Tag: Francis Helbling

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Talented Tuesday: The Skills of Franz X. Helbling

Helbling family home in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. From a family photo but image may also be found in St. Augustine Diamond Jubilee, page 40-2, St. Augustine Catholic Church, Lawrenceville, PA. From a family photo but image may also be found in St. Augustine Diamond Jubilee, page 40-2, St. Augustine Catholic Church, Lawrenceville, PA.
Helbling family home in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. Note store front, and family would have lived above store and possibly have rooms behind.
From a shared family photo but image may also be found in St. Augustine Diamond Jubilee, page 40-2, St. Augustine Catholic Church, Lawrenceville, PA.

Helbling Family

Are you a Helbling descendant who is good with knives? Can you deftly carve a large turkey at Thanksgiving, debone a chicken breast in just a couple quick strokes, or gently filet a fish? Then you may have have some of the butchering talent passed down through the Helbling DNA.

Franz Xavier Helbling (1800-1876) and his brother Jacob (1813-1872) were butchers, and Jacob is credited with being one of the first butchers to have a stand at the Pittsburg market. (Yes, that is how they spelled Pittsburgh back in the day.) With both brothers being butchers, it is highly likely that their father, Franz Xavier Helbling, (1773-?), was also a butcher. Franz  had a son who became a butcher, but the family trade ended there.

I have found 4 IRS Tax Lists for 1862-3 for this family, and they show that there were more Helbling butchers than just these two in Lawrenceville, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

(Tax rates are 30 cents per head of cattle, 5 cents for a calf, 10 cents for a hog, and 5 cents for sheep.)

#1- September 1862

Francis Helbling- 6 cattle + 1 calf + 1 hog= $1.95 in taxes.

Jacob Helbling- 6 cattle + 1 calf + 1 hog= $1.95 in taxes.

Jacob Helbling- 4 head of cattle= $1.20.

#2- October 1862

Francis Helbling- 6 head of cattle + 2 calves for a total of $1.90.

Jacob Helbling- 6 head of cattle + 1 calf = $1.85 in taxes

Francis Helbling- 10 head of cattle +2 calves + 3 hogs + 4 sheep= $3.60 in taxes.

John Knipschield- 12 cattle + 1 calf= $3.65 in taxes.

(We do not know Mary Theresa Knipschield’s siblings nor parents- maybe this is her brother and why she came to America?)

#3- November 1862

Francis Helbling- 3 head of cattle for a total of $0.90 in taxes.

Jacob Helbling- 5 head of cattle + 2 calves = $1.60 in taxes

Francis Helbling- 9 head of cattle + 5 calves + 1 hog for a total of $3.05.

Jacob Helbling- 6 head of cattle + 2 calves = $1.90 in taxes

#4- October 1863

Francis Helbling- 7 head of cattle + 1 calf for a total of $1.45.

Jacob Helbling- 6 head of cattle + 3 calves = $1.35 in taxes

John Knipschield- 13 cattle + 6 calf + 4 hogs= $3.14 in taxes.

Robert Helbling- 4 head of cattle= $0.80

(Not sure who Robert Helbling is…more research needed.)

 Being a butcher in the 1800s was a lot different than today- no tractor trailer driving to the grocery store loading dock with cuts of meat that only need a little trimming for the expensive meat case. As can be seen from the tax lists, our ancestors had to grow their own meat, kill the animal, butcher the carcass, utilize and dispose of the offal (undesirable parts), and package it when the customer chose the perfect steak. Cattle back then were a bit smaller than today, about 1,100 pounds vs today’s 1,500 pound cattle; an animal that size was a lot to manage. A lot to feed, too, to get to that weight- they would have had to purchase hay and corn to grow those calves, or grow their own.

After dressing the animal, i.e. cutting off all the undesirable parts, the remaining meat cuts would be about half the weight of the live animal. Of course, back then they also ate parts we are not always inclined to eat, such as tripe, tongue, heart, etc. Being German, they probably made some amazing sausage out of the leftover parts, and head cheese too, so their yield would probably have been higher than today’s. (Of course, our industrialized livestock farming of today uses all those undesirable parts- they just don’t tell us what it is in. Often it is fed back to animals, one way mad-cow disease is spread.)

Our ancestors who farmed, which was a majority of those in the 1800s, had to do this too, but on a much smaller scale.

So, the next time you are wrestling a 24-kb Thanksgiving turkey as the whole table of guests watch, remember that culinary knife skills  may be in your DNA, and you can do it!

 

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1) Obituary for Rosina Wiesert Helbling, wife of Jacob Helbling.

The Pittsburgh Press, Nov. 30, 1907, page three http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=nhobAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CEkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4329,6709035 &dq=helbling+death&hl=en

2) September 1862 Tax List: U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862-1918AuthorAncestry.comPublisherAncestry.com Operations IncPublisher Date2008Publisher LocationProvo, UT, USA

October 1862 Tax List: U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862-1918AuthorAncestry.com. Online publication – Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2008.Original data – National Archives (NARA) microfilm series: M603, M754-M771, M773-M777, M779-M780, M782, M784, M787-M789, M791-M793, M795, M1631, M1775-M1776, T227, T1208-T1209

[Ancestry.com is in the midst of switching viewer styles and I cannot get to all of the sources for each of the IRS records. Please let me know if you need more information.]

3) A Century of Georgia Agriculture, 1850-1950 by Willard Range, 1954.  https://books.google.com/books?id=s_GPG0k7XwUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Willard+Range%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JusAVeOtHYuZNt3rg9AL&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

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Income Taxes for Francis Helbling, 1886

May 1886 Excise Tax Header for Pennsylvania.
May 1886 Excise Tax Header for Pennsylvania.
May 1886 Excise Tax for Francis Helbling.
May 1886 Excise Tax for Francis Helbling.                          (Click for larger and sharper images.)

 

Happy (??) Belated 101st Anniversary to the 16th Amendment, which was ratified February 2, 1913.

As our income tax information comes in this month and we scramble to understand the complex laws that will determine how much we owe Uncle Sam for last year’s income, it is worth noting that the US did not have an income tax for most of its early history. The few tax records remaining, however, will provide interesting information to family historians.

An income tax was proposed during the War of 1812, based on the British Tax Act of 1798. (A few levels of irony there…) The proposal was made in 1814, but because hostilities ended with the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, this progressive tax of 0.833% to 10% was never implemented.

By the time of the Civil War, however, the need for a federal income tax was apparent to pay the high costs of war, and income taxes were imposed on personal income in 1861. Any income over $800 was taxed at 3%. The Revenue Act of 1861 was repealed but another tax was implemented in 1862.

In 1894, an income tax was again passed to compensate for the reduction of federal income due to the Wilson-Gorman Tariff, which also reduced tariffs. Income over $4,000 was taxed at 2%, which only affected about 10% of the households in the United States. In 1895, however, a Supreme Court ruling effectively made this an impractical tax to impose, due to constitutional limits on direct taxes needing to be apportioned by the states per the census enumeration. Thus technically no ‘income taxes’ were paid to the federal government until ratification of the 16th Amendment on 02 February, 1913.

Amendment XVI to the US Constitution:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

“Excise” taxes, however, were imposed before this time, because it was possible to tax on property; such records may be found in the NARA records for the IRS. Some are available on Ancestry.com, such as the record above that shows Francis Helbling paid 85 cents excise tax on his two cattle (40 cents each) and one calf (5 cents tax). I have not proved that this is my ancestor, but it is possible since Francis X. Helbling was a butcher and lived in Pennsylvania at that time. Many families kept some cattle for their own use, too. I have also seen Civil War IRS records for other family members, but am not sure how to find those on my Ancestry tree without going through each head of household’s data sheet for the proper time period. It is great to find these records, though, as they tell us a bit more about daily life for our ancestors.

 

And I’ll bet our ancestors complained about paying taxes just as much as we do.

 

Notes, Sources, and References:

1) Source Information: Ancestry.com. U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862-1918 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2008. Original data: National Archives (NARA) microfilm series: M603, M754-M771, M773-M777, M779-M780, M782, M784, M787-M789, M791-M793, M795, M1631, M1775-M1776, T227, T1208-T1209. Accessed 02/01/14.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States. Accessed 02/01/14.

3) Of course, other taxes were imposed such as road taxes, a poll tax to vote, etc. Those records are sometimes available as well.

 

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Copyright 2014 by Heritage Ramblings Blog and pmm.

 
We would love to read your thoughts and comments about this post, and thank you for your time! All comments are moderated, however, due to the high intelligence and persistence of spammers/hackers who really should be putting their smarts to use for the public good instead of spamming our little blog.