This week I am chronicling the search for my great-grandmother’s Bavarian family.  This is a long read with a lot of detail on the resources that I drew upon to find the place of origin for my mother’s mother’s mother’s family.  I am especially interested because this is the source of my mitochondrial DNA (deep ancestry K1a2b subclade).  I wrote about this in week 6 of 2015.  This is one of my longer posts and details how I found this family when it seemed like there was almost no information.  There still remains one connection to make.

Researching German ancestry is fraught with pitfalls. If you don’t know the place of birth for your ancestor, it is nearly impossible to move forward. You may get very lucky and find your family transcribed on FamilySearch.org like I did with my Müller family from Kleinneidesheim, Bavaria; but this is not that common. Many records have never been filmed by the LDS Church, much less transcribed. Parish records for German churches are held in a variety of places throughout Germany. Further, you really need to know if your family was Katholisch  (Catholic) or Evangelisch (Lutheran) and that may have changed through the years. Then, if you find your family’s records, reading them becomes the next challenge. These are some of building blocks of genealogical brick walls. The wall grows even higher when you begin to consider the surname spelling challenges. German surnames were usually not easy for officials to understand or to spell. Many German ancestors chose to Anglicize their names just to make life easier and, of course, to help them blend in their new land.

As regular readers of my blog will know, I am very interested in how DNA relates to genealogy. Most of my DNA matches present elusive puzzles. Ancestry.com is not testing overseas and most of my closest connections may still be in Germany. To get the best snapshot of my autosomal DNA, several of my immediate family members have tested. Thank goodness I have my 92-year-old father and my 94-year-old maternal aunt among those who were agreeable. It makes it very easy to sort my paternal and maternal connections. I have also paid the extra money to transfer our autosomal DNA to Family Tree DNA to widen the net for matches.

Ernestine M. is my aunt’s closest match outside of immediate family. She has been eager to explore our relationship. I noticed early on that Ernestine shared a set of common ancestors with “S,” who is my closest match on Family Tree DNA. Ernestine and “S” don’t seem to match one another, though. While disappointing, this emphasizes the randomness of DNA heritability. These two cousins do not know one another, but they have one set of common German ancestors – Peter Elsasser and Ann Catherine Schimp.  Here is a visual of how I match “S” with a significant chunk of DNA on the first chromosome only.  It measures 39.16 centimorgans.

My 39.16 cM Match on Chromosome One (FamilyTree DNA) with “S”

Peter Elsasser and Catherine Schimp married in Vicksburg, MS, on 11 Apr 1841. We have not found their immigration records, so it is unclear if they knew one another before arriving in the United States. Catherine Schimp is identified in the 1870 census as being from Württemberg, but no more specific information is available. Peter probably began naturalization proceedings in 1840 and he received citizenship in Vicksburg in 1842. This record indicates that Peter was from Bavaria. Peter died on 11 January 1860, thus cheating his descendants of his enumeration in the 1860 census. His will is online through FamilySearch.org, although it is currently not indexed online.  The original can be read here.

When Ernestine and I first began exchanging information, I had to admit that I had no ancestors with the surnames Elsasser or Schimp. Since Catherine Schimp was from Württemberg, I thought she might connect with my Maier family from Pleiningen near Stuttgart; but this family is well-researched and I couldn’t see the connection. There was one other tantalizing piece of information. Living in the Elsasser household in Vicksburg 1850 was a young man, 18-year-old Adam Helfrich. Helfrich is not a very common surname and my 2x great-grandmother’s maiden name had been identified from her daughter’s death records as Catharine Helfrich.

Death Certificate for Catharine’s Daughter, Elizabeth Hamburger

Is a relationship between Catharine and Adam too far-fetched?

Catherine Helfrich was born in 1813 in Bavaria. In 1850, she was living with her husband, Anton (Anthony) Stephan, and three children in Mason County, KY. This census showed the two eldest children as having been born in Germany, so I felt like I had good clues for and immigration date of approximately 1848. By 1860, the Stephan family had moved on to Brown County, OH, where my great-grandmother, Julia Magdalena Stephan, was born. In Brown County there was one household of two people with the surname Helfrich: Anna Odilia (Ottilia), born 1790, and Francis (Frank), born 1803. Based on the dates of birth, I pondered if they could be Catharine Stephan’s mother and brother. That didn’t quite work, though. Francis was too old to be a likely child of Odilia and too young to be Catharine’s father. Perhaps Francis was Odilia’s brother. I reminded myself that censuses can be wrong. Still, one of the Stephan children was named Francis. Francis and Odilia Helfrich died within a few months of one another in 1869. I had never found any immigration records for the Stephan or Helfrich families. Further, Anthony Stephan died in May 1871 and the family dispersed. I felt like the trail was a dead end.

I had been working on the Stephan/Helfrich puzzle for nearly 20 years. How was I going to have a breakthrough? My instincts told me that there was a connection to the Elsasser family in Vicksburg, so I intensified my efforts. I decided to go back and review every piece of documentation that I had. I made a list of what I had found. I had located a will for Anthony, again in the probate records on FamilySearch. I dread churning through records with no electronic index, but sometimes it pays off. Anthony Stephan’s will had been unremarkable, though, and had shed no new light on the family; but a light went on. I had never looked for the original death records for Anna Odilia and Francis Helfrich; nor had I searched for a will for Francis Helfrich.

First, I tracked down the original death records. Anna Odilia died first on 11 September 1869. Her marital status at time of death was married. Francis dies 19 November 1869 and his marital status was widowed. Were they really husband and wife? Finally, Frank Helfrich’s will wasn’t that hard to find, and it held the clue for which I had been searching for years. Frank left his entire estate to his STEP-daughter, Catharine Stephens, wife of Anthony Stephens. No wonder I had such a genealogical mess on my hands. Francis Helfrich was Anna Odilia’s husband – not son and not brother! He was only related to Catharine by marriage.

I was overwhelmed by the breakthrough, but disappointed that I didn’t find any Elsassers living in Brown County. I posted my findings to the Brown County Facebook group. I needed some advice on how to find early Catholic church records for the county. Within hours I had help. A member had located a Brown County civil marriage record of Anthony Stevens to Catharine Elcesser for May of 1846.

Brown County, Ohio, Marriage Records on FamilySearch.org

Although these records are purportedly indexed, I cannot make their marriage show up in a search. I had to hunt for it among the images on FamilySearch by date. I had made another bad assumption. I had trusted the 1850 Mason County, KY, census and believed that Anthony and Catherine were married in Germany since their children were born there. That also meant their immigration date was earlier than I had believed.

Now, DNA came into play again. I won’t go into all the details here, but my aunt, my sister and I have some matches people with ancestors in the Pirmasens area of the Rhein-Pfalz. Even before the breakthrough in the digital records, I had ordered films for two towns. I had come to believe that my best bet for finding my ancestors would be in Eppenbrunn or nearby Vinningen. I had already ordered the appropriate films of the Catholic Church registers.

I have to backtrack a little here.  I knew there was an Anton Stephan who was born in Eppenbrunn on 29 January 1811; Anthony’s gravestone gives his birth date as 30 January 1811. I had located this baptismal record, but had been hoping for a marriage record to Catharine Helfrich to prove that this was my Anthony Stephan. I also have a DNA match to someone with the Eppenbrunn Stephans in their family tree.  I knew there were Helfriches in nearby Vinningen, so I also rented that film; but I hadn’t been able to find Catharine. (Remember, my first look at these films had been for Catharine Helfrich, not Catharine Elsasser. Now everything was changed.)

In my first exploration of the Vinnigen baptisms, I had stumbled across a Peter Elsasser. I made note of it, even though the birth date didn’t match Ernestine’s ancestor. This Peter was close. He was born in November 1815 to Petrus Elsasser, schoolmaster, and Anna Odilia Greiner. Ernestine’s Peter Elsasser was born 12 April 1815 as inscribed on his tombstone. I was more than intrigued, though. The mother’s given name was Anna Odilia!

I set aside time for another visit to my Family History Center, but first I decided to take another crack at finding a passenger list with Anna Odilia and Francis Helfrich and Catharine Elsasser.  Peter Eslasser most likely came through the port of New Orleans.  I decided to search the New Orleans arrivals specifically, using the broadest wildcards I could without having the Ancestry.com search feature throw a hissy fit at me. It worked! I know the records are sometimes wrong, but this is one of the worst cases of garbled names that I have seen. I think my family was not only speaking German, but whoever gave their names to the recording official must have been speaking with a mouth full of marbles. Here is how the names came out, arriving on the Columbia 2 June 1845:

Francois Hoferig – 41
Orma Gehner – 54
Cath Elsaser – 31
Adams Efferig – 12

Despite the awful spellings, the ages were perfect. Note that “Orma” was 13 years older than “Francois.” (It was a French ship that sailed from LeHavre.) An examination of the original manifest showed that part of the problem was poor transcription. Hofrig was Helfrig and that is an alternate spelling of Helfrich. Could Gehner be Greiner, I wondered? And could this be the same Adam that was living with Peter Elsasser in Vicksburg, MS, in 1850? It now seems likely.

It is amazing that I found birth records for all four of these individuals in Vininingen. Here is the additional information that I was able to put together after viewing the film a second time:

1. Francis Helfrich was born in 1803 to Francis Adam Helfrich and Maria Bauer.

Francis Helfrich Baptism (Vinningen Catholic Taufen 1770-1798, 1800-1927; Family History Library; Film 400554)

2. Anna Odilia Greiner was born 8 October 1790 to Joannes Greiner (Kreiner) and Catharina Schatz.

Anna Odilia Greiner Baptism (Vinningen Catholic Taufen 1770-1798, 1800-1927; Family History Library; Film 400554)

3. Catharina Elsasser was born in December 1813 to Petrus Eslasser and Anna Odilia Greiner.

Catharina Elsasser 1818 Baptism (Vinningen Catholic Taufen 1770-1798, 1800-1927; Family History Library; Film 400554)

4. Adam Helfrich was born in 1832 to Francis Helfrich and Anna Odilia Greiner. He would be the half-brother of Catherine Elsasser.

Adam Helfrich 1818 Baptism (Vinningen Catholic Taufen 1770-1798, 1800-1927; Family History Library; Film 400554)

5. Peter Elsasser and Anna Odilia Greiner had a second child named Peter who was born 9 March 1818. Apparently, the first child named Peter must have died.

Peter Elsasser 1818 Baptism (Vinningen Catholic Taufen 1770-1798, 1800-1927; Family History Library; Film 400554)

6. Peter Elsasser and Anna Odilia Greiner also had a child named Catharina before my 2x great-grandmother. One must assume this child also died.

7. The surnames are partially indexed in the Vinnigen originals, but there are no other Elsassers that I have found. It appears that Peter the Elder must have been from somewhere else. It seems like 20% of the Catholic records in Vinningen are for people with the surname Greiner!

8. I now have two DNA matches who share most recent common ancestors of Johannes Greiner and Catharina Schatz. Anna Odilia Greiner Elsasser Helfrich was the third Anna Odilia born to Joannes Greiner and Anna Maria Schatz, the first two presumably having died young.

This epistle is my way of asking the question, is the Peter Greiner born in Viningen in 1818 the one that emigrated to Vicksburg sometime around 1840?  There are some contradictions.  Peter Elsasser is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Vicksburg. The date of birth on the grave marker is one.  There is a a reference to this marker from an  online database provided by the City of Vicksburg:

This transcription begs more questions than it answers.  Who is Ann Mary Golmer?  She is clearly someone’s mother, but whose? It sounds as though Ann Mary Golmer provided all the tombstones, but if you look at her purported date of death, she would have died too early for this to be true.

Deceased: Golmer, Ann Mary
BurialDate: 1844-03-05
OriginalPurchaser: Rawling, Mary E

Who is Mary E. Rawling? Did she purchase the tombstone or the cemetery plots? Was Peter Elsasser’s birth date provided by someone else at a later date and gotten wrong?

The bigger question, is Peter Elsasser of Vicksburg my 2nd great-granduncle?  This is a work in progress and, as of this writing, remains a mystery.