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.