmed.

The first confirmed record I have found for David is the 1850 US Census listing for his household in Huntington, Huntington Cty, Indiana, where he and his wife were counted as living with his youngest son George and new daughter-in-law Henrietta (Miller) Forst, in addition to their infant granddaughter (Eliza) by their oldest son Samuel after the death of Samuel's first wife (Henrietta's older sister Elizabeth) and an orphan from another local family.

David's first wife, Mary Schlosser, is reported to have died in late 1855, and there is a marriage record from early 1856 for David to the much younger Mary (Carr) Delvin, a widow in her early forties whose husband (James Delvin) was reported by the Fort Wayne Daily Times to have been "an inexorable drinker of whiskey" and to have died just weeks after David's first wife. How long this marriage lasted is unknown, as David can be found in the 1860 US Census living with his second wife Mary and her three children (along with David's granddaughter Eliza), but in the 1870 US Census his second wife Mary and her children are no longer present. It seems unlikely that David was twice a widower, given how much younger Mary Delvin was than David, so divorce seems more likely, but I have not found anything to confirm either outcome at this point.

In the 1870 US Census, David is counted living on the farm of his son George, along with George's wife and their four youngest children, in Jackson Twp, Huntington Cty, Indiana. Next door to them was George's oldest, Melissa (Forst) Stuver, with her husband Alfred and daughter Elfrieda.

There are two 1880 US Census listings for David. On 10 Jun 1880 he was listed as a boarder in a rooming house run by German-born Fred Pronnett in Goshen, Elkhart Cty, Indiana, and just over two weeks later he was counted in the household of his brother George Forst in Chester Twp, Wabash Cty, Indiana. Both listings give him as an eighty-four-year-old widower, born in Pennsylvania, and blind, so I am quite confident that both listings apply to him. (It should be noted that David's blindness was reported in the 1870 US Census, as well.)

No specific death or burial record has been confirmed for David, though there is an entry on the FindaGrave.com website for David Forst in Foster Cemetery in Wabash, Wabash Cty, Indiana for a David Forst. This cemetery's listing on the website is almost certainly from an older published list of burials as this cemetery, like the one in which his wife is buried, has been abandoned for many years. The vital dates, then, would likely be pulled from cemetery records from years past, and are the vital dates that I have noted in my work here. The website listing for David includes notes that very few headstones remain, and none of those visible can be seen to read "Forst." Additionally, the listing contains some supplemental information including a citation of a sentence in the local newspaper the Andrews Express from April of 1884, announcing the death of a "Daniel Furst, a blind man... and [a charge] upon the county."

David's parentage and family origins are mostly unknown at this point, as the only reference I have yet found is in the 1880 US Census listing for his brother George's household. In that record, which was presumably answered for David by his brother, the birthplace for both the men's parents is given as Bavaria. Researching the extended Forst family of that generation, including George, may help identify David's parents.

The only known photo of David Forst was a small cabinet photo contained in Jane Anne's files. While it is undated, I would guess from the style of the print that it stems from the early-to-mid 1870s; David's appearance suggests he likely still lived with his son George at the time of the photo, along with the fact that his son's family made a point of having portraits taken by local photographers. David is pictured wearing a vest and coat with a simply-collared shirt, holding a cane in both hands. His eyes appear closed and sunken, and he is facing somewhat away from the camera, rather than toward it - giving us a fairly clear impression of the condition in which he found himself in his last years.