My grandmother Viola told me that her family came from Germany and that she only spoke German until she went to school. Her middle name was Bertha, after her mother’s mother, Bertha Milford. My grandmother told me that Bertha came to America and lived with her father. Since Bertha was single, “an old maid,” in the language of that time, her father expected her to take care of all the children in his new family. He told her he would never speak to her again if she married Robert Feldweg, who was almost a decade younger. She saw her chance and took it, and now we are all here. [1] Genealogy documents having come online since I talked with my grandmother, I was able to learn that Bertha’s full name was Amalie Bertha Auguste Mühlpfordt, her father’s name was Johann Carl August Mühlpfordt, and her mother’s name was Johanne Amalie Ernestine Ebritsch. [2] Germans often had three or four given names, but commonly used one. Here I will call them Amalie and Carl. In 1854, Carl left his s...
I am fortunate to have my grandmother’s account in her own words. I have transcribed it in full here, because her handwriting was a little difficult to read unless you are used to it. It was not all written at one time. The last part shows her hand was shaky. The use of capitals, dashes and quotation marks is hers. It was written between 1898 and 1991. “ My Life I was born on Nov. 11 th 1902. Long ago and far away, - not so far – in Newark, N.J. about 200 miles from here, Lancaster, Pa. My first recollection was waking up in an iron crib in a living room, with the upper part of the windows pushed down so all the cold air could come in. All the d...
ANCESTOR NUMBER 1: JAMES JOSEPH KIRNER I’ve decided to make a new start on this blog. I’ve decided to go through the ancestors in Ahnentafel table order, a numbering scheme widely used in genealogy software. And in order to speed up the writing process, I’ve decided to forego using footnotes, since this blog is mainly just for our family. I'm hoping to go through the ancestors, doing one a week. We'll see! My first ancestor was James Joseph Kirner, who I barely knew. So, I am using publicly available records and a private photo to describe him for you. He was born on 15 March 1931 at a hospital in Summit, New Jersey, the youngest son of Leo/Lee Kirner and his wife, nee Agnes Fennessey. This was during the Depression, but Lee and Agnes lived in Chatham, New Jersey, a well-to-do suburb of New York City. Many women still gave birth at home instead of in a hospital. Jimmy had only one sister, Mary, who was about ten years older than him. Jim lived in Chatham all during childhood, g...
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