Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ancestor #34

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has another interesting challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF). This time he's going for ancestral name list roulette. Here is the challenge:

1) How old is one of your grandfathers now, or how old would he be if he had lived? Divide this number by 4 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your "roulette number."

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an "ahnentafel"). Who is that person?

3) Tell us three facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the "roulette number."

4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook note or comment, or as a comment on this blog post.

5) If you do not have a person's name for your "roulette number" then spin the wheel again - pick a grandmother, or yourself, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!

Using Dick as the base person, here is the result:

Dick's grandfather Henry Hoffman was born in Oct. 1873 making him 137 today. Divided by 4 = 34.25 that rounds to 34.
Dick's Ahnentafel #34 is Johannes Homberger.
He was baptized on 20 January 1771 in Vorder-Radreyh, Hof, Egg, Zurich.
He married Barbara Muschg on 20 September 1795 in Oetwil am See, Zurich which was her home community.
He died on 16 September 1835 in Oetwil am See at the age of sixty-four.

Three facts about Johannes Homberger:

1. He was a citizen of Hof, Gemeinde of Egg in Canton Zurich, Switzerland, but the family lived in the home gemeinde of his wife's family in neighboring Oetwil am See which is near Lake Zurich (the "See") on its east side.

2. Johannes and Barbara had at least eight children although the records were not totally legible. Marriages were recorded for three of the children, Elizabeth to Johannes Hoffmann, Jakob to Susanna Kunz, and Heinrich to A. Barbara Weber. Daughter Elizabeth was the mother of the immigrant generation of Hoffmans. She also came to Illinois where she died in 1870.

3. His occupation or trade was "meisterzimmerman" or master carpenter. I speculate that it was this occupation that brought Johannes Hoffman, zimmerman, into the Homberger family.

Mappy Monday: Hoffman Land in Woodland Township

The first land owned by Henry and Jacob Hoffman in Illinois was in Derinda Township in southern Jo Daviess County, the northwest corner of the state. Jacob later moved just south to Woodland Township, Carroll County. I wrote earlier about Jacob and the likelihood that he died between 1900 and 1903 when his grandsons, Henry and Jacob Benz, filed paperwork on his land. The Hoffman's brother-in-law, Jacob Blumhardt, husband of their sister Margaret, bought neighboring land in part mortgaged to Henry. When Blumhardt disappeared, Henry eventually got it through a sheriff's sale. I like a pair of landownership maps available from books published in 1893 when the Hoffmans were alive and later in 1908 after their deaths. Jacob Hoffman's land is then owned by Henry Benz, et al. Blumhardt's land that went to Henry Hoffman is then owned by David Burke who was in the process of buying it when Henry died. Also, David is the person with whom widower Jacob Hoffman was enumerated in the 1900 census. The maps tie all these facts together in a nice visual package. The maps were located in libraries, but these digital versions are courtesy of Ancestry.com. Click on any of the maps to see larger versions.

NW Woodland Township - 1893

NW Woodland Township - 1908