Henry Hoffman: Family Stories, Part 1

The Hoffman Family News was usually four pages printed each month from December 1998 through December 2002. Since then I’ve put out two or four pages each year. I have the blog version of the newsletter at http://hoffman-news.blogspot.com/ for updates to research finds and items of interest. News of living family members remains in the print version that only goes to family members.

The newsletter and blog have served as a record of research on this family of Swiss immigrants to Illinois. In 2009 I decided I wanted to begin piecing the story together so we could all see the ancestral family members in a unified way. I wrote a little on the Hoffman line but soon bogged down. Over three years later this is my new start on providing ancestral Hoffman stories. During this February I’ve joined a challenge (http://familyhistorywritingchallenge.blogspot.com/) to write every day. I set a word count goal of 500. That seems rather ambitious, but we’ll see how it goes. Some of the time I will be writing on other projects. I am currently finishing an article on my Williamson family that I plan to submit for publication.

Today the first Hoffman immigrant takes center stage. Heinrich Hoffmann was a citizen of the community of Oberglatt in Canton Zurich even though he never lived there. Oberglatt is still a small town a little north of the runways of Zurich International Airport. Dick has translated some historical information on their website (http://www.oetwil.ch/de/) including some interesting tidbits about the bridge over the River Glatt.

In Illinois Heinrich gradually changed to the English version of Henry and dropped the second “n” at the end of his surname. Two sources told of the location of the family before they Switzerland. Henry’s youngest brother, John Hoffman, has a biographical sketch in a Carroll County history. In it he named the place from which he came. He came to the U.S. in 1864 with other family members included his widowed mother. She is buried in a rural cemetery where Henry and some of his sons were later buried. Her tombstone, engraved in German, also tells the place she was born: Oetweil, Ct. Zurich, Schweiz. The current spelling of the name of the community is Oetwil am See. That was all that was needed to begin finding the family in Swiss records.

The Family History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) has microfilmed records all over the world. They have an extensive collection of Swiss church books. They loan copies of the films to the many Family History Centers around the world. We spent many hours pouring over church records hand-written in old German script, some of them over 400 years old. Most are the registers in which pastors recorded baptisms, marriages, burials, and sometimes confirmations. The Reformed Church in Canton Zurich was the protestant denomination founded on the teachings of Ulrich Zwingli and governed by the Zurich Synod. The synod required additional records that are of enormous genealogical value. One type, haushaltungsrodel (household list), had a listing for every family in a parish and included ages or birth dates for a man, his wife and his children. Earlier population records (1633-1767) have briefer entries, but with family units together. Today digital versions of the microfilms are created and put online with free access.

Finding Henry (actually Heinrich Hoffmann) in records of Oetwil am See was easy. They also pointed to his place of citizenship where many more records were of great help. The location of his family between the marriage of his parents and the births of some of the younger siblings in Maur, a little north of Oetwil, is still a mystery. Tomorrow will bring more details about Henry Hoffman.

Follow Friday: The Register of Swiss Surnames

I recently learned from a post by Wolf Seelentag that the Register of Swiss Surnames is available online. This is an extremely important resource for Swiss genealogical research and the very first place to check when starting out on a name.  A search engine, guidelines and a table of abbreviations are presented in English (here) and in German, French, Italian and Romansh, Switzerland’s four official languages.

In the early days of our Swiss research I got look-ups or used the three-volume set at the library of the Western Reserve Historical Society. Titled Swiss Surnames: a Complete Register, it was edited by Emil Meier and published by Picton Press in 1995. Its original German name is Familiennamenbuch der Schweiz. This is a list of all surnames with Swiss citizenship in 1962 for each community in which citizenship was held. When you don’t know the community from which your Swiss family originated, finding records is nearly futile.

We first learned that our Hoffman immigrants came from Oetwil am See in Canton Zurich. Church records there included members of the family because they did live there. However, they were always noted as “von Oberglatt” (of Oberglatt) the community in which they were citizens – even though our branch hadn’t lived there since about 1750. If you look for Hoffmann or Hofmann in Canton Zurich, you will find that HOFFMANN (2 Fs) is listed for Oberglatt from before 1800. Our immigrants included the widowed mother of seven. Her maiden name was Homberger. The listing for Egg, a community just north of Oetwil am See was one of the places that name appeared before 1800. Her father was a citizen of Egg (remember that’s German and sounds a little like “eck” not that thing you scrambled for breakfast). Her mother’s family were the ones who were citizens of Oetwil am See. Their surname was Muschg. A potential problem with the list shows here. Older church records show the family as citizens in that location, but the register does not have them as citizens before 1800. The reason is that eventually all the descendants I could trace were daughters and the family surnames changed to that of the husbands. In other words, the name “daughtered out.”

It is a big advantage to have this list so handy now. If you have, or may have, Swiss family to research, be sure to check their surnames in the register.

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.

A Hagie Marriage Certificate

Originally posted on 7 Jun 2009

Marriage records seem to abound these days. The Family Search beta site (http://pilot.familysearch.org/) where so many digital images and indexes are becoming available now has records from Cook County, Illinois, home of the city of Chicago. I try to search in new databases when I learn of them and Chicago marriage licenses had some for various relatives.

One was for a grandson of Regula (Hoffmann) Hagie. She was the second of the Hoffmann sisters and the last of the family to immigrate to the US. She and her husband John settled in the town of Elizabeth near the Derinda farms of other family members in Jo Daviess County. Frederick, the middle of their 3 sons, had two daughters and a son. The younger daughter, Maude, ran a store in Elizabeth into her old age, dying in 1974. The son became a doctor who had a practice in Richmond, Indiana.

Some years ago we visited the library in Richmond on the way home from the west and found many items about the Hagie family in the local newspapers. The doctor's name was Franklin Eugene Hagie. He married a Canadian immigrant whose father was the minister who married them. Her name was Nell Wells Rae.



Franklin served as a doctor in World War I after an internship in Chicago. He settled in Richmond in 1919. He died in 1951 and he and his wife were buried in Earlham Cemetery. His obituary ran this photo which we printed from microfilm and scanned:



His grandmother's name of Regula certainly looked unfamiliar when we first encountered it, but I found many girls with that name in Swiss church baptismal records. I learned that Regula was one of two patron saints of canton Zürich which would explain its being common there but not elsewhere. I found an article at Wikipedia on the Zürich patron saints Felix and Regula at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_and_Regula