I have been indexing the baptismal records of the Church Book in Tann which includes the years 1791-1822 for several months now. As you are probably aware if you have followed this Blog at all, Tann is the ancestral hometown of the Roediger and Eichenauer families of NW Ohio.
Sometimes things get a little more complicated then one might imagine when I'm trying to connect these people to my tree. If I could just force myself to stick to indexing, the task would go much faster. But, as I index each new baptismal record I just have to see if this child fits anywhere in my tree.
In this Blog post I am going to let you follow me on a detour I recently took off of the Indexing Task Highway.
Let me use Anna Martha Herdt as an example. This is her baptismal record which I was indexing and then checking to see if she connected with my existing family tree:
From this record I learned that:
Anna Martha was born on 19 November 1805 at 10 in the evening, and baptized on 24 November 1805 in Tann. The Cross above the figures 13/3 64 indicates that she died on 13 March 1864.
Her parents were Johann Heinrich Herdt (farmer) and his wife, Elisabeth, neé Glebe.
Her baptismal sponsor was her father’s sister, Anna Martha, the wife of Nicolaus Büttner from Rohrbach.
Upon reviewing my tree I realized that I already had the subject’s parents in my tree, plus two of her siblings. So I intended to add her to my tree. After all, she is the great-aunt of the husband of the niece of the husband of my 3rd cousin 2X removed. I won’t bore you with the details because the exact relationship is not the focus of this blog. But I will include the path between us at the end of this post.
The real focus of this post is the process that is sometimes necessary to ensure that connections are made with the correct people. (And to show you how much brain power I have to burn to learn). After all, the names in the area around Tann are repeated over and over as the example above proves. Anna Martha Herdt was named after her aunt, Anna Martha Herdt. And this can become confusing. I continually check to see if I might have someone in my tree already who matches the identity of one I am indexing.
In this case, I checked to see if I already had the aunt, Anna Martha Herdt anywhere in my tree. I did not, so I added her as a sibling of Johann Heinrich Herdt, our subject’s father.
Then, I checked to see if there was a Nicolaus Büttner in my tree that might might be a match for the husband of the “godparent”, Aunt Anna Martha Herdt, in the baptismal record. I found that I had two Nicolaus Büttners in my tree. One was born in 1800, so he definitely did not match. The information I had on the other Nicolaus Büttner looks like this:
As you can see, I have no information about this Nicolaus Büttner other than the information about his two children. I believe that he was named as the father of Anna Margaretha, and that either Elisabeth Knebell’s godmother was her mother’s brother’s wife, Elisabeth Scheuch, or that Anna Margaretha Büttner (daughter of Johannes Büttner and Elisabeth Scheuch) was named after her father’s sister, Anna Margaretha Büttner. In either case, the name of Nicolaus Büttner’s wife is never mentioned.
So, in order to figure out whether this Nicolaus Büttner is the match with the Nicolaus Büttner of the subject’s baptismal record, I needed to examine what data I did have. The daughter of Nicolaus Büttner in the above chart was married in 1795, so she was probably born at least twenty years earlier. So, just to get an idea, I will place her date of birth at 1775. Using the rule of 20 (which I just made up), her father would have been born at least 20 years before that, so before 1755. Just knowing the generational patterns of the Tanners--ie. inhabitants of Tann-- that more often than not, couples did not marry until age 25 or 30, this could push this Nicolaus’s date of birth back to 1735 or even earlier.
I already knew that our subject’s father was born in 1774, so his sister, the godparent, Anna Martha was probably not more than 10 years older or 10 years younger than him. So I assigned a birthdate range for her between 1765 and 1785. So if she was the wife of the Nicolaus Büttner in the above chart, she would have been at least 10 years his junior, and maybe even 50 years his junior. Neither scenario is impossible. Though the latter case is most improbable, the former is at least conceivable.
However, there is another factor which I needed to consider. If you will recall, the baptismal record said that the godparent and her husband were from Rohrbach. This does not fit neatly with what is known about the Nicolaus Büttner in my tree. In fact, all of the information I have on his known family is that they were firmly established in Tann.
Tann and Rohrbach are less than a mile apart. So maybe the reason the church recorder stated that they were from Rohrbach was to ensure that no one confused that Nicolaus Büttner with the one in Tann.
So, my next step was to determine if there actually was a Nicolaus Büttner in Rohrbach’s church records that fit the bill. If so, I could eliminate the one in my tree as a candidate and add a new Nicolaus Büttner from Rohrbach to my tree as the spouse of my subject’s aunt.
After searching I found this marriage record in Rohrbach:
This basically says that on 2 June 1800, in the evangelisch Kirche of Rohrbach, Nicolaus Büttner, Widower, married Anna Martha Herdt, daughter of the deceased Johannes Herdt, resident of Tann.
I should have mentioned earlier that I also previously had information about the subject’s Herdt grandparents in my tree. They were Johannes Herdt and Anna Margaretha Büttner who were married in 1767 in Tann. I had also known that Johannes had died prior to marriage of the subject, Anna Martha’s parents which took place in 1802. But I did not have a definite date of his death.
In spite of this lack of information, this record reveals a father's name and locality consistent with the the Johannes Herdt family in my tree.
So, my next task was to confirm that the Johannes Herdt, father of Johann Heinrich, and grandfather of the subject, Anna Martha Herdt, and of course, father of the godparent of the subject, actually died before Nicolaus Büttner and Anna Martha Herdt married in 1800.
As I already mentioned, His son, Johann Heinrich’s marriage record stated that his father had died prior to their marriage in 1802. And since Johann Heinrich was born in 1774, I know his father must have died no earlier than 1773. I could possibly narrow that window even more by looking for other children born to Johannes Herdt after 1774.
What I learned was that Johannes Herdt and Anna Margaretha Büttner had five more children after Johann Heinrich. I have now added those children into my tree:
*Johann Adam, born 25 Jan 1777
*Elisabeth, born 30 Oct 1779
*Anna Catharina, born 5 Feb 1782
*Johannes, 6 Jan 1787
*Johann Justus, 26 Oct 1794
This helps me shrink this window and look for a Johannes Herdt in Tann death records who was born before 1747 and died between 1793 to 1802. Working backwards from 1802, I found only one Johannes Herdt who fit my criteria:
This one died on 17 Jun 1798 at age 67 years 6 months and 23 days and was buried on the 19th. This would put his birth date at about 25 Nov 1730. Even though there is no information in this record about family members, the fact that there are no other viable candidates in Tann makes me believe that he is a match with the Johannes Herdt I am looking for. Plus this record also aligns with the statement in Nicolaus Büttner and Anna Martha Herdt’s 1800 marriage record that her father was deceased at that time.
As a further step in trying to confirm that this Johannes Herdt is indeed the father of Anna Martha Herdt, godparent of my subject, I have worked forward from 1794 looking for death records of any of Johannes Herdt and Anna Margaretha Büttner’s children or Anna Margaretha Büttner herself that might solidify that consideration. I found a death record for Johann Adam (b. 1777) who died on 1 Apr 1800 which states that his father had predeceased him. Since this date predates the marriage of Nicolaus Büttner and Anna Martha Herdt on 2 Jun 1800, I know that I am on the right track.
In fact, I am ready to commit myself to accept this as the correct death record of of Johannes Herdt.
But I was still faced with the question of whether this Nicolaus Büttner could possibly be the Nicolaus Büttner I already have in my tree.
Realizing that he was a widower when he married Anna Martha Herdt, I delved further back into the Rohrbach records and discovered that he was actually previously twice widowed. In his first marriage I learned that his father's name was also Nicolaus and his mother was Juliana Goßmann.
He had 7 children from his union with his first two wives and all were born in Rohrbach, and none match up with the children of the Nicolaus Büttner from Tann in my tree.
In addition I learned that the Nicolaus Büttner of Rohrbach was born in 1754 in Rohrbach and died there in 1814. His third wife, Anna Martha Herdt was born in 1768 in Tann. After Nicolaus died, she married Johannes Sunkell in 1816. She died in Rohrbach and was buried there in 1829.
So, to summarize, I believe that I have been able to rule out the Nicolaus Büttner I had in my tree as the husband of Anna Martha Herdt’s godparent and aunt, and to rule in the Nicolaus Büttner of Rohrbach.
All of the above information and more I have dutifully entered into my Master Index and my family tree. I calculate that I spent 6-8 hours and added 27 to 30 new people into my tree while taking this detour and am now quite ready to move on to the next baptismal record.
At this rate, it might take me 5 years to index the baptismal records from this one church book, encompassing just 30 years. That's a happy thought isn't it!
As promised, just for kicks I am including the path that connects me with the subject, Anna Martha Herdt. I have to thank ancestry.com for making this path known to me. I am not sure I could have figured it out on my own:
I am the Son of Roger Dean Roediger, who is the
Son of Alfred Tobias Roediger, who is the
Son of Conrad Tobias Roediger, who is the
Son of Johann Tobias Rödiger, who is the
Son of Johann Henrich Rödiger, who is the
Son of Johann Adam Rödiger, who was also the
Father of Anna Dorothea Rödiger (2), who is the
Mother of Anna Dorothea Hoßfeld, who is the
Mother of Anna Katharina Hildebrand, who is the
Mother of Anna Maria Schlägel, who is the
Wife of George Leonhard Schuch I, who is the
Son of Leonhard Schuch, who was also the
Father of Valentin Schuch, who is the
Father of Anna Katharina Schuch, who is the
Wife of Heinrich Herdt, who is the
Son of Johannes Herdt, who is the
Son of Johann Heinrich Herdt, who is the
Father of my subject, Anna Martha Herdt
If you have a tree on ancestry.com, this feature appears on each individual's profile page just below the birth and death information. Just click on the link and a list similar to the one I created above will appear. You can then print it out or clink on any person to go directly to their profile page. I think is a quite clever and helpful feature.
By the way, my subject, Anna Martha Herdt grew up and on 30 Dec 1832 she married Johann George Kauffman who was already in my tree and who is the nephew of the husband of a 1st cousin 4X removed from me.
The Self-Appointed Heritage Hound of the Eichenauer-Roediger Family,
Stephen Roediger
