HathTrust.org: A competitor railroad yields a ancestor’s business location
The timeline of places where one of my great great grandfathers resided has always fascinated me. Today I was searching online using some of my more unusual ancestral surnames. I repeat this every few months in order to see what new items appear online. The result was that I added a street name for William Rudolph Slaker’s butcher shop in Berlin, Wisconsin.
One search was done on the freely available HathiTrust. Up popped the “Gazetteer and directory of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railway and branches, the Western Union and the Sabula, Ackley & Dakota railroads : embracing all alphabetical directories, with sketches of all towns lying along the lines of the above railroads, distance tables and other information.” (Detroit, Mich.: Polk, Murphy & Co., 1875.) This is not a regular city directory, but it gave me what I needed.
He was a butcher before he retired and was also a butcher during his brief Civil War service that he entered from the town of Berlin. He later followed his two sons (Louis F. and Fred) to many locations around Wisconsin as they moved from one railroad station to another. Eventually they ended up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My own hometown was not the last place of residence for all of them.
It’s ironical that I found William listed in a publication related to the Milwaukee Road. His two sons, and later a grandson, worked for the “Omaha” (Chicago, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha Railway).
Now I need to get back to Berlin and check out any of the old storefronts on Huron St.
