New Year's Postcard

We wish you all the best in 2010!
This is another of the postcards send by Elizabeth (Hochrein) Hückmann to her cousin. They were given to me in a group of old family postcards and when I sorted them out I found that they gave me the timeline of when the family left Tennessee. As they were written in old German script, they are a challenge to read.

Wordless Wednesday: Jesse Hoffman and Rich about 1941

Tombstone Tuesday: Derinda Methodist Cemetery

Dick and I first visited Jo Daviess County, Illinois, in June of 1999. It was still early in our discoveries about the family, but we did know some of the cemeteries where family members were buried. We followed a map south from Derinda Center around and up the hill and almost missed the little cemetery on a windy hilltop in Section 16. It was once associated with a church, but the building is long gone. It is the origin of the name of Derinda Methodist Cemetery given in a book of transcriptions that is available online. The USGS name given now is the Morrison Cemetery and it has been known as the Wurster Cemetery. Apparently it is on the Wurster farm and maintained, very well, by that family.

We easily located the gravestone of Henry Hoffman (1828-1897) with its GAR marker. Next to it is one for his son Fred and then one shared by his sons Henry and William. In the row facing them is the older gravestone of Henry's mother. It is inscribed in German and reads

HIER RUHT IN FRIEDEN
ELISABETH
HOFFMAN
GEBORNE [Geboren] HOMBERGER
GEB. IN OETWEIL
CT. ZURICH, SCHWEIZ
DEN 17 SEP. 1797
GEST. [Gestorben] DEN
9 JULI 1870
SANFT RUHE IHRE ASCHE.



It states that her maiden name was Homberger and she was born in Oetweil (Oetwil am See) in Canton Zurich, Switzerland on 17 September 1797. (The date is in the month following the one in her Swiss baptismal record.) She died on 9 July 1870. I was so startled to see her birthplace on the stone! We had found the information in a biographical sketch of her youngest son, but if the transcription of this cemetery had included that part of the inscription we would have known so much sooner.



Her second son Henry and three of his sons are buried opposite her in this quiet pastoral setting.

Rosina Hoffman married John Eiler

We hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas! If you've had a chance to read the newsletter, you'll have seen that we finally learned what became of Margaret (Hoffman) Blumhardt and her daughter Rosina Hoffman.

In March I found a marriage listed in the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, 1763–1900, provided by the Illinois State Archives (http://www.sos.state.il.us/departments/archives/marriage.html). It took place in Stephenson County, just east of Jo Daviess, and the place where Margaret lived in 1880. The bride was Rosina Hoffman, the groom John Eiler, the date 14 December 1872. Eventually I determined this to be the right couple as detailed in the newsletter.

I wrote to the Illinois Regional Archives Depository (IRAD) at Northern Illinois University, the one covering Stephenson County, for a copy of the marriage record. They sent copies of the license with the minister's return and the separate affidavit. Click on the images to see them larger.


This is the license. In the affidavit below, you will see John's surname spelled "Iler" and Rosina's first name rendered some other way, written by a clerk no doubt, but it does contain John's signature.



I'll have more about this couple in future posts.

Christmas Postcard

A 1915 greeting card, printed in Saxony, with a message to Mrs. Katie Hoffmann from her Hochrein cousin and her husband, Adam and Eliza Hückmann, in Cleveland, Ohio.

We wish you all a Merry Christmas

St. Helena Vegetarian Café newspaper articles

Originally posted 8 July 2009

I've also done more searching on the St. Helena Vegetarian Café that Henry H. Hoffman (Cliff's grandfather) was involved with. Oddly the items I found were about his apparent partner A. W. Robins and they don't mention Henry. Hmmm. Anyway, here is the front page story about Mr. Robins and his wife after the fire. There were accounts of their arrangement at the beginning of 1909, but this article has the news that there WAS an insurance payment after the fire. These were sure interesting folks 100 years ago! (Clicking on the image will bring it up full size.)



If you want to read more about the arrangement of this couple, here is what the paper reported at the beginning of 1909.

St. Helena Vegetarian Cafe burned in 1909

Originally posted 15 Jun 2009

Caspar Hoffman's older son, Henry H. Hoffman, was a waiter and restaurant owner in San Francisco. After the earthquake and fire we know he and A. W. Robins, as Robins and Hoffman, owned and operated the St. Helena Vegetarian Cafe at 418 Market Street in San Francisco from listings in the 1908 and 1909 city directories.

His descendant, Clifford Anderson, and I have recently thought about trying to learn more about this - to us - novel concept of a vegetarian cafe 100 years ago.

Today I learned about a new Internet resource for early California newspapers. It is the California Digital Newspaper Collection which offers free online access to the Golden State's historical newspapers at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/

I searched on the cafe's name and found one article in The San Francisco Call, Thursday, November 18, 1909, on page 4, column 3. Now we know why Henry Hoffman did not continue to run this interesting establishment.