Entry #28
I am visiting family in Pennsylvania this week and staying with my mother-in-law. She has been telling my husband and I for a few months that she found boxes of “really old photos.” At my request, she dragged out the five boxes in her keeping. Mostly, I was disappointed. There are only a few really old photos. One will be exciting, if I can figure out who he is. I will save that for another time, since I have a hunch. There was another nice find, too, in a less dramatic way.
Luckily, the photo of a young man was marked in pencil, “grandfather.” Later someone added in pen, “Roy’s.” This i.d. – combined with the photographer’s city of Nurnberg -made it pretty it pretty clear that I was looking at a photo of Joseph Köhler as a young man. I was lucky to “meet” one of my husband’s Köhler cousins online and she shared some of her family photos. This gave me an image of an older Joseph, but it is always refreshing to the see the ones taken in the prime of life.
This photo was probably taken between 1880 and 1883 since it was shot before Joseph’s immigration to the U.S.
Joseph Köhler was born in Schweinfurt, Bavaria, on 31 December 1861. He came to the United States in either 1883 or 1886 and settle in Philadelphia, where married Anna Marie Lang of Beerfelden on 21 March 1889. Joseph was a machinist by trade. I have written about Anna Marie previously in the story of how my husband and my friend are cousins. Just two weeks ago, I found their shared ancestors, aided by the Pennsylvania Death Certificates online at Ancestry.com.
Once again, the Pennsylvania Death Certificates have yielded a goldmine of information. Here I learned that Joseph’s parents were Peter Köhler and Christine Hoffmann –new information for me. Joseph and Anna Marie named their only daughter Christine and now we can surmise the origin of her name. Sadly, I realized that Joseph died in the Philadelphia Hospital for Mental Disease on 16 October 1928. It listed arteriosclerosis as the cause of death with dementia as a secondary cause.
I nearly overlooked a crumbling baptismal certificate for Christine Köhler in the boxes of photos that my mother-in-law showed me. It listed Sophie Lang and Leonhard Köhler as her godparents. I guess this was a pretty good haul after all. Maybe Joseph Köhler had a brother named Leonard – more clues for our Köhler research!