Nohn Schaefers

To review the family group of my 3rd g-grandparents, namely Johannes Schaefer and Margaretha Gipp, they had 10 children: one likely died as an infant, one became a priest, three remained in the Boppard area to raise their families, and four emigrated to the USA. That leaves one unaccounted for, Elisabeth, born 1828 in Udenhausen. I've never spent any time looking for her simply because I have come to some acceptance that a certain number of females in any given family simply vanish in time and space.

But the recent discovery of the Adams family from Wisconsin lead to an Ortsfamilienbuch that covers families who lived in Nohn, a place found in the Eifel mountain range of west Germany. That source has revealed more than just a passing reference to Elisabeth Adams, daughter of Josef Adams and Anna Maria Schaefer. It also mentions Elisabeth Schafer, a daughter of Johannes Schaefer and Margaretha Gipp! Unbelievable, but here is the missing daughter in our family group. Elisabeth Schaefer apparently married one Christopher Mueller in Aremberg in 1861, and she died in Nohn in 1888. So far I have not found any reference as to whether she had children.

So now we have accounted for all the children from the Schaefer family group which produced our ancestor who emigrated to America. But there is something more in that Nohn Ortsfamilienbuch. There is an entry for Margaretha Gripp (Gipp) which indicates that she was married to Johannes Schaefer who worked in Udenhausen, and they were the parents of Elisabeth who was born in Udenhausen. Wow. Now we have a whole new viewpoint in a whole new landscape.

Now that I'm looking, there indeed seem to be several links to Nohn in our Schaefer family.  Gerhard, the one who became a priest, preached at a church in Nohn.  Joseph, the youngest, became a teacher and taught for several years in Germany before coming to America. One of the places he taught was in the Eifel.  And now, we have discovered one daughter, Elisabeth, and a granddaughter, Elisabeth Adams, who ended up in Nohn or the surrounding area. The question is whether the family patriarch, Johannes, was originally from Nohn or Udenhausen. The two places are roughly 33 miles apart, as the crow flies. I suspect there must have been some kind of Schaefer family connection in Nohn, some good reason for both Johannes and for some of his children to be found there.

Perhaps all this explains why we have never been able to account for what happened to either of our 3rd g-grandparents.  Even more interesting might be the possibility that this is also telling us something about the previous Schaefer generation. A place called Nohn, no place like Nohn. Thus begins a new avenue of research, and yet more unraveling of our Schaefer family story.

The Adams Family

DNA matching has once again lead me to explore an apparent relation that I could not explain. It's one thing to find a fairly close and inexplicable match to me — that would be challenge enough. But it's quite another thing when my Schaefer first cousins share the same inexplicable match. That makes it Game On.

With very little to go on, I jumped into researching a family from Merrill, Wisconsin, and with some persistence, I was able to determine that one of the immigrants from that family group was from Germany, one Gerhard Adams. It's not hard to recognize that Gerhard is a name of German origin, but Adams? I never would have thought that Adams is a German surname, and surely if the family was German, then the surname Adams was an Americanization of some kind. But Nein. I was able to piece together the following clues:

• In an American record, the birthplace of Gerhard Adams was listed as Boffard, Germany. I've been doing this long enough now to recognize a possible if not probable mistranscription of old script handwriting. Given that my Schaefer family is from the Boppard region of Rheinland, the chances seem good that a DNA match to me could also have the same origins.
• A quick search for Gerhard Adams from Boppard produced a baptism record from a Roman Catholic church in Boppard for Gerhardus Adams, born in 1856 in Boppard, parents (in Latin) were Josephus Adams and Anna Maria Schaefer.  I would call this Deutsch Bingo.
• It so happens that our progenitors, Johannes Schäfer and Margaretha Gipp, had a daughter, Anna Maria, born in 1835 in Udenhausen. She would have been the right age to have been married in the mid-1850s and to have begun having children.

Further research has produced a Boppard Familenbuch, which not only names Josef Adams and Anna Maria Schaefer and most of their children along with all corresponding dates, but also the parents of both Josef and Anna Maria. For our interest, Anna Maria's parents were Johannes Schaefer and Margaretha Gipp of Udenhausen, my very own 3rd g-grandparents.

So now we welcome yet another Schaefer relation who pioneered in early America. But why did Gerhard Adams come to Wisconsin specifically, a place about midway between modern Minneapolis and Green Bay? Surely he had a reason, and perhaps it was familial. The bottom line is that the story of settling in early Wisconsin had its own tales of hardship and adventure. Gerhard Adams, son of Anna Maria Schaefer, traveled across the ocean and halfway across the US continent to Wisconsin where he married a Polish woman, and raised his family.  All their descendants are a part of the Udenhausen Schaefer legacy.