Tombstone Tuesday: John and Kunigunda Hoffman

John Hoffman, born in Maur, Canton Zurich, was the youngest of the Hoffman siblings. He came to the U.S. with his mother, brother Christian, and niece Rosina in 1864. ¹ Arriving during the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Army in 1865 shortly after his brother Henry and along with his cousin Jacob Homberger. I’ll tell their army stories in later posts.

After the war John married Kunigunda Schneider, a German immigrant, in Jo Daviess County and was naturalized in Carroll County, Illinois. He first lived on a Derinda Township farm, then had a billiard hall and grocery in Elizabeth, moving on to run a hotel in Hanover, all in Jo Daviess County. He finally settled in Savanna, a town on the Mississippi River in Carroll County. There he had a hotel and among many activities belonged to the R.M.A. Hawk Post 406 of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). (Read more about the GAR in Illinois.)

Kunigunda died in 1909 and John remarried in 1914 to a second German immigrant, Margaret (Kupfer) Toepfer. John passed away in 1922 at the age of eighty-one. He was buried with his first wife in the Savanna City Cemetery. Most of his adult children have also been buried in that cemetery. There is one large marker for both John and Kunigunda and two small stones, one for each of them (photographed from the opposite side of the main photo). John’s has his GAR marker with it. The main stone correctly reads

HOFFMAN
JOHN HOFFMAN
DEC. 16, 1840 – MAY 9, 1922
-------
KUNIGUNDA, HIS WIFE
FEB. 6, 1849 – JAN. 27, 1909



Photographed 19 June 2002