Saturday Night Genealogy Fun! Meet my 2nd Great-grandparents

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  We each have 16 great-great grandparents.  How did their birth and death years vary?  How long were their lifespans?  

2)  For this week, please list your 16 great-great grandparents, their birth year, their death year, and their lifespan in years.  You can do it in plain text, in a table or spreadsheet, or in a graph of some sort.

3)  Share your information about your 16 great-great grandparents with us in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.  If you write your own blog post, please leave a link as a comment to this post.

I only know 14 of my 16 second great-grandparents and I don’t have all of their vital dates.  All of mine are from Germany, Ireland, and Norway.  I will say that the church records from both Germany and Norway are excellent.  Unfortunately the Irish records are both sporadic and illegible.  Here is what I do have on my second great-grandparents. I have sorted them by country.

IRELAND

Patrick Leahy born about 1805

Ellen Mc Carthy born about 1807

Patrick Connery born about 1794

Ellen Drake born about 1800

John Hennessy born about 1784 – died 10 Oct 1833

Mary O’Donnell born about 1790 – died about 1833

NORWAY

Daniel Kristensen born 1817 – died after 1865*

Karen Dorthea Christiansen born 1833 – died 1928?

Martin Hansen born 1829 – died after 1865*

Johanne Sofie Johannesdatter born Oct 1829 – died 1901

GERMANY

Georg Burbach born 1825 – died 1897

Catherina Caspari born 1825 – died 1913

Phillip Schmitz born 1834 – died 1906

Elisabeth Kronenberger born 1832 – died 1876

*After 1865 because they are noted in the 1865 Norway census

This exercise has shown me where I need to do more research for the missing death information.  It is also interesting to note that my Granddaughter (born 1999) was born in the same town in Germany as her 4^th great-grandmother Elizabeth Kronenberger.

Roots Tech 2016 and the Challenge issued

Today was the opening day of Roots Tech 2016 and I watched the opening keynote session.  The common theme for all the speakers was story telling.  The speakers were all inspiring and made me realize just how important the stories are to those living now.  All of the finalists in the Innovator's Summit are about capturing the stories verbally, through the written word, or in photos.

This month I have also entered the Family History Writers Challenge sponsored by Lynn Palermo.  I will write the story of my Great-great-grandparents Georg Burbach and Catherine Caspary.  Their story begins 1851 as a married couple with a young son.  It will include their journey from Villmar, Hessen-Nassau, Germany to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.  I want to show their triumhs and sorrows.

As part of the Family History Writers Challenge, I will be attempting to include dialog and descriptive scenes in the story.  Part of the challenge is that I will need to make some assumptions about George and Catherine along with interweaving the facts of their lives.  This challenge lasts for a month so I hope to become comfortable with this type of writing.  If I succeed, I will develop other stories of my ancestors.

Family History Writing Challenge - The Journey to Milwaukee

                           

The Journey to Milwaukee

The villages of Villmar, Selters, and Bad Camberg
are all part of the  Burbach saga.

Georg Burbach left his home village in Oberselters, Nassau, Hesse, Germany in search of a better life.  He moved to the village of Villmar where he met and married Catherine Caspari about 1848.  Their oldest son Adam was born in Sept 1849 and died in Dec 1854.  Son Hermann was born in 1852 and John was born in 1854.  In 1856 Georg and Catherine, with their two surviving sons left Villmar and began their journey to America.  Later Georg’s sister Helena and her family would settle in Milwaukee along with members of Catherine’s Caspari family.

                              

In 1846, three neighboring towns combined to form the city of Milwaukee. The population continued to grow thanks to the waves of German immigrants over the next several decades.  Originally the area was home to many Indian tribes. The word "Milwaukee" may come from Potawatomi language minwaking, or Ojibwe language ominowakiing, "Gathering place [by the water]”.[i] [ii]

The German Revolution of 1848 sparked the immigration of over a million Germans to the United States.  Wisconsin was a popular destination because of the availability of cheap land and assurances of freedom.[iii]  Many of those arriving had suffered poverty in Germany. 

Milwaukee has long been known for it’s meat packing and processing businesses.  In the 1860s the pork processing industry boomed, in part due to the Civil War and the needs of the war effort.  It was also the era that Patrick Cudahy and Phillip Armour were establishing their companies. Many of Milwaukee’s population were involved in the meat industry as drovers, butchers, packers, and transporters.  It was a good place to settle and raise a family with good opportunities to make a living. Georg was first a drover, then a cattle broker and later a butcher.

Milwaukee’s large German community supported the publication of many German Language Newspapers, such as Wisconsin Banner and Volksfreund, which reported on local as well as world news.  Church and club news as well as school news and births, marriages, and deaths often appeared only in the German Language Newspapers.

(358)

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[i] ^ ^a b Bruce, William George (1936). A Short History of Milwaukee. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The Bruce Publishing Company. pp. 15–16. LCCN 36010193.

[ii] ^ "Ojibwe Dictionary". Freelang. Retrieved 2007-03-25. 

[iii] Wikipedia

photo credit Google images

Tombstone Tuesday - War Memorial

Memorial to the soldiers from the village of Villmar, Germany who died in WWI. Caspari is the family name of my Great-great-grandmother.

This tombstone resides in the cemetery of St Anthony church in Oberselters, Nassau, Germany. Amazingly the Burbach family has lived in this tiny village for over 200 years. To be sure, remnants of the family have emigrated to the United States in the 1840s/50s. The destinations selected ranged from Milwaukee, WI to St Louis, MO, and the hill country of Texas.  My G-g-grandfather Georg left Oberselters about 1847 and settled in Villmar, Nassau, Germany where he met and married Catharina Caspari.  They has three sons before they emigrated to Milwaukee in 1856.  Sadly, their oldest son, Adam, was buried in Villmar in 1854.  George was one of eleven children which may explain why the family name still appears in the parish cemetery.

Anna Burbach

Anna Burbach - Oberselters, Nassau, Germany

In December of 2003 my husband and I traveled to Germany to visit our daughter and her family. While there, we made a visit to Oberselters, Nassau, Germany. My great-great-grandfather, Georg Burbach, traveled from Oberselters to Villmar and married Catharina Caspari in 1848. We were very lucky to find the family name still present in the cemetery in Oberselters. Usually one only retains a grave, in Germany, for 20 to 30 years.