German ancestry news!

 

For thirty years, I have been searching to fill the holes in my family history tree--particularly looking for the parents of Catherine Hilligean Kreger, and Mary Mendell.

I have hired professional genealogists over the years with no success. And then, joyful news, I heard back from German researcher Uwe Mehlhorn with the information I'd been seeking. Our Kreger/Krüger/Hilleger/Hilligan line comes from the Hanover region, in the towns of Neuenkirchen, Nellinghof, Fladderlohausen, Kolenfeld, and Gehrden. It's an interesting region that has changed hands under different regimes--Catharine was born in Gehrde when it was the French empire under Napoleon, and then it was Prussia and Oldenburg, now Germany. Gehrde had a third of its population emigrate to America in the nineteenth century. starting with the common laborers in the 1830s, which fits our ancestral story precisely. 

Catharine & Barnhart's marriage record

Catharine's birth record

Mary Adeline's birth record (born Catharine Maria Elisabeth Krüger)
perhaps the Adeline later came from all the Adelheids in the family

One of the most interesting things we now know conclusively is that Mary Adeline Kreger (later married to Hiram Cramer) was born in Germany; her parents and the four oldest Kreger kids emigrated to the US in 1843, when she was three years old. There had been confusion on which of the nine kids in the Kreger family were born in Upper Turkeyfoot Township, and which were born in Germany, and we now have birth records to prove those details.

showing how close Lew's mission village is to ancestral town

Another real delight was the connection with Lew's past--he served some of his mission in the Hannover area, and actually spent the summer of 1969 only minutes from an ancestral town, saying: "I served as a missionary both of my summers in Lower Saxony, first summer of 1969 in Wunstorf (small gorgeous town) and summer of 1970 in Hannover, which is the capital of Lower Saxony and home of the royal House of Hannover, which was the line of the English monarchs starting with George I and going through Queen Victoria.  During WWI, the royal name was changed to House of Windsor to avoid anti-German feelings in Britain.  King Charles speaks very good German which I think he studied a bit in Hannover.  In the German speaking world, the best German ("hoch Deutsch"---high German) is generally considered to be spoken in Hannover.  Love that part of the world. I undoubtedly rode my long-suffering bicycle by many of the gravesites of our beloved ancestors."

St Christophorus Church in Gehrde where Catharine was christened

Note for further research: I think we’re also probably related to the guy who started Kroger grocery stores—his dad is from the same town and era as our Kreger/Kroeger/Krugers, but then there’s no further info on his line. Not sure I’m going to pay for research into the grocery empire, but Bernard Kroger, son of Heinrich Kroger, and our Bernard Kreger, son of Heinrich Kreger, born less than a decade apart in the same vicinity seem tantalizingly connected.

 

I look forward to visiting someday!

only one missing couple left to find for my fourth-great-grandparents generation