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.

Happy Father's Day, Hans Jakob Hoffmann (1704-1758)

Prolific Father of 15 Children

Joining in on Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF) on Sunday, Father’s Day, I looked at the Hoffman family and found one father far surpassing all others in the number of his children.

Hans Jakob Hoffmann, a citizen of the gemeinde (community) of Oberglatt in Canton Zürich, Switzerland, was baptized there on 26 October 1704. His parents were Hans Hoffmann and Barbara Albrecht. He was the last generation in our line to remain in Oberglatt. On 13 January 1728 he married Anna Margareth Meier, daughter of Anthony Meier and Euphrosina Bünninger. This Meier family had citizenship in the village of Seeb in nearby Bülach.

With Anna Margareth he fathered twelve children, the second of whom was our progenitor Hans Kaspar Hoffmann baptized 4 September 1729. He would marry Rosina Vetter and settle in Burg across the Rhine River from Stein am Rhein. Anna Margareth died 19 September 1748 in Oberglatt. Widower Hans Jakob married a second time to Elsbeth Rösch, apparently from Kloten, another nearby community. Elsbeth presented Hans Jakob with three children the first of whom, also named Elsbeth, was baptized 25 January 1750. The last of the fifteen children was named Felix and he was born 28 November 1756. The patriarch of the family died on 3 August 1758.

I have followed very few of the other children in this family mostly because many of them died very young. The first one after our Hans Kaspar to survive and marry was the eighth child, Jakob, born in 1740. The youngest two children, another Jakob and Felix, born in 1752 and 1756, also survived and married. With so few children surviving, this huge family suddenly appears much smaller and their hard lives illustrated.

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All the documentation came from Oberglatt parish records on microfilm at the Family History Library. In addition to church registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths, there are household registers (haushaltungsrodel) and population registers or census (bevölkerungsverzeichnisse, 1633-1767) of Reformed Parishes in the Synod of Zürich, Switzerland.

(Not so) Wordless Wednesday - Henry H. Hoffman Wedding Day 1905

Henry H. Hoffman was born 25 December 1865 and baptised as Joh[annes] Heinrich Hoffmann on 7 January 1866 in Bussnang, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland. His parents were Kaspar Hoffmann, whose citizenship was in Oberglatt, Canton Zurich, and Louise (geb. Schmid.)¹ Henry traveled with his parents, older sister Susette, grandmother Barbara Schmid, probable uncle Heinrich Schmid and aunt Margaretta Hoffmann to Antwerp, Belgium. They sailed from Antwerp on the SS Medway arriving in the port of New York on 2 May 1867. Henry was recorded as Heinrich Hoffmann age eleven months.² Their names altered slightly when they settled in northwestern Illinois.

Caspar Hoffman's children were orphaned at his death in 1877 leaving an estate in debt. Henry lived with and worked for his uncle John Hoffman at his hotel in Hanover, Illinois, in 1880. Eventually Henry, his older sister Susie and their younger siblings, Albert and Louise went west to San Francisco. There Henry met and married Alice Houlton. They were photographed in the elegant auto in 1905. They had one daughter and a number of grandchildren.

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1 Kirchenbuch, 1600-1920 (Oberglatt, Zürich); FHL microfilm no. 0,996,482 from Zurich Staatsarchiv, Book 4, p. 40, 1865.
2 Manifest, S. S. Medway, 2 May 1867, p. 4 for Hoffmann and Schmid family; digital image by subscription, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 24 April 2005); from National Archives microfilm M237 (New York Passenger Lists, 1851-1891), roll 278, list 356.

In the Year 1609

Tonight we watched a PBS Nova special that spent a lot of time discussing telescopes. It reminded me of the piece I wrote for the newsletter on 1609. Following is a reprint of the article from the Henry Hoffman Family News of January/February 2001.

In the Year 1609: The moon was first drawn using a telescope, Heini Hoffmann was born in Oberglatt.

    For Christmas [2000] I gave Dick Galileo's Daughter, a book by Dava Sobel, just because it looked fascinating. It was a fortunate choice; he enjoyed it enough to encourage me to read it too. It is a very readable account of the life of Galileo (1564–1642) in Pisa, Padua and Rome, enlightened by letters from his elder daughter, a cloistered nun.
     Fueled with interest in the 17th century I read Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier's novel based on a painting by Dutch artist Vermeer in the 1650s. The plot was a disappointment, but the book brought to life that time in Delft. I learned that details were mined from the excellent Vermeer and His Milieu, a Web of Social History by John Michael Montias who looked at all sorts of documents of the painter, his friends and three generations of family. The last required genealogical assistance to weave together the names, places and dates to create historical biography. I wish I had access to and could read similar documents in Zürich!
     Galileo's intellectual and aristocratic world is informative for all of Europe, but daily life in conservative, mostly Protestant, Delft was surely closer to that in Zürich. Not having the Catholic faith's need to hurry, probably the same custom was followed in Zürich as in Delft to baptize a child one or two weeks after birth at a service following the Sunday sermon. Creating a 1609 calendar shows the March 5th date of Heini Hoffman's baptism was on a Sunday.
     Bibliographies led me to other books. Interesting is Asimov's Chronology of Science & Discovery which has entries for each year like Grun's The Timetables of History, but only covers a few events, but in some detail. In ArtBook Vermeer I was surprised to learn that the map on the wall in one of his paintings had west, not north, at the top, supposedly common at the time. It looks strange.
     I was especially taken with the pages from Galileo's notebook with the first illustrations of the moon's surface as seen with a telescope in 1609. The telescope was accidentally invented in Holland the previous year but kept secret as a military advantage, but rumors quickly ran through Europe and Galileo easily built his own. He is the first known to have turned it to the sky where he could distinguish the stars of the Milky Way and the mountains and “seas” of the moon.


     Galileo's inventions include a pendulum clock, but that didn't come until the end of his life in 1641. He was blind by then and the model built for him by his son. Try to imagine life in 1609 with no clocks as we know them. He died in January of 1642; Isaac Newton was born Christmas of that year, one of my favorite men of science.
    Exploration was big in 1609 when Henry Hudson, searching for a Northwest passage, reached New York Bay (Manhattan, located by Verrazano in 1531) and sailed his ship Half Moon up the river that would be named for him all the way to the site of Albany. One of Vermeer's ancestors had dealings that year with founders of the East India Company.
     In Oberglatt, the baptism register was begun in 1600. Men named Hoffman first appear as witnesses, Claus in 1602 and Hans in 1605. Soon their own children appear. For some reason the name Hoffman is underlined in these records though others are not. This continues for some years, then another name is underlined. Sadly, around 1609 many baptisms do not list the mother. The given names in this record are diminutives which at this time are very common in the records. These are probably for Heinrich, Jacob, perhaps Gertrude. Heini was always so named. In 1654 his son Hans was born who would become the Ehegaumer.


     I also brought home from the library books on The Thirty Year's War (1618-1648—Switzerland just managed to stay out of this one, but the ending of it had important results for its autonomy and neutrality) and The Black Death or plague which was still a scourge of the 17th century. It was a time of great invention and discovery, but was still very primitive in health and education.

Tombstone Tuesday: Caspar Hoffman (1837 - 1877)

Caspar Hoffman was one of the younger siblings of the immigrant Swiss family. He was born 7 January 1837 in Maur, Canton Zurich. He was baptized there as Kaspar Hoffmann, his father Johannes a citizen of Oberglatt, Canton Zurich. The witnesses were Kaspar Sennhauser and (Mrs.) Barbara Hofmann.

He arrived in the U.S. and Illinois in 1867 with his wife Louisa Schmid and two children. Louisa died and he married Wilhelmine (Minnie) Sievert in 1872. He had a farm in Carroll County but died there 19 June 1877 leaving a widow and four minor children of his first marriage. His brother Henry Hoffman administered the estate. The land had to be sold to meet the debts but still fell short. He had taken a number of loans, some from his brothers and brother-in-law John Hagie, or co-signed by them. The children were scattered among relatives and associates.

With no money left over, I'm sure he had no gravestone at the time. His widow remarried and had this slightly cryptic marker erected in the Albrecht (or Albright or Fehler) Cemetery. Where it says "Minnie His Wife," it really means wife of both men. I have no idea where Caspar is actually buried, but this cemetery is likely as other family members and friends are buried there. In rural Derinda Township, Jo Daviess County, Illinois, it was once with a church, but even the building is long gone.

photos taken 18 June 2002

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