Entry #39

The name of my husband’s great, great grandmother was given to me as Anna Catherina Eviflon. It can be a blessing and a curse to receive information that was recorded by elderly relatives about their ancestors. I am not sure who in the Brown or Holtzman family typed up the one page rudimentary family tree, but I ended up with information that was suspicious.

The little that I have on Anna Catherina Eviflon states that she was born on December 20, 1851, in Germany. She married John Frederick Holzmann in 1872. They had seven children in 18 years. She died on July 7, 1914, in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of 62. I have had no luck in finding out any more about her because Eviflon is, simply stated, not a real surname. Search any of the major genealogical record repositories and no one who has ever lived appears to have had the surname of Eviflon.

I have tried to use my imagination to come up with a name that might phonetically be close. Of course, it should probably be a German surname. Using the Soundex Generator I get a Code of E114, but that leads me nowhere. The closest matches in most searches that I’ve run are names like Ebbefeld or Evavold. The single nearest match has been Evafli, which apparently is Hungarian. My only other guess is that perhaps the full name was really Anna Catherina EVA Flon. In Other words, the surname could have been Flon which is a legitimate name.

Not one of these possibilities has led me to Anna Catherine, though. Leave a note if you have any leads on this strange, and probably mangled surname.  By the way, here is a link to Rootsweb’s Soundex Converter: http://resources.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/soundexconverter