Clement Louis Zbinden I

Clement was born in Greenville, Illinois, on Sept. 12, 1859, and presumably raised within the Greenville Meeting Room, his parents were Louis (1821-1888) & Louise DeBonneville (1823-1884) Zbinden, both born in Switzerland.  A list of Clement's siblings can be found at the forementioned Greenville Meeting Room link.

By 1874, the family had moved to Indianapolis, where Clements and his brother David were employed as clerks for a local grocer, Hogan & Hammel (owned by David W. Hogan & George J. Hammel).  Their father, Louis, was employed as a gardener.  On May 27, 1880, Clement married Martha Church Lockstand (1860-1925) in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is also where their first son Sylvan Francis Zbinden (1881-1947) was born. In that time period, R.S. Sinclair was serving as a correspondent for the Indianapolis Meeting Room. By 1882, he and his family had relocated to Knoxville, TN where his mother died. Several of their children were born in Knoxville, including Nettie M. Ramseur (1885-1953), Clement Louis II (1887-1949), Arthur David (1889-1953), and Martha C. (b. 1891).

Clement was serving as a correspondent at the Knoxville Meeting Room by 1889 at the age of 29. By 1896, he had relocated to the Chattanooga area as farmers, where they may have been in fellowship from 1900-1902 (ca.) with John G. Barnwell, Jr. at the Chattanooga Meeting Room.

From 1903-1905, Clement's uncle David Harold Zbinden (1852-1923) was a correspondent at the Nashville Meeting Room. Another uncle, Louis Theophilus Zbinden (1864-1945) served with the Corunna Meeting Room in in Michigan in 1905, and at the Owosso Meeting Room, also in Michigan, in 1908.

By 1903, Clement's family had relocated to Birmingham where he served as a correspondent at Birmingham Meeting Room until possibly his death in 1912 there, although meeting lists from 1908 do not list anyone for that area by that point, so it is presumption that he was still meeting with the Brethren toward the end of his life, although the TW splinter was around that era as well.

Sources

• Lists of Meetings
• Ancestry.com