Better, I think

Fixing a bad typo and additions:

John Adam and Christina Doratha [Dorothea Unkel] Bohnet

            Census records indicate that both were born in 1830, but Christina’s grave marker gives her birth date as 1829. Birth location records are confused. One suggests that John Adam was born in Austria. Another suggests that they were both from Wurttemberg. A family record says: “John Adam Bohnet and Christina Doratha Unkel were born in the same place in Germany, sailed on different ships from Germany to the United States and disembarked in New York City on the same day. John sometimes went by his middle name Adam. He was a blacksmith by trade. His blacksmith shop faced Carpenter Road. Christine raised flowers to sell, tulips and gladiolas.”

            Christina’s obituary says they lived “together in the same home ever since their marriage, and [they are] said to have been the oldest married couple in the state [of Michigan].”[1]  They immigrated to America in 1854, settling in Minnesota. They were on the American frontier, and their life reflected that. The 1880 United States Census verifies the family record, listing Adam as a Farmer and Black Smith. We have little record of their early years in America, but Christina’s obituary tells an interesting story: “In her early maidenhood [she] crossed the Atlantic in 39 days, in a sailing vessel, and worked as a hired girl, 16 hours every day, for $1.00 Per week, for years in a family near Ann Arbor. After supper each night during apple season she peeled and sliced a bushel of apples by hand and dried them for winter pies. On wash days she was up at 4:00 a.m. and had her wash on the line before breakfast hour.”

            We do not know their marriage date. We know something about her early married life:

She took the fleece direct from the sheep, carded it, spun it into yarn on a foot tread spinning wheel and knitted by hand all the stockings for herself, her husband and her five children as long as they attended school and she did this by the light of her home-made, tallow candles. Talk about a woman working’ she was a wonder of wonders; slight of frame and swift of movement; even up to her last sickness [at age ninety-five] she could catch a fly with her hand. She suffered without complaint. She was love and justice personified, and the generous almost to a fault, never turned away from her door a hungry beggar.[2]

           

            Christian seems to have been the first to adopt Watch Tower belief. Her obituary says that she was “ever a devout Christian” and that she left the Lutheran church 25 years ago” embracing “the true gospel as presented by the Watch Tower publications.” Counting backwards from her death date [1924] brings us to 1889.

            One of their sons, James A. Bonhet, became prominent in the work. Bohnet relatives lived nearby, and some seem to have accepted Watch Tower teachings. James was active by 1893. A letter from him to the Watch Tower office tells us this:

Please change tower to present address. I miss it, and would not do without it. I shall never drop this welcome visitor; rather would I do my work on one meal a day. It is food to the truth-hungry soul, I need it to sustain my spiritual being, just as I need food to sustain me physically. I hope all subscribers read and digest its precious truths as I do. How it opens up the Word of God and throws light where darkness reigned before! We cannot all uncover these hidden truths, but we can see and accept them when the due time comes for them to be known and pointed out by the Lord's servants.

I close with every kind wish to all in the tower office and all the readers of this priceless seed sower. I hand you a letter from my friend May, to whom I had the pleasure of introducing these precious truths.[3]

            The letter from J. J. May [We can’t identify him further] was appended to James’ letter. May wrote that the first three volumes of Studies in the Scriptures presented “the most wonderful explanation of the old Book that I have found in all of forty years reading and study of its teaching.” He claimed acquaintance with Joseph Addison, Thomas Sherlock, John Locke and Thomas Scott “and others of less note.” He said he owned every Bible commentary of which he had ‘ever heard of as having been published in English” during the previous twenty-five years, but nothing that I have ever read seems even to point in the direction of the straight and narrow path opened up and made plain by those three volumes.” He wrote that within the books was “a perfect and complete system” of theology that encompassed the entire Bible. And the books, he said, were ‘full of comfort.’

            James Bohnet attended the 1893 Convention held in Chicago, and by 1894 he was a part-time evangelist, holding Sunday meetings in the Midwest as he traveled for business.[4] While James is the better known of the Bohnet family, his mother and father quietly promoted the Watch Tower faith.

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[1]               Obituary, The St. Paul, Minnesota, New Era Enterprise, December 9, 1924.

[2]               ibid.

[3]               Encouraging Words from Faithful Workers, Zion’s Watch Tower, September 1, 15, 1893, double issue, page 287.

[4]               Z. W. T. Tract Society Annual Report, Zion’s Watch Tower¸ December 15, 1894, page 393.