Discovering another Unknown Schaefer

A few weeks ago, I wrote about finally discovering the death date and burial location of my 2nd g-grandmother, Maria Magdalena Vierling Schaefer.  I wrote to the Most Holy Trinity cemetery in Brooklyn to inquire about her burial plot, and received a reply that her grave is in block 073, row 009, and grave 005.  The cemetery reports that two others are buried in the same grave:

• Louis Schaffer, interred 7 Jun 1893 at 22 years old
• Frank Schaffer, interred 22 Dec 1890 at 8 years old.

We knew about Maria's son Louis (also called Ludwig, see my blog post Obituary) because he had shown up in census records both in Iowa and New York.  But we didn't know about Frank.  We knew that Maria had given birth to an unnamed male in Iowa in 1882, per a birth record found there, but we never knew that child's name or if he survived.  Apparently Frank was that child.  He died of pneumonia.  

I'm not sure where the name Frank might have come from but I suspect it was on the Vierling side as Maria's sister, Catherine, had the middle name Franciszka.  I can only think that Maria's brother, Adam Vierling, helped Maria to buy the burial plot for her sons since upon her return to NY she was newly widowed and with small children.  Adam Vierling and his family are also buried at MHT -- a grave I visited when last in NY in hopes that I would find Maria had been buried in his plot, but alas not.  In fact, Maria outlived all her siblings, only to die in the charitable care of Catholic nuns.  Thankfully, her faith gave her a resting place with two of her sons.

Remembering Maria

For the last 17 years, I've been trying to determine whatever happened to my gg-grandmother, Maria Magdalena Vierling, who arrived in New York harbor from Germany in 1866 at the age of 16.  She came to America traveling only with her older sister, Catherina.  Four years later, Maria married another German immigrant, Peter Schaefer, at the Most Holy Trinity church in Brooklyn.

Peter and Maria moved to Murray, Iowa around 1876.  But something must have happened to Peter because by 1889, Mary Schaefer, as she was known in America, was back in New York, a widow.  The last record I had of her was the 1900 census of Brooklyn, a widowed washing woman living with the two surviving of her six known children.  

So what happened to Maria after 1900?  Did she go back to Germany?  Did she remain in America living around her other siblings, one of whom had moved to Rhode Island?  When did she die?  And can we guess how many women had the name Mary Schaefer (of various spellings) in the boroughs of New York from 1900-1920?  Many, and over the years I have pulled at least a dozen death certificates for women of that name hoping to find my gg-grandmother, but as with Peter, I've just had no luck determining whatever became of my immigrant ancestors.  Until yesterday.  The New York City Municipal Archives has finally started digitizing their vital records, and though not straightforward to use, I finally found my Mary Schaefer.  She died April 16, 1916 at the Home of the Aged run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, one of two such homes in Brooklyn at that time.  Here is a link that tells something about the Sisters.

Maria was 71 years old when she died.  Her fairly long life in America had been full of tragedies and sorrows (see my related blog post about Maria's life), and yet it was by the grace of Maria's courage, faith, and perseverance that my family history can be written the way it has been.  If Maria had not returned to New York after Peter's death in Iowa, well, our family story would have been different and that other story would not have included my grandfather, my father, my uncles, my cousins, my siblings, or me.  As it was, Mary had at least 6 grandchildren alive in Brooklyn when her life was waning - they were Madeline, Martin, John, Charles, George, and Ruth - did they ever meet their grandmother?  Even though we don't have any account that they did, I do hope they had that opportunity.  Great-great grandmother Maria was a woman whose story was both simple and inspiring, and hers was a full life that mattered in so many ways.

So 110 years after Maria's death, let us remember our gg-grandmother gratefully.  Per her death certificate she was buried at the Most Holy Trinity Cemetery in Brooklyn, and I have sent an inquiry to see if we can determine if a marker was ever placed on her grave.  There may not have been, and in that case, let this post be that marker.

A Grimm Beauty

With regard to the three generations of my female Alsace ancestors who were all born to unmarried moms — my g-grandmother Marie Grimm, my gg-grandmother Pauline Grimm, and my ggg-grandmother Salome Grimm — I haven't had much expectation of making any new discoveries that add to their story.  However, I am late in reporting about a rather amazing contact I met in 2021, who did just that, add to the story.  Monsieur Augé is a French citizen living in Strasbourg who collects old photographs from his family history and attempts to identify them.  He has long had one particular old photo showing a young and rather elegant woman, probably in her 30s, probably taken around 1900.  The mat around the photo shows the stamp of Goodman (probably photographer) at 191 Broadway in Brooklyn, and the back has the words "Madame Klein, veuve (widow) Michel."  For many years, M. Augé had no idea who Mme. Klein was until he found a family tree of mine that I had posted in Germany.  Based on information I had posted there, he was finally able to identify the unknown woman in his photograph as Cécile Pauline Grimm, widow of Michel Sebastien Klein.  And then he contacted me to share his discovery!  Unbelievable.

It turns out that M. Augé is related to the Klein family, however, because my g-grandmother, Marie Grimm, was not the daughter of Michael S. Klein who would later marry Pauline (as Cécile was known), I am not Klein-related.  Nevertheless, M. Augé is quite an adept genealogist, and so the two of us spent a couple months exchanging information that each of us could locate in our respective countries.  How wonderful to work with somebody whose research interest and experience lie in the home world of my ancestors!  Nothing could be better.

And now we have this eye-opening new image of a younger Pauline to compare to the one faded photo we have of her when she was older.  She was much more than the poor widowed washer woman I had pictured in my mind.  She was stylish with her lace-trimmed dress, feathered hat, white gloves, and charm bracelet.  One hand to hip, she wore an expression of confidence.  She was beautiful in the eye of this beholder, possessing a physical grace that is hard for us to imagine over 100 years later without this glimpse of her portrait.  Pauline was herself a single mother at the time of this new photo, and we know her life in Brooklyn was certainly not an easy one.  But Pauline stood tall in her appearance, and did not hide who she was.  As was carved into her gravestone in 1921, we also know she was beloved, which was, of course, her real beauty.

An American Passport

While visiting with Crown relations in Manorhamilton, it was brought to my attention that a record of U.S. citizenship had been passed down among the descendants of John Crown of Manorhamilton.  This was interesting news!  The certificate has since been located, a hand-written document with very faded ink, part of which can still be read:

United States of America
From the Secretary of State on the 6th day of November 1858
'To permit safely and freely to pass John Crown
a Citizen of the United States' etc.
No 10954

It so happens this is not a certificate of John's U.S. naturalization, but rather his passport, for which he applied in the state of New York on 4 Nov 1858.  Unfortunately, the application, which reflects the same passport number, doesn't say much about John, neither where he was living nor where he was traveling.  We only know these details from the application:

The application was certified by a notary public at NYC city hall with this verbiage:

John Crown a naturalized citizen of the United States, about visiting foreign countries, desires a passport, and I do hereby certify that the persons named herein appeared before me and being duly sworn according to law each subscribed to the annexed declaration which I deem sufficient proof of the citizenship of said John Crown.

There is then an abbreviated notation which takes a while to decipher, which I now translate as:

Court of Common Pleas, Balto (Baltimore) 3 Nov 1856

The person who vouched for John on his passport application was named Charles Cooper, and he signed with his mark.  There were a couple men named Charles Cooper found in the 1858 NYC city directory, but no John Crown.  It's hard to say how Mr. Cooper knew John Crown well enough to vouch for him.

So all this is rather amazing to me.  First, living relations in Manorhamilton are in possession of an artifact that is 165 years old — an American passport issued to John Crown.  And the application for that passport still exists in American archives.  Second, I have always thought that it was my ancestor, Patrick Crown, who was the first from our family group to go to America, but that was not so.  Patrick's older brother, John, was there long before, by at least 12 years or so.  

But there are still a number of questions about John's travel:

• Why did John go to America?  Was it to start a new life or was it to help other Crowns who were in NYC? (see my article A Study of Intersecting Crown Families from the Manorhamilton Region in New York City).  
• Whatever the reason for making the voyage to America, John intended to stay because he went through all steps required to become an American citizen.  But why was he in Baltimore when naturalized?  
• A bigger question is why did John want a passport?  In the mid-19th century, passports in the United States were primarily used for diplomatic purposes and were issued to government officials and individuals traveling on official business. They were not widely required for ordinary citizens traveling abroad for personal reasons.
• And finally, why did John go back to Ireland?  I'm sure his aging parents had much to do with it.  But perhaps the looming Civil War, which erupted in 1861, might also have been a deciding factor.  Maybe John Crown did not see himself as a soldier.

All of this narrative now becomes a new chapter of the Crown story which we have not previously known.  John Crown came home and married, and maybe because of things he had seen and learned in America, he decided to become a proprietor in the town of Manorhamilton.  Though Crown's Bar in Manorhamilton is no longer in the Crown family, their name has been etched in the window of the building which still stands on Castle Street.  We just never knew how far John Crown had traveled before returning to his Leitrim roots and forging ahead into his future.

Sadly, John Crown died in 1882 at the relatively young age of 57.  His gravestone in the Crown plot at Killasnet Graveyard must have been vandalized for it was found pushed over and broken.  But when the base stone was rolled over, we found the clear inscription for John Crown and all his family members.  RIP, John Crown of Manorhamilton, an Irish and American citizen.

Turf — Then and Now and Then

According to the Valuation Office records, in 1861 Richard Crown and seven other Pollboy tenants banded together to pay tax on 73 acres of land that was assessed as bog.  One sixth of Ireland's terrain is classified as bog, more than any other country in Europe except Finland.  Click here to learn about the two types of bogs:  blanket bogs, which we saw on our driving tour of the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, and raised bogs, which would be the kind found in central Ireland, including County Leitrim.

In Ireland, the word "turf" refers to peat, which is the decayed, compressed organic matter found in bogs.  It was the primary source of heating fuel in Ireland for thousands of years.  In 1861, 162 years ago, rural Irish families like that of Richard Crown in Pollboy worked like crazy to bring in crops of turf, which literally had as much or even more significance than bringing in their agricultural crops.  Here is a visual overview, but this 6+ minute video gives an even better perspective.  The collective effort to harvest turf in order to survive each winter was enormous.

Ironically, turf is today considered a dirty fuel, even more so than coal.  And now, the cutting of turf by machine has begun to threaten what is essentially a unique and rare habitat.  And so, the subject of turf-cutting is now an issue of hot debate in Ireland, and I wonder what Richard Crown would have to say.  I would tell him, Look, you can relax now, and then show him my mini-split heat pump powered by electric from my solar panels, which, yes Richard, do still work on cloudy and rainy days.  He'd probably reply, See how you know nothing of Irish culture and identity, that the sweet smoky aroma of a turf fire is not only distinctive, ancient oaks and moss, but its nostalgia is a certain gateway into the long rural traditions of our ancient peoples.  And then I would say, Tell me more.

A Namesake Crown

While being introduced to Manorhamilton last week, I was able to visit with a local researcher, Margaret, who also happens to be married to a descendant of John Crown and Mary Rooney.  During our short visit together, I received a copy of one sheet of Margaret's notes about John Crown, and his wife and children.  Among the children listed was Mary Anne Crown, and Margaret's notes about her say this:

Mary Anne born 11-08-1864 (Killasnet Church Records) and died 1891 (Mary Ellen Connolly's notes).  Mary Anne went to America and married there.  She was then Mrs. Reilly.  She died in childbirth and her daughter, Kate, was brought home to Ireland by aunt, Kate, and reared in Castle Street until she was of age to return to her father in the states.

It was years ago now that somebody forwarded to me an old photo found on Facebook (which I don't use) posted by the Manorhamilton and District Historical Society.  The caption on that photo of three women standing in front of a building says "Crown's Bar, Castle Street 1910.  Katie Reily, Mary Crown, Kate Crown."

It so happens that in the 1901 Ireland census, there was a Kate O'Reilly, age 10, living in Mary Crown's household in Manorhamilton.  For years I have wondered who Kate was, and could only think she was somebody from the Rooney side of the family.  Until now.  Now with insights from Margaret's notes, I can search for corroborating evidence in the U.S.:

• I found a Mary Ann Crown, age 18, a spinster from Ireland arriving in NY in 1883 on her way to Philadelphia.  Could that have been her?  And if so, what was taking her to Philadelphia?
• I found a marriage record between Mary Crown (transcribed as Cronn) and John J Riley in Philadelphia in March 1889.  He was a steel polisher and she was a hat finisher, and her birth was recorded as 2 June 1865 in Ireland.  That date doesn't match the birth date recorded on the Irish civil registration record of Mary Anne's birth in Leitrim, so this record is unsure.
• Finding no clearly identifiable death record for our Mary or Mary Ann Riley (and spelling variations, very common name), I started searching for her daughter, Kate, who supposedly returned to the U.S.  I found a marriage record in 1916 between John McElhatten and Katherine Reilly, born 2 Jul 1892 in Philadelphia.  Katherine's parents were listed as John Reilly and Mary Crown, both deceased.  Bingo.
• I wasn't able to locate Kate's birth record.  Her U.S. records all show slightly different birth years:  her marriage record said her birth was 2 Jul 1892, the social security death index said her birth was 2 Jul 1889, and finally her death certificate said her birth was 2 Jul 1894.  Of the three records, the marriage record would have the date reported by Kate herself.
• Circling back again to look for Mary Anne's death record based on Kate's approximate birth, I found one Mary Riley, married, age 30, who had lived at 1644 Afton and who died of Phthsis (consumption, tuberculosis).  She died 30 Jun 1892 and was buried at Old Cathedral Cemetery on 2 Jul 1892.  Checking the Philadelphia city directories for that year, there was a John J Riley who lived at 1644 Afton, occupation was polisher.
• Moving forward from Kate's marriage in 1916, we find that she and John had one daughter, Hannah Marie McElhatten, and Hannah had two husbands and several children.  And yes, one of those descendants has taken the DNA test and is matching me and one other Crown tester.

So now we know much more about the short life of Mary Anne Crown, daughter of John Crown and Mary Rooney of Manorhamilton.  She was 18 when she left home and family, she was a hat finisher, and she died young of tuberculosis, a disease like COVID passed through the air when someone who is sick with TB disease coughs, laughs, sings, or sneezes.  Mary Anne's daughter, Kate, was apparently born between 1889 and 1892, and we know that she consistently used her mother's burial date as her own birth date.  Kate was likely in her 70s when she died in 1963.

I find myself wondering if any stories about the Crown Bar in Manorhamilton got passed down along the line of Mary Anne Crown.  Maybe a few.  Kate Reilly never knew her mother, Mary Anne, but she grew up with her grandmother and her aunts and uncles at the Crown Bar, all of them forging ahead to support themselves.  I imagine them working all the day but maybe pausing here and there to share a meal, chat with a neighbor, give a kind word in moments of heavy heart.  Maybe more than DNA was going down the line from John and Mary Crown to Mary Anne to Kate Reilly.  Maybe a collective memory of Leitrim lingered in their senses and carries on with us still.

Evidence of Honor

When looking at my current family group of Richard Crown Sr. and Sarah Meehan, I have these children:  John, Mary, Cormac, Bridget, Patrick, and Richard. But I have one more possible child of Richard Sr. and Sarah penciled in, a daughter named Honor Crown.  In 1875, a person named Honor Crown was a witness at the marriage of Martin Eams of Pollboy and Mary Quin of Morerah.  Pollboy and Morerah are Crown Central, at least in my branch of the family, and if Honor Crown was around 20 years old in 1875, making her birth around 1855 or before, then I believe Honor is a candidate as a daughter of Richard Sr. and Sarah, probably their youngest child.

Now after my recent visit to the Valuation Office in Dublin, I discovered that somebody named Anne Crown occupied some of the family property in Morerah.  I have no idea who that might have been, but then I remembered there are at least two examples in Crown genealogy where the same woman was referred to both by Honor and Anne, the second name being something of a nickname.  What if the Anne Crown seen in valuations of Morerah was the same person as Honor Crown, witness at a Eams-Quin marriage?  And given that the chain of occupiers on a property were next of kin of the original occupier, maybe we are looking at another daughter of Richard and Sarah Crown.

The evidence is now on the table to consider.  Click here to read more details about the Morerah valuations.  Because I can find no other record of an Anne Crown in Ireland, one who fits the time and place, I am imagining that she too might have emigrated, perhaps to America where other members of the family had gone.  Regardless, now we know to watch more for the trail of Anne Crown aka Honor.

An Irish Homecoming

I am just returned from my first visit to Ireland!  By all accounts, we were blessed with two weeks of nearly no rain in the areas we visited, so that made the journey all the more pleasant.

After so many years of researching the Crown and related families from afar, the time to meet many of my long-time correspondents had finally arrived.  We were greeted at the airport and later the train station, and then treated to a couple of family gatherings where I finally got to meet the kind people I've been corresponding with.  It's one thing doing genealogy research through a computer screen.  I've learned more than my father or even my grandmother ever dreamed of knowing about our Irish origins.  But meeting these Crown-related people now, seeing their faces and expressions, hearing their voices and tones and accents, feeling their memories come alive with the telling — these things shall never be conveyed by computer screen, and no AI can ever shake my hand knowing that the history of my connection to these people matters in deeper ways.

Because this was my first trip to the Emerald Isle and because time has its limits, I didn't want to get buried with research work.  Thus I bypassed places I might some day still visit, like the National Archives and the National Library.  However, I did make an appointment at the Valuation Office in Dublin because I knew there was information there not currently online.  And so I was able to spend an hour or so with two small books pertaining to properties in the Lurganboy district of County Leitrim.  I am still analyzing the information I gleaned from those books, but regarding the original Crown farm in Pollboy, I was able to see where the farm ownership passed down the line of Richard Sr. to Richard Crown II and III, and was finally sold out of the family to a man in his 90s who still lives on the property.  Amazing.

After Dublin, I was escorted to "Lovely Leitrim" by Paddy Travers, who was our personal guide throughout our days there.  We walked the rolling countryside, saw places off the beaten path where Crown and Travers relations lived, visited hard-to-find grave yards, and shared in the local Irish culture with music and pints.  Quite remarkably, Paddy also connected us to a McMorrow family who had made contact with the current owner of the original Crown farm to seek permission to walk on the property, which we did.  To step foot on that land would have been enough for me in itself, but then there were the ruins of the original Crown farm house.  I had hoped for but not expected this, and I was deeply moved to be standing on the property where our Crown family had lived for over 165 years.

But then there was more.  The McMorrows had located the Crown family plot at the Killasnet grave yard, and there they had found and unearthed the original gravestone of Richard Crown and his wife, Sarah Meehan.  This discovery was emotional.  All the years of research from afar had somehow lead me to this field where our original progenitors were laid to rest.  The origins of my Brooklyn Crown family are not just names and dates, the remnants of their lives in Leitrim are still tangible.

Click here to access the travelogue and photos of this very special journey.  

Native Language

 I wonder how many of us could recognize what this says:

This is the signature of an Irish girl whose English name was Bridget Crowne.  I find it stunning and beautiful to behold.  For descendants of Crown(e) family groups from County Leitrim, Ireland, we can now recognize our ancestors' surname written in the language they spoke long before the English colonized their land.  To learn more about this signature, click here.

Crowns of Jersey City

I guess I never realized that both the Statue of Liberty as well as Ellis Island, which both lie in the waters of the Hudson River, have been at some point claimed to be in the territory of New Jersey rather than New York. In fact, Liberty State Park in Jersey City (JC) incorporates over 1200 acres, half of which is in the open waters of New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary, and the other 600 acres being a parkland of open space and wildlife habitat.  Who knew?  Ok, not me.

It turns out that Jersey City was a hub for Irish immigrants in the 1800s, which included some Crowns from County Leitrim. DNA-matching has helped to identify several children of Francis Crown and Biddy Carroll of Sweetwood who found their way to Jersey City. It's hard to imagine a more stark contrast in environment than that of Sweetwood and Jersey City, and in both places, the conditions for survival were a struggle. The Irish who emigrated faced different hardships from those they left behind, many of which were just as harsh or harsher.  And yet they came.  Is glas iad na cnoc i bhfad uainn.  Distant hills look green.

It so happens my Crown ancestors were barely 10 miles away from JC, settling in Flatbush, Brooklyn.  Did the Flatbush Crowns know the JC Crowns, I wonder.  Maybe.  Probably.  They lived 10 miles apart from each other in County Leitrim, and Irish families not only knew each other, they often helped each other no matter how poor their own lives.  I wish we knew more about how such family connections influenced the choices and the futures of so many.

Click here to read more about discovering the JC Crowns.

Gaeilge

I have occasionally wondered if the Crowns living in County Leitrim in the 1830s were originally from some place outside of Ireland, like maybe England.  But the ethnicity reports from our DNA tests tell the difference between Irish and English.  The Crowns were definitely Irish.

Yet, I'm embarrassed to say that it has been much too easy to think of the Irish as though they were English.  With my Schaefer ancestors, there was no question from the beginning that their German language was not English, and if I wanted to know about those ancestors I had to learn about the language, the written script, the translation of family-related terms, and so on.  Thus, after much stubborn effort, I still can't speak German worth a hoot, but I can read old German church and civil records enough to determine names, dates, places, and relationships.  After that, switching to the Irish ancestors must be a piece of cake because Irish records are written in English, a language officially adopted by America after revolting against the country that colonized them, go figure.  Therefore, reading Irish records written after 1801 in British English need little translation by modern-day me, thinking as I do in American English.

To be clear, the surviving genealogical records found in Ireland are, for the most part, written in English, but the official language of Ireland is Gaeilge which is known as Irish, Gaelic, or Irish Gaelic in English.  Gaeilge uses 18 letters of the Latin alphabet, omitting the following letters used in English: j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z.  Notice the letter W, which would not have occurred in a Gaeilge surname.  Thus, the surname Crown was certainly a name devised by an English record-keeper whose job it was to collect taxes for the Church of Ireland.  This surname reset might have been a literal translation of the Irish word for Crown, coróin, or it might have been a phonetic translation of a name that sounded like or approximated the sound of Crown, something like Croghan.  I tend to favor the latter possibility.

This moment of enlightenment for me about the Gaeilge language comes on the heels of finding a tenant family in County Leitrim whose surname spelling varied slightly over the course of 64 years of English records.  What started in 1833 as Crown became Croan became Croal became Crowell.  You can read about my research into a possible explanation for this spelling variation here.  

Let me assert that my research insights would be utterly empty without several recent email exchanges with Irish relations.  Such correspondence reinforces my idea that connecting with real people can teach us so much more than the records alone, especially where the records are scarce.  I have read Irish history, which, like so many places, is complicated.  But reading that history in English without realizing there might have been another version of that history if translated from Gaelige probably fooled me a little.  It made me think I understood things that I couldn't because the replacement of the Irish native language obscured my ancestors culture as well as the reality of their lives.  As an English speaker, I feel fairly humbled to be learning this lesson now.

With that said, having better awareness of our ancestors' native language gives so much greater meaning to our Irish legacy.  To share the closing remarks from my Irish correspondent:  Slán go Fóill, (Goodbye for the time-being!).

The McGloin Sisters of Largydonnell

I have one more story to tell this week which stems from DNA matches and subsequent research.  In corresponding with descendants of these matches, I learned about three sisters:

• Honora "Annie" McGloin, b 1844 Leitrim, m Michael Duggan after emigrating to NY, d 1935 in Bronx, NY
• Catherine "Kate" McGloin, b 1856 Leitrim, m Terrence McGowan in Ireland, lived in Brooklyn and later Newburgh, NY, d 1963 in Newton, NJ
• Bridget "Bessie" McGloin, b 1860 Leitrim, m Philip Clarke in NY, lived in Brooklyn, d 1950 Brooklyn, NY

There's a wonderful photo of these sisters in their later years, probably taken in New York in 1930s.

The kicker here is that these sisters were daughters of Francis McGloin and Bridget Crown!  I am making the leap that Bridget is the source of our DNA matches!  But I find no records about Bridget other than her death in 1899 in Ballina, Ireland at the age of 86 (b 1813), and her subsequent probate record.  Her husband, Francis McGloin, can be found in the 1857 Griffith's valuation in Largydonnell, where the family story says that the sisters were born.  Francis died in 1887.

But we have one other piece of evidence provided by Bridget herself.  In 1896, Bridget McGloin was writing letters to her daughter, Annie Duggan, from Glenade.  Bridget was asking her daughter to come visit her because she was feeling weak and feeble.  We don't know if Annie made it back to see Bridget or not, but the letters survived, still in the hands of Duggan descendants.  What a treasure!

I have found evidence of Crown families living in Loughmuirran, which is literally a walk of 1202 yards from Glenade, and a little farther down the road to Largydonnell.  The records on these Crowns are sparse, and it's hard to know if Bridget Crown McGloin was related to them.  Alternatively, the Lurganboy and Poundhill Crowns were just over 6 miles down the road to  Manorhamilton. Perhaps the McGloins traveled to Manorhamilton from time to time, and Francis McGloin might have met the fair young Bridget on one such trip, they married, and she moved to his home land. We don't know, yet.

The DNA matches from McGloin descendants in America tell us that Bridget Crown of Glenade is related to us somehow, but how does she fit in?  Each puzzle piece holds some part of the big picture, which at some point will reveal itself to those of us looking.

Cross-Checking Crowns

Anybody using a computer for their genealogy in this day and age is likely reading information that has been abstracted and transcribed from original records.  Somebody else is reading our ancestors' records and we're taking their word for it.  We're also sparing ourselves the time it takes to read the fading ink of old-time handwritten script which might have been written by a priest who was left-handed and using Latin abbreviations if he was in a hurry. But if the research question matters and/or you might die from curiosity, locating original records becomes important.  At least half the time when I look at a record for myself, I find information that was not included in the abstract and/or a word or phrase that was mistranscribed or mistranslated altogether.  Luckily for us, digital images of many Catholic registers, especially in Ireland, are now available online and for free.  What could be better?

This post is going to give you a quick example of how this methodology made me very happy today:

• In a previous post, I mentioned the obituary of Michael Crowne who died in 1936 in NJ.  That news clipping mentioned that Michael had a sister, Mrs. Patrick McMurray.  The unfortunate tradition of identifying women solely by their relationship to men doesn't really help genealogical pursuits.  All my searches for any Patrick McMurray in that vicinity as well as in Ireland from 1920-1940 were fruitless.
• I went back to Michael Crowne's family group to review his siblings. There were two sisters who I couldn't account for, Mary and Bridget.  I started with Mary.  The only information I had about her was that she was baptised at the Killargue Church in County Leitrim in 1877.
• In reading the actual baptism, I came very close to missing something.  Above the original handwriting was a notation made in a smaller and different handwriting which reads "married to Patrick McMorrow 20.9.1908 in Brooklyn by [can't decipher]."  It took several minutes before I realized that the 1936 newspaper obituary of Michael Crowne had misprinted his sister's married name.  We're looking for McMorrow, not McMurray.
• I located the New York marriage certificate for Mary Crown and Patrick McMorrow which was acquired a few weeks before the church wedding.  But strangely, I found no other record of them in any U.S. or NY census. Finally, I found a U.S. passport application dated 5 Jul 1924. The applicant was Patrick McMorrow to be accompanied by his wife Mary whom he had married on 20 Sep. 1908 at the St. Thomas Aquinas RC Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY.  Patrick provided much more information about his origins and his occupation in NY, and Mary McMorrow, housewife, attested that she had known Patrick for 20 years.  And then, affixed to the application, are photographs of them both.  Wow.

So there you have it.  I have read that priests in America would often inquire to the home parish overseas about those seeking sacraments.  So the priest in Brooklyn wrote to the priest in Killargue and asked if Mary Crowne had been baptised there.  The priest in Killargue looked her up in the parish register and confirmed.  The priest in Brooklyn then married the couple, and he subsequently notified the home parishes of the marriage.  In our case, the Killargue priest went back to Mary's baptism record and also made note of her marriage.

I can't say much more about whatever happened to Patrick and Mary, or whether they had children.  The passport application said they were going to Ireland "to benefit health" and would return within two years. We know that Mary was still alive in 1936 when her brother, Michael, died in Hoboken, New Jersey.  Whatever Mary Crown McMorrow's fate, it was likely recorded in some Catholic register somewhere.

Irish-American Nurses

In 2019, a number of DNA matches appeared whose Crown ancestors trace back to the County Leitrim townlands of Sweetwood Lower, Sweetwood Little, and Cloonagh.  All of these places are a virtual stone's throw from the other.  Next came a flurry of correspondence between U.S. and Irish contacts, including some story-telling.  Here's one clip:

There were two unmarried brothers Jimmy and Tom Crown living in the little house beside Crown's Bridge in the townland of Cloonagh.

It didn't take long to identify that this reference applies to Martin Crown, shoemaker of Cloonagh, and his wife, Sarah Waters.  The baptism records tell us this couple had the following children:  John, Mary, Michael, Bridget, James, Ellen/Helen, Catherine, Thomas, and Sarah.  As of the 1911 census, James and Thomas (aka Jimmy and Tom) were living at home in Cloonagh with their elderly widowed mother.

I then tried a reverse search in U.S. records in hopes of catching any family members who might have emigrated:  were there any U.S. Crowns with parents Martin Crown and Sarah Waters?  There was one match to that query for a Michael Crown who arrived in the U.S. in 1903 on his way to his brother John.  The names of both Michael and John appear in the family group of the Cloonagh Crowns.  The passenger list, however, curiously included a reference to a state hospital.  Wonder what that means?

I subsequently fell across a family tree with a Crown relation who supposedly worked at a state hospital on Long Island, citing this wonderful book as a source.  What?  Now that I look, there were three Crown women who lived out on Long Island in communities where state hospitals were:  Helen Crown Moran, Catherine Crown Johnston, and Sarah Crown McHugh.  Hmmm, these are all names of girls in the family group of Martin Crown and Sarah Waters.  Interesting, but this evidence isn't quite enough to say there is a connection between Long Island Crowns and Cloonagh Crowns.

So turning back to Michael Crown who arrived in NY in 1903.  He apparently married in NY and had one child there who died as an infant.  Michael subsequently moved across the river to work in a pencil factory in Hoboken.  He had six children there before he was killed in 1936 when struck by a car while crossing the street.  His obituary mentioned three surviving sisters:  Mrs. Harry Johnston (Catherine), Mrs. O. McHugh (Sarah), and Mrs. Patrick McMurray (Mary).  Two of these would be our Long Island Crown nurses.

Because of the increasing DNA matches, we know that Crowns from the Drumlease civil parish were somehow related to my ancestor, Richard Crown of Pollboy, but the exact connection still eludes us, for now.  And yet thanks to correspondence with Philadelphia relations, descendants of Malachy Travers and Brigid Crown, we know that two g-granddaughters of our Richard Crown were also nurses at Friends Hospital in Philadelphia,  Elizabeth "Babbie" Travers Doherty and Tressa Travers Lynch.  This photo was so kindly shared by James Doherty, an enthusiastic family historian who corresponded with me before his passing in 2018:

Elizabeth Ann Travers Doherty, top step left. and Tressa Travers Lynch, far right

Does nursing just run in the Crown family?  Hardly.  It's interesting to learn that single Irish women outnumbered Irish men among the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island after 1892.  These women were intelligent and independent, wanting to take charge of their own lives, and nursing was a career that welcomed them. Many left the profession after marriage, but their skills, spirit, and compassion have carried on to present day.  As luck would have it, another DNA match has recently joined our growing ranks of Crown descendants, a retired psychiatric nurse who now lives in Australia.  She clearly follows other Crown descendants who found purpose in the care and treatment of mental health patients, those especially struggling through bleak times in their lives. The character of such women emphasizes, then and now, that helping each other is a heritage that belongs to us all.

Remembering Crown Women

Late in 2014, a Crown descendant shared a Crown family tree that his father had drawn. That drawing clearly depicted our ggg-grandparents Richard Crown and Sarah Meehan as the parents of five children:  John, Patrick, Richard, Cormac, and Bridget, outlined in one of my previous posts.  As we know, things really took off from there as we have located descendants from each branch, and further confirmed with DNA matching.  What a miracle that family tree has been to all of us.

And yet, I've learned alot from my own experiences with genealogy over the past many years, not the least of which is that secondary sources (such as a hand-drawn family trees) need to be combined with primary sources and considered altogether in order to draw valid conclusions. The truth is that we have been unable to find any baptism records for the people mentioned here, the marriage records, where they exist, rarely identify the relationship of witnesses, and death records may or may not identify relationships depending on the informant.

All of which brings me to a recent discovery that made me question the aforementioned handed-down family tree. In reviewing early Crown marriages in County Leitrim, I was reminded of the marriage banns between Malachy Travers and Bridget Crown in 1852.  But this time I noticed another marriage bann just three years previous between Michael McMorrow and Mary Crown in 1849.  Both the Crown women in these banns were of Drumlease.  After a long pause, it started to dawn on me.  Mary Crown could be another daughter of Richard Crown and Sarah Meehan, one that was not included in the hand-drawn family tree.  I suddenly feel ridiculous that all this time has gone by, and I have never once considered whether Richard and Sarah had more than one daughter.  Of course they must have, daughters who were forgotten and subsequently unknown to the later generations who were recording our history.

So allow me to briefly introduce Mary Crown.  She was born about 1829, and she and Michael McMorrow had at least 7 children:  Catherine, Patrick, Bridget, Michael, John, Mary, and Sarah.  They lived in Kilroosk.  Mary died in 1878 at the age of 49, and Michael died in 1904, so he can be found in the 1901 census living with his youngest daughter.  We might wonder together how we could associate Mary as a daughter of Richard and Sarah. Certainly the proximity of Kilroosk to Pollboy is notable, but better yet, Richard Crown was a sponsor at the baptism of Mary's son, Patrick, in 1854.  As of this writing, we know about only one Richard Crown who was alive and old enough at that time:  Richard Crown of Pollboy. Richard might have been some relation other than Mary's father, so I'm trying to temper my sense of excitement.  Wish me luck with that.

I have since located a couple DNA matches between me and other known Crown testers and descendants of Mary Crown McMorrow.  Those matches aren't enough to confirm relationships that long ago, but I've been learning how to use triangulation to help confirm a common ancestor.  Until then, Richard could have been Mary's father, or possibly her uncle (maybe daughter of Arthur, see previous post). Even if neither of those speculations can be proved, we know now about Mary - she existed - and I suspect she had sisters as well as brothers, aunts as well as uncles, a mother and maybe grandmothers who helped her with childbirth and mourned her passing at a relatively young age.  Mary Crown had a part in our story.

Finally, let me also acknowledge that 100 years ago today, the United States permitted women to vote, two years after that right was given to Irish women.  Mary Crown McMorrow didn't live to see that time, but her daughters might have, and her granddaughters most certainly did.  I think all our female Crown ancestors would be proud to know that their lives are remembered in our own voices and choices moving forward.

Ghost of Arthur Crown

Until recently, I haven't fully realized just how much history I was going to learn as a result of studying DNA matches. This time, I've spotted two matches to a Crown family who lived in the area of Meshoppen, PA starting in early 1830s, which predates the Great Famine.  So why did this Crown family leave Ireland to settle in a forested region 160 miles from NY or Philadelphia, which were the likeliest ports of arrival?

The answer is almost certainly Jobs. From 1828-1856, the North Branch Canal was built along the Susquehanna River for 169 miles between southern New York and north central Pennsylvania. But work was paused for about 10 years around 1840, and the workers, many if not most of them Irish, had to make a home.  So a handful of Irish settlers acquired land in/around what is today called Stowell, and which would become known as the Irish Settlement.

Although the Crowns are not listed among the early settlers of the Irish Settlement, Richard Crown and his wife Jane Gallagher lived in Meshoppen, 12 miles distant.  They had at least five children up through 1880. One of those children, Arthur Joseph Crown, 1837-1919, had descendants whose DNA is matching me as well as several other testers in my Crown family group.  I think it's fair to say these Meshoppen Crowns fit into our family tree some how, and maybe the very name of Arthur can give us a clue.

The earliest Irish record set I have found that applies to our Crowns is the Ireland Tithe Applotment Books.  There, in 1833 and 1835, an Arthur Crown was tithed in the Killasnet civil parish in the townland of Killymeehin, two miles from where Richard Crown lived in Pollboy.  However, by the time of the 1857 Griffith's Valuation, there was no trace of any Arthur Crown, nor is that name found again in subsequent record searches of that area of Ireland. Poof, gone. Who was Arthur Crown?

The disappearance of one Arthur Crown from Killymeehin in 1835, and the appearance of one Richard Crown in Pennsylvania about the same time could be a coincidence. But then subsequently, what are the odds that Richard Crown living in Pennsylvania would name a son Arthur?  What are the odds that DNA from descendants of Arthur Crown born in Pennsylvania would match descendants of Richard Crown and Sarah Meehan of Pollboy?  Odds are not my thing.  And DNA-matching, which happily lead us to this post, can be crazy-making when we consider the random nature of which and how much DNA is passed to each tester.  But history has a pliable framework in time and space, which, even for all the missing records, echoes.  To the listening ear, it facilitates imagining all the answers to our questions about the past. Perhaps Arthur Crown Sr. and Richard Crown, my ancestor, were brothers. Perhaps Arthur Sr. died in Ireland shortly after being tithed there, and his son, Richard, named for my ancestor, left Ireland for America. Perhaps once in America, Richard named his son for his father, Arthur. This could be one explanation for the evidence we have so far, but it is hardly the only possible explanation and we are light years away from any genealogical proof. But something tells me that the ghost of Arthur Crown who was tithed in Killymeehin in 1835 is following this story now.

The Journey

I am recently learning a great deal about early German culture in the Rheinland thanks to extremely informative articles posted by blogger Kathi Gosz.  I am also reading Kathi's book, House of Johann, which is a novel incorporating facts Kathi has discovered about her Rheinland ancestors and their lives.  I recommend these sources highly, and you will see me pointing to links of Kathi's work more than once.

With that said, I turn to the 1866 emigration application that was recently discovered.  Peter Schaefer was noted as Schreinergeselle, Schreiner indicating a joiner, and geselle indicating a journeyman.  Kathi's article provides an excellent introduction of Gesellen on der Walz.  We learn that the journey meant leaving the home village for three years and a day, and not being allowed to be within 30 miles of the home village during that time.  The journey meant wearing a uniform of sorts in order for the journeyman to be recognizable as such.  The color of his clothing and even the number of buttons on his vest and coat conveyed information about his trade and his available work days/hours.  He had no money, and so walked from place to place with his carved cane (Stenz), a small pack of work clothes, and a satchel of his tools.  He worked for free room and board wherever he went, and he was not allowed to be in any one place more than a few days.

What's most fascinating to me is that the journeyman also carried a Wanderbuch.  The book gave instructions for a journeyman's conduct, and served as a sort of passport, containing a description of the journeyman to help identify him to local police who had to be sure the stranger was not a beggar and was free of disease.  The Wanderbuch also served as a diary which recorded the dates and places of the journeyman's apprentice labor, and any comments from a master about quality of work.

So now let us imagine our Peter Schaefer.  He likely started to learn the trade when he was 14 years old, about 1857.  Who did Peter learn his trade from?  I have a feeling it was from somebody on his mother's side of the family.  I say this because the civil marriage record between Johann Schäfer and Margarethe Gipp in 1824 told us that Margarethe's father, Ludwig Gipp, who had died in 1805, had been a master carpenter.

Peter's initial trade training would have lasted 3-5 years. So let's say he started his trade journey in 1861 when he was 18 years old. But what about Peter's military obligation? Thanks to the Krümpersystem which was developed by the Prussians during the Napoleonic Wars, compulsory service was reduced to three years, and recruits were quickly trained and then sent to the reserves so more recruits could be trained.  Perhaps Peter received his military training, and then being in the reserves, embarked on his trade journey.  Perhaps the trade journey was interrupted by the Second Schleswig War in 1864, and most certainly by the Austro-Prussian War in 1866.  Perhaps, as with Kathi Gosz's ancestor, Peter determined that prospects for becoming a master joiner in Prussia were not promising. Peter's father, Johann, was apparently not a landowner, and so inheritance was likely not a factor to be considered in Peter's future. All these variables probably led Peter to extend his journey to North America.

Which leaves me with the unanswerable question:  Did Peter leave his Wanderbuch behind in Prussia, or did he bring it with him to America?  He would have had no use for it in America except perhaps as a resume and recommendation of his work.  If he brought it with him to America, what became of it?  If ever found, what more would it tell us about Peter Schaefer's incredible journey?

Sources:

• Tidbits Tell a Tailor's Story by Kathi Gosz
• Journeyman Years, wikipedia
• The Wander-Buch of Wilibald Koch by Peter Biggins
• German Journeymen and Wanderbuchs, Family Tree Tours
• Germany Occupations, familysearch

Peter Schaefer in the Prussian Army

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, Rhineland became Rheinprovinz, part of the Kingdom of Prussia where all men were required to serve in the Prussian army.

"...law for universal conscription, by which men would successively serve in the standing army, the Landwehr and the local Landsturm until the age of 39."

Our gg-grandfather, Peter Schaefer, arrived in New York in May, 1867 at the age of 23. At that time and at that age, Peter needed to get permission to emigrate from Prussia or he simply fled illegally. Which was it? Peter got permission.

Thanks again to the extraordinary efforts of an experienced and generous German genealogist, we received from the Landeshauptarchiv in Koblenz a record dated December 1866 which indicated Peter Schäfer's service in the Prussian military. Although I still need a better understanding of the details of this record, we can determine that Peter had served in the 8th Army Corps, which had headquarters in Koblenz, and was the home of the 2nd Infantry Regiment (IR) from Rheinprovinz, No. 28 (28th infantry unit in the Prussian army). I cannot yet confirm that the 2nd IR was Peter Schäfer's unit, but it's a reasonable guess.

Based on my research, the uniform that Peter would have worn was called a Waffenrock. Here is an image that shows such a uniform at the time that Peter was in the army:

And what about Peter's military service? We know that the 2nd IR No. 28 fought in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 (this conflict was known by several names). That unit was part of the 15th Infantry Division, Army of the Elbe, numbering 39,000 troops. The Army of the Elbe was present at the following battles in 1866:

• 26 June - Hühnerwasser
• 28 June - Münchengrätz
• 3 July - Königgrätz

Königgrätz was the decisive battle of the conflict, won by Prussia.  History tells us that it was the largest battle fought in Europe during the 19th century with over 450,000 soldiers on the field. And yet, the Army of the Elbe, lost only 356 soldiers, with 1,234 wounded in action.  Possibly Peter was one of the wounded, or perhaps his service was simply complete by December, 1866.  Whatever the reason, Peter's military obligations were apparently discharged, and his emigration application was approved in January, 1867.

By April, 1867, Peter Schäfer departed from the port in Antwerp, Belgium aboard the ship called Maria S., leaving behind his parents and nine siblings.  He was a Catholic Prussian veteran who had helped defeat the Austrian Empire, which shortly thereafter lead to unification of the German Empire in 1871.  But Peter was also a carpenter, probably more accurately, a joiner.  Peter married in Brooklyn in 1870, started his family, and together with his brother, Philip, who had also emigrated in 1868, he headed 1,200 miles due west to settle in the rolling hills of Murray, Iowa.  Whatever Peter's reasons for leaving Prussia, he apparently did not look back, and the story of his life as a soldier was lost with his presumed death in Iowa before 1885.  But now we know more about the history that Peter Schäfer lived in Prussia before coming to America, and now we won't forget.

GGG-Grandfather Johann Schäfer, RIP

Sometimes it's hard to describe my genealogical journey. When I "discovered" Udenhausen in 2013, that knowledge and subsequent visit to that place seemed more than enough. We had found our Schaefer family origins, which was information lost to us for three generations. My mind and heart were full, and at that time I couldn't want more.

But with the time since 2013 comes experience that is colored by changing technology, which further enables access to clues that fire my curiosity. Remote DNA matches leading to databases of digitized records leading to online translators leading to German genealogists who still don't mind helping an American who wants to know more. This time I have the good fortune to find a German who's been doing genealogy over 20 years and knows all the local resources where records of our family history might be found. He called the local civil registry to inquire about records, he went to the copy center to scan a marriage certificate for me, he used his membership in the West German Society for Family Studies, and he contacted a local author of several familienbuchs in the area to make inquiries. All to help a stranger in America investigating one particular Schaefer family to whom he is not related. German generosity continues to both humble me and inspire me.

Thanks to these exchanges, we're learning about the parents of our ancestor, Peter Schafer, Johann Schäfer and Margarethe Gipp. Who were they? Johann was the son of a cow and pig herder (supposedly, research is ongoing), and we have record of him living in Udenhausen up through 1834 as a day laborer. But I've not been able to find any record of what happened to the Schaefers after that. Now it appears that Johann and Margarethe may have followed the path of their son, Gerhard. Gerhard was ordained a priest in 1853 in Trier. He was a chaplain at Speicher in 1855, and subsequently a pastor at Biersdorf (probably Biersdorf am See), Nohn, Retterath, and Illerich. After Udenhausen, we have now found record of Johann residing at Nohn, Retterath, and Illerich, places where Gerhard was pastor. In this last place, Johann had an apartment where he laid ill for six months before he died on 30 January 1880. He was apparently a widower by that time, and his age was thought to be 80. He was buried at Illerich, as was his son Gerhard, who later died in 1884.

But there is more subtle evidence about the life of our ggg-grandfather. On the 1869 marriage certificate of his daughter, Anna Maria, Johann Schäfer signed his name.

Johann was born at a time when Rhineland had been annexed by Napoleon. From the time of his birth until Napoleon's defeat in 1815, Johann Schäfer was a French citizen living in the French department called Rhin-et-Moselle. Napoleon effectively dismantled the ecclesiastical rule, implementing civil administration and a legal system for the first time. Equality under the law included compulsory schools. Johann was likely the first generation of Schaefers who learned to read and write, as did his children, three of whom were involved in teaching.

The French evacuated Rhin-et-Moselle on New Year's Eve 1814 when the Russians and Prussians moved in. In 1815, the area was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia. Under Wilhelm I and his chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, Prussia was involved in multiple wars fought by all Prussian males ages 17-45 who were compelled to serve. But does that mean all Prussian males did serve? It could be that many Rhinelanders did not serve because they were considered too short!

Nevertheless, the wars involving Prussia took staggering tolls. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 resulted in over 900,000 soldiers of both sides killed, wounded, or captured, and 250,000 civilians killed including 162,000 Germans who died from a small pox epidemic brought by the French. By that time, three of Johann's younger children were in America — Anna, Philip, and Peter, and five years later they would be joined by the youngest in the family, Joseph. It seems nearly certain that these new German-Americans never saw their parents again.

So let us dedicate a moment to the memory of our ggg-grandfather, Johann Schäfer. He bore witness to so much during times that challenged the souls of humanity. May we continue to carry on with as much faith.

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!