Luzius Hegnauer and Anna Margreth Bernet in the papers, 1856–1900

Living persons: none of the people named in this file is living (every item is dated 1856–1900). No [LIVING] tags were needed.

Summary

• Queries: 183 logged name queries (about 170 distinct), plus 25 coverage and facet probes. Each query returned its complete result list (up to 600 records), so splitting by decade was not needed.
• Hits examined: about 480 hit locations. For each one I viewed a cropped image of the page at the hit (the OCR text itself is not exposed). The pages were:
  • all 98 Missouri "Hegnauer" pages of 1856–1900 other than a display advertisement;
  • 3 of the 39 Westliche Post / Mississippi Blätter advertisement pages;
  • about 100 pages found under variant spellings and wildcards;
  • 175 "Lucius" pages in the Bates and St. Clair County papers;
  • 55 "Luzi" pages in the Hermann papers;
  • the Oregon, Kansas, Illinois and Kansas City variant hits.
• Items that are certainly about the couple:
  • The Kansas City Star, 21 Aug 1891, p. 6: NEW. A second printing of the pension-grant list, naming "Luzius Hegnauer".
  • The Kansas City Times, 21 Aug 1891, p. 2: ALREADY CITED.
• Possible items (all "L. Hegnauer", and more likely his son Leonhard):
  • a county-court bridge petition, 1891;
  • a horse breeders' company, 1891;
  • the purchase of an organ by "one of oldest settlers in Pleasant Gap neighborhood", 1892;
  • a petition list, 1885.
• Death, burial, estate and probate: no notice of Luzius's or Margreth's death, burial, estate or probate was found under any spelling in any Missouri, Kansas, Illinois or Oregon paper of 1856–1900 on Newspapers.com.
• Name forms: the Bates County papers also printed the name as Hegenaur, Heganaur, Hegenour, Hegnawer, Hegnaer, Hegnaner, Heganuer and Hagenauer. All of these were searched and read. Every item found under them concerns Leonhard, his children or his grandchildren.
• Hermanner Volksblatt: the Hermann German paper of 1860–1869 cannot be searched for the family by OCR. It is printed in Fraktur, and the surname never comes out as any recognisable form. Only a page-by-page reading could find Luzius there (see What is still unsearched).

1. Newspaper items already cited in the masters (before this harvest)

H0036's Research Notes list "seven Appleton City Journal items of 1892–1896 [that] are still unread". I have now read all of them (items 30–60 in table 3b). Every one concerns the grandson Leonard (born 1872) or his father Leonhard. None concerns Margreth.

2. Search log

Method. I used the site's own search endpoint, /api/search/query, from the signed-in page. Its parameters were:

• keyword;
• date-start and date-end;
• region (a US state);
• publication-ids (one paper, or a list of papers);
• entity types page, obituary, marriage, birth and crime;
• sort by relevance, 100 results per page, with every page of results fetched.

Each hit's word position came from /api/search/hits. A crop of the page image at that position was then displayed and read on screen.

Wildcards. * means any run of letters and ? means exactly one letter. A query with more than two ? characters, or with only one letter before a *, is refused by the site.

Dates. Unless a row says otherwise, the dates are 1856–1900.

Publication ids used in the log:

"BATES" in the log means the set 31250, 36071, 30951, 36077, 23658, 36061, 36078, 31254 and 30934. From query 145 on, 1477 was added to the set.

2a. Name queries

Some queries were run twice and gave the same counts both times, so each is logged once: Heg*auer MO, Heg*aner MO, Hegnauer IL/KS/OR, and Hegnau* IL. That is why the 183 logged runs come to about 170 distinct queries.

HTTP 429: at about 22:13 UTC the site returned a rate-limit error, after a 600-record query in a fast sequence. I paused, and all later queries ran 2.5–3 s apart.

2b. Coverage probes (years held on Newspapers.com)

Facet lists for Papinville, Pleasant Gap and Prairie City show no paper published in those towns before 1900. No Highland (Illinois) paper appeared in the facet lists either.

3. Hits

3a. Items about Luzius or Margreth (certain, probable or possible)

No probable or certain item about Margreth (H0036) was found.

3b. Items read and judged "not ours" (kept for the record and for other agents)

"Grandson" below means Leonard Hegnauer (H0012, 1872–1963), son of Leonhard. All image ids are Newspapers.com page ids; the URL is newspapers.com/image/ID.

Pages that were pure OCR noise, and pages about other families, are recorded in the search log (§2a). Among them:

• the St. Louis "Hagnauer" family and the Madison County, Illinois, Hagenauers;
• the Rochester (N.Y.), Beloit (Wis.), Galveston and Brenham (Tex.), Louisville (Ky.) and Saginaw (Mich.) Hegnauers and Hegenauers;
• the Portland and Salem Hegners;
• German "Regenschauer" and Fraktur misreadings.

4. Transcriptions (read from the page images)

A2. The Kansas City Star, Friday 21 August 1891, p. 6 (image 648857643; newspapers.com/image/648857643). NEW.

The heading is PENSIONS RECENTLY GRANTED. The Kansas list comes first ("In Kansas—Joseph R. Martin, John T. Weaver, William P. Watkins, …, Lucinda Burnham and Mary A. Sterling."). The relevant part of the Missouri list reads:

In Missouri—To Oliver Massey, Mabin Jones, Benjamin F. Hall, Augustus Steinhaus, … Stephen T. Ritchey, Edward G. Webb, Robert Kemp, Joseph Vaughan, Charles S. Higham, John Link, George S. Bradley, Ashal N. Hagan, Thomas R. Walters, James W. Blue, Bradford R. Scott, Alonzo G. Odell, William Parsons, Eugene Sweeney, Philip L. Reitz, William H. Jackson, Milton Roberts, John C. Johnson, Jackson Waddell, Luzius Hegnauer, Ira Weaver, August Hossenlopp, Henry C. Kyger, William H. Porter, Rufus B. James, Charles D. Payne, Sterling Halbert, George W. Whitehead, Moses Knight, Inocenz Linder, Henriette Meyer, minors of Arloff Maring, …

In the image the surname is blotted after "Hegnau". The spacing and the KCT text fit "Hegnauer". There is no dateline and no statement of the kind of pension.

Facts: the grant of Luzius's pension was published in both Kansas City dailies on 21 Aug 1891: the morning Times (already cited) and the evening Star. The two lists are the same, which suggests a common source (probably the Pension Office's weekly list, sent out from Washington).

Adds: a second, independent printing of the grant; nothing else new. It does not settle whether he was alive on that day.

A1. The Kansas City Times, Friday 21 August 1891, p. 2 (image 650109923). ALREADY CITED; re-read to compare with A2.

In Missouri—To Oliver Massey, M[abin Jones], Benjamin F. Hall, … Jackson Waddell, Luzius Hegnauer, Ira Weaver, August Hossenlopp, Henry C. Kyger, William H. Porter, Rufus B. James, Charles D. Payne, Sterling Halbert, George W. Whitehead, Moses Knight, Inocenz Linder, Henriette Meyer, minors of Arloff Maring, …

A3. The Butler Times-Press, Saturday 15 August 1891, p. 3, county court proceedings (image 999294143; newspapers.com/image/999294143). NEW; possible.

Bridge ordered across Willow Branch, in S. E. part of county, on petition of L. Hegnauer et al, petitioners to pay half of cost.

The OCR reads "Hegnaur". Nearby entries in the same proceedings are a bridge across Mormon Fork petitioned by A. J. Satterlee and others, and a dram-shop licence for McAllister & Co. of Rich Hill.

Facts: an "L. Hegnauer" of the south-east of Bates County headed a petition for a public bridge over Willow Branch in Aug 1891. The petitioners paid half the cost.

Identity: possible for Luzius, who lived in Pleasant Gap in 1890. More probably Leonhard, who was the public figure of the family in these years (county treasurer candidate in 1884, bank stockholder in 1890, county judge candidate in 1892).

A4. The Appleton City Journal, Thursday 10 September 1891, p. 4 (image 863246546; newspapers.com/image/863246546), credited to the Bates County Record. The same item is in The Butler Times-Press, 5 Sep 1891, p. 2 (image 999294362). NEW; possible.

A COMPANY composed of twenty leading farmers and horse breeders of Southeast Bates, has purchased an "English Shire" stallion of the celebrated importer of fine horses, O. O. Hefner, Lincoln, Nebraska. A committee selected to make the purchase, consisting of Wm. Burrows, John Hedges and David Sweazey, went to Lincoln and returned with the horse the first of last week. The horse is a four year old, a dapple bay and weighs 1,800 pounds. Price paid, $1,9[00]. The members of the company are William Burrows, Francis Gilbreath, Geo. Brow[n], John Hedges, William P. Lane, G. […] Neafus, J. C. Lane, J. W. Gench, F. […] Gench, Daniel Hutton, J. C. Hirni, F. […] Diel, L. Hegnauer, W. A. Siggins, Henry Grobe, W. H. Maltby & Son, Fred Fix, F. Schapaler, Martin Rapp and David Sweazey.—Bates County Record.

The right edge of the column is cut off in the ACJ image, so the bracketed letters are missing.

Identity: possible, but Leonhard is much more likely. Luzius was 71 in 1891, and the company's members are Leonhard's known associates.

A5. The Appleton City Journal, Thursday 22 September 1892, p. 5 (image 863190968; newspapers.com/image/863190968). NEW; possible.

L. Hegnauer one of oldest settlers in Pleasant Gap neighborhood bought a fine Kimball Organ from our live music dealers Diven & Deffenbaugh. Get their prices. See their Pianos and Organs, and then enquire of any of twenty-six number-one farmers they have sold to, in regard to their honest way of dealing and they can prove to you that you can save money by buying of them.

This is a dealer's puff: the paragraph is really an advertisement for the dealers.

Facts: in Sep 1892 an "L. Hegnauer", called "one of [the] oldest settlers in Pleasant Gap neighborhood", bought a Kimball organ at Appleton City.

Identity: possible for Luzius, who lived in Pleasant Gap Township in 1884 and 1890, and "oldest settlers" suits a man of 72. Leonhard had been in the township since 1869, was 49, and had daughters at home, so he is at least as likely. The item does not decide it.

A6. The Butler Weekly Times, 23 December 1885, p. 6 (image 859839827). NEW; possible (probably Leonhard). Only the signatures at the foot were read; the heading of the petition or card was not.

T. H. Summy, J. B. Durand, G. W. Roberts, Wm. P. Kemper, L. Heganuer, Martin Rapp, A. T. Lowry / Fred Fix, Christ Hirni, J. N. Bradley, F. Schapler, J. S. Eddy, N. Johannes, Amos Bennett / And twenty-five others.

The heading above the list should be read to learn the subject.

5. Access limits

• Access: no sign-in page, paywall, purchase prompt or bot check appeared. All the papers used were fully accessible on the account, and no Publisher Extra title was met in this set.
• Rate limit: Newspapers.com returned HTTP 429 once (§2a). I slowed down, and nothing was lost.
• OCR is not exposed. Newspapers.com gives no OCR text on the image page or through any endpoint I could find. Every reading in this file is from the page image at the hit coordinates, displayed and read on screen, not from OCR text. Hits whose OCR is too garbled to match a query cannot be found at all (the KC Star item was found only through "Luzius").
• Hermanner Volksblatt (1860–1869, the Gasconade years): Fraktur type. The OCR turns names into noise, and no form of Hegnauer, Hegenaner or Luzi(us) Hegnauer is findable. For example, "Luzi*" found "einzigen" and "Hegen*" found "liegen". Names printed in roman type, such as English legal notices, are findable, and none of them names Luzius.
• Missing runs on Newspapers.com:
  • no Gasconade County paper for 1856–1859, and no English-language one before the Advertiser-Courier of 1875;
  • no Hermanner Volksblatt for 1870;
  • Butler Times-Press: gaps 1885–88 and 1892–93;
  • Bates County Democrat: gaps 1885 and 1899;
  • Butler Daily Democrat: nothing between 1882 and 1889;
  • Bates County Republican: nothing for 1893–1901;
  • no Papinville, Pleasant Gap, Prairie City or Rockville paper before 1900;
  • no Highland (Illinois) paper, and no Madison County paper before 1862.
• Chronicling America (Library of Congress) was not used. The browser lessons record Cloudflare challenges there.

6. What is still unsearched

1. Hermanner Volksblatt, page by page, 1860–1869. The priorities are:

   • Oct–Nov 1864 (Price's raid and Union reprisals; Henry Domeyer);
   • 1861 (Home Guard and Reserve Corps lists);
   • county court proceedings, delinquent-tax lists and letter lists ("Briefliste");
   • Dec 1868 – Apr 1870, around the sale of the farm to Kemper.

   The paper has no 1856–1859 issues on Newspapers.com.

2. Bates County papers, page by page, for Aug 1890 – 1900. Read the Pleasant Gap, Papinville and Prairie City correspondence columns and the probate notices ("Notice of final settlement", "Administrator's notice") in the Butler Weekly Times, Bates County Democrat, Butler Daily Democrat and Butler Times-Press. Luzius's death would most likely appear there, and a garbled surname could hide it. The gap years (Times-Press 1892–93; Bates County Republican 1893–1901) cannot be checked on this site.
3. The Domeyer items of 1864–65 in the St. Louis papers (32 pages, query 152) were not opened. They are probably other Domeyers of St. Louis.
4. Queries too broad to page: Hegeman (MO), Hegner (MO), Lucius Heg* (MO), Margaretha Heg* (MO), H?gnauer (IL). A targeted pass could combine them with "Bates", "Papinville", "Pleasant Gap" or "Hermann".
5. "Lucius" in the Hermann papers after 1875 (92 pages, queries 25–26) was not read. The family had left Gasconade County by then, but an estate or a return cannot be ruled out.
6. Other newspaper sites: GenealogyBank; the State Historical Society of Missouri's Missouri Digital Newspaper Project, which holds Bates County titles; and Chronicling America, to be opened by the owner in a normal browser.
7. The decisive non-newspaper source is unchanged: the pension file, NARA RG 15, invalid certificate 638,825. It would give the date he was dropped from the rolls, and hence his death.

Working notes 7. Suggestions for the masters (for the integrating agent; no master was edited)

• H0001: add The Kansas City Star, 21 Aug 1891, p. 6, "Pensions Recently Granted", Missouri list, "Luzius Hegnauer" (newspapers.com/image/648857643), as a second source beside kct1891 on the pension fact.
• H0001, Research Notes (death): record this harvest as negative evidence. No death, funeral, estate or probate notice was found in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois or Oregon papers on Newspapers.com, 1856–1900, under about 170 queries covering more than 20 spellings and wildcard patterns. The possible "L. Hegnauer" items of 1885–1892 (A3–A6) should go into the Research Notes only, as unresolved (Luzius or Leonhard), not into the biography.
• H0036: replace "seven Appleton City Journal items of 1892–1896 are still unread" with the result: all were read and none concerns Margreth (they concern the grandson Leonard). No item about her was found.
• Leads for other profiles:
  • H0002: items 7, 9, 38, 40 and 41;
  • H0003: items 1, 5, 10, 12, 13, 19, 22, 29 and 30, and A3–A6;
  • H0007: item 2 (Kansas City, 1876);
  • H0010: items 18, 20 and 26;
  • H0014: item 25;
  • H0053: items 24 and 33 (her wedding at Troy, Kans., 14 Oct 1899, to Lew W. Johnson);
  • H0015: item 34;
  • H0005 (Kraettli in-laws): item 43.

8. Review (adversarial), 27 Sep 2026

Reviewer: a second browser agent (Claude), on the same signed-in Newspapers.com account, in one tab of its own, closed at the end. Nothing was clipped, downloaded or saved to any tree, and no message was sent. No master, data file or export was edited. No sign-in page, paywall or bot check appeared. The site returned HTTP 429 once, when several queries ran back to back while another agent was using the account; after that, queries ran 3–4 s apart. Living persons: none of the people named in this review is living, and no [LIVING] tag is needed. Proposals for the masters are in luzius-proposals-2026-09-27.md.

Method. The same endpoints as the harvest (/api/search/query, /api/search/hits). Each hit was read on a crop of the page image at the hit coordinates, with the page's own image token.

8a. Verdicts on the identifications

Surviving certain items: A1 (already cited) and A2 (new, but not independent of A1). Nothing certain about Margreth for 1856–1900.

8b. Extra searches

The dates are 1856–1900 unless a row says otherwise. "BATES" is the harvest's set, including 1477. "LOCAL2" is 46985 (The Messenger, Adrian, Bates Co.), 30933 (Voice of the People, Osceola), 30937 (Osceola Advance), 19650 (Nevada Noticer), 11629 (Henry County Democrat, Clinton) and 6052 (Clinton Advocate).

Hit images re-read for verification: A2 (648857643), A5 (863190968), A6 heading (859839827), the Mary Luzius items (648887201, 649165585), Barbara Kamm's 1923 obituaries (1000206435, 1000364021) and Martin Hegnauer's 1927 obituary (863945723).

8c. Coverage gaps: what was closed and what remains

Closed, with nothing new about the couple:

• surnames split across a line break ("Heg-/nauer" and similar), R10–R21;
• given-name variants in the Bates papers, R22–R26;
• Lucius in the Bates papers for 1869–1879, the decade when the parents came to the county, and in the Appleton City Journal for 1882–1889 (R27–R28);
• Fraktur misreadings in the Hermann papers (R32–R37);
• the six local titles that were missing from the harvest's set (R51–R57). The harvest's statewide searches had covered these papers only for correctly OCR'd spellings.

A gap that produced facts: items printed after 1900. The harvest stopped at 1900, but the obituaries of the couple's children, all on Newspapers.com, state three things about the parents that are not in H0001 or H0036. They are cited on the children's masters, but not on the parents'.

1. Appleton City Journal, 31 Mar 1927, p. 6 (image 863945723), Martin's obituary: "Martin Hegnauer, one of six children and son of Lucius and Margaret Van Barnett Hegnauer, was born in Grau-Bunten County Switzerland, Feb. 20th, 1848. He came to the United States with his parents in 1854, settling in Highland, Ill., later moving to Gasconade County Mo." Checked on the image.
   • It is a third account of a first stop in Illinois, beside the 1883 and 1918 county histories, and the first to name Highland.
   • It conflicts with Leonhard's 1916 obituary, which says only that the family "first settled" in Gasconade County.
   • Its "1854" is wrong: the 1856 manifest is contemporary and wins.
2. Rich Hill Mining Review, 11 Jan 1923, p. 5 (image 1000206435), Barbara's obituary: "She was an old resident of the county, having resided here for about forty years, coming here from Gasconade county, Mo." Checked on the image. It supports a direct move of the family from Gasconade County to Bates County, since Barbara, unmarried, lived with her parents in 1860 and 1880. The Bates County Republican obituary (12 Jan 1923, image 1000364021) has nothing on her parents.
3. Advertiser-Courier (Hermann), 24 May 1916, p. 1, and Carthage Evening Press, 15 May 1916, p. 8, Sylvester Kraettly's obituaries: in 1869 he married "Miss Christine Hegnauer of this county", that is, of Gasconade County. This is the only newspaper evidence that the family, or at least Christina, was still in Gasconade County after the farm was sold in Dec 1868.

Remaining:

• R30 (47 pages), R43 (43 pages), the last 24 pages of R25, and R11 "nour" (278) have not been read.
• The Hermanner Volksblatt of 1860–69 has still not been read page by page. One correction to §5: the OCR of this Fraktur paper is not useless. "Luzius Kraettly" and "Luzius Bernhard" are found, and the paper apparently printed year-end lists of deaths. No form of Hegnauer is found, though, so a page-by-page reading is still needed.
• The Butler Times-Press gap (1892–93) and the Bates County Republican gap (1893–1901) cannot be filled on this site.
• There is no Papinville, Rockville or Prairie City paper on Newspapers.com before 1900. The Rockville Globe, which A6 quotes, is not held.
• The decisive source is still the pension file, NARA RG 15, invalid certificate 638,825, together with the pension payment records, which would show when payments stopped.

8d. Corrections to the harvest text above

• §3a A5: "possible" becomes probably Leonhard (8a). A6: the heading has now been read (8a). A7 has been added.
• §3b-8: "Not Margreth" becomes unidentified (8a).
• §2b and §5: add the six LOCAL2 titles to the coverage table. The Hermanner Volksblatt's OCR is poor, not useless (8c).
• §7: A3–A7 belong in H0003's Research Notes, as probable Leonhard items. H0001 needs only one line saying that the "L. Hegnauer" items of 1885–1893 have been examined and attributed to Leonhard.
• §4, A2, "Adds": the Star list is the Times list reprinted, so it confirms the printing but adds no independent weight.
• §7, leads: add H0012: Appleton City Journal, 24 Dec 1896, p. 11 (image 863149896).