Anna Maria Times Two

In 2018, we discovered what became of Anna Maria Schäfer, a sister of my ancestor, Peter Schaefer:

• Anna Maria Schäfer, 1835-1906, wife of Joseph Adams, married and lived in Boppard.  Her daughter, Elisabeth Adams, married and lived in Nohn (the location of another Schäfer sibling, Elisabeth), and her son, Gerhard Adams, was the one who emigrated to Wisconsin, and whose descendants are a DNA match to me and others in my family.

Now to present day. I've been excited to learn recently that I share DNA with a number of Schäfers from the Eifel region of Germany who came to America in the 1800s, and specifically to the midwest:  Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska.  Sounds familiar, like my ancestor, Peter Schäfer and his brother, Philip, moving to Murray, Iowa. Was my ancestor related to all these other Schäfers emigrating to the American midwest? Among the German locales mentioned in my DNA matches are Mayen, Münk, Arbach, and Mannebach, but the vast majority of records can be found in Retterath. It appears that many generations of Schäfers were recorded living in the Retterath area, about 22 miles west of Udenhausen as the crow flies (no roads are that direct in this hilly region, so the travel distance was and is longer).

Imagine my surprise to discover a marriage record in 1869 between Peter Joseph Scheider, a teacher, and Anna Maria Schäfer, who was born in Udenhausen and was a daughter of Johann Schäfer and Margarethe Gipp. The marriage was in Retterath!

My first assumption was that Anna Maria who married Scheider in 1869 was the widow of Joseph Adams who died in 1866, but that was wrong. Thanks to correspondence with a Scheider researcher in Germany, we have the civil marriage certificate from Virneburg. It does not indicate that Anna Maria was previously married, and it would have if she had been. More than that, the marriage certificate indicates that Anna Maria as well as her parents, Johann and Margarethe, were living in Retterath at the time of the marriage.

So this new evidence gives us some new insights:

• Johann Schäfer and Margarethe Gipp were living in Retterath in 1869, not Udenhausen. It could be that the family was living there because that is where their son, Gerhard, a priest, was assigned. In fact, Gerhard performed the Scheider-Schäfer marriage! But how was my Schäfer family related to other Schäfers in Retterath who seem to be showing up as DNA matches? We don't yet know.
• The next important point is that we now clearly have two girls in the Schaefer family named Anna Maria: one born 1831, married Joseph Adams, lived in Boppard, died in 1906, and the other born 1835, married Peter Joseph Scheider, lived in Unkel, and died in 1885. My previous assumption was that the Anna Maria born in 1831 died as a child, and the next female child, born in 1835, was then named for her deceased sister. But my new German correspondent tells me that especially in this area of the Rhine, children were always named for their godparent. This article supports that idea.

Thus, in our Schäfer family, two girls named Anna Maria had a godmother named Anna Maria. Because I have yet to find baptism records of our family group, we don't know Anna Maria Who, and whether she was the same or a different woman for each child. Without access to libraries or archives (closed by cursed COVID pandemic), it could be awhile before we can search for and access additional records to give us more clues. But one thing seems clear — we have recovered a family member thought to have died in childhood. Welcome back to the Schäfer family history, Anna Maria #2!