Udenhausen - Our German Roots

We've known for a long time about Udenhausen, Prussia, the birth place of our Schaefer immigrants.  The problem has been that there are no less than three places of that name in Germany today.  So which one is ours?  Well, I researched each one (naturally), and rated them by the probability of which was most likely to be ours, based mostly on Catholic population historically.  My first choice was a place which is today called Boppard, situated along the Rhine River within an area that has been designated as a World Heritage Site.  In 1976, Boppard incorporated several of the small surrounding villages, which included a village called Udenhausen.

Well, how to proceed?  In looking online at German Google, I noticed that the current mayor of Boppard-Undenhausen had the surname Schäfer.  Well, of course, Germany is full of people with this surname, but I thought it was worth a shot.  I sent Herr Schäfer an email, completely written with Google Translate saying "I know you're busy and you can forward my email to the nearest archives, but I also can't help wondering if we're related...."

A week went by with no reply, so I figured it landed in the ethereal bit bucket. But then on December 15 came an email into my in box, all in German, which of course immediately got pasted into Google Translate. It was from the wife of the mayor! She wrote to say her husband had given her my message, and she was writing to say that I was most definitely NOT related to him. However, SHE was born and raised in Udenhausen, and just happened to have access to the town genealogy, of which she scanned pages pertaining to Schäfer and sent to me. And OMG, there they were - our Schaefer family! There can be no doubt. Next to the name of Peter Schäfer, it says "wandert 1867 in die USA aus".

So that I have it correctly recorded, the village genealogy I refer to is called this:  

Bopparder Bürgerbuch / 3 Die Ortsbezirke Buchholz, Herschwiesen, Oppenhausen und Udenhausen by Michael Frauenberger; Bernd Minning; Werner Stoffel, published in Boppard in 2003, it is apparently already out of print.

Here is the summary update based on information from that book:

Johannes Schäfer married Margareta Gipp in 1824.  The information we had previously for Margareta was a maiden name of Gibb, but with German pronunciations, the letters B and P are often interchanged between German and English.

This couple had 10 children, in this birth order:  Paul, Gerhard, Elisabeth, A. Maria, Johannes, A. Maria (yes it was common to name children the same name if the first one died), Philipp, Anna, Peter, and Josef.

Knowing that Philip also emigrated to America shortly after his brother Peter, I checked his birth date as recorded in Germany.  It matches exactly with Phil's gravestone in Murray, Iowa: July 3, 1838.  Bingo.

As if this news were not big enough, the town genealogy also takes our family tree back TWO more generations on both the Schäfer and Gipp side, which is to say around the 1750's.  I know enough German history at this point to know that was a time when Germany was just coming out of the Thirty-Year War (which reduced the German population by half), and was about to enter the Seven-Year War.  And by the time our gg-grandfather emigrated 100 years later, he was probably trying to get away from serving in the army of Mr. Otto von Bismarck, who, by the way, didn't much like Catholics.  Wouldn't we like to know the whole story?

But here we are, knowing about Boppard.  The mayor's wife has offered to host a visit when she will be happy to show me around.  It's hard to believe.  We actually found Udenhausen.

Getting Started

As mentioned on my web page, it's taken me awhile to get started with this blog.  The purpose is to post periodic updates regarding my research pertaining to the Schaefer-Crown family.  It serves as a log for me and updates for any family (or others) who are interested.  Enjoy!