A Day of Research....

I've seen t-shirts that say "a bad day of fishing is better than a good day working."  I don't know if that's necessarily true, but a bad day of genealogy research is still a good day- even if you don't find everything you had hoped.

The headquarters of the St Louis County Library has amassed a large collection of genealogy resources and has a special focus on regional populations, including Germany. While we were at the Gehner Farm for Christmas, I had a chance to to spend a morning digging into their genealogy collection. I had a to-do list of things I wanted to use to try to find out more about the families; some things were successful, some not

1. Henry Gehner Sr's lost brother?

Swing and a miss.
Baptism records in Borgholzhausen list two Frederich Wilhelm Gehners born in 1824 and 1827 to the same parents as Henry Sr. (Given the short time between their births, I suspect the first one died young), and an intriguing possible match kept appreaing in St. Louis for a William Gehner. Unfortunately his death notice in the Post-Dispatch lists him as about 4 years too young.

2. Henry Gehner Sr- Marie Schweppe wedding?

Found it.
St Louis City/County Marriages for 1857
bottom of page 452. 

Notice this entire page are marriages performed in the past couple months by the same pastor (Fr. Picker??), all recorded by the clerk on the same day. A quick Google search lead to this forum on Rootsweb that Pastor Franz Picker founded the Independent German Evangelical Protestant Church in downtown St. Louis, now in Florissant which split off of Holy Ghost Church in 1856. 

Sidebar: Given the timing of the split, it is quite possible Henry Gehner, Sr who was living in St. Louis at the time was a member of one if not both of these churches. If Henry, Sr. was part of the founding of the Independent German church, this would make the number of churches he help found as the result of splitting off another congregation two. It would appear he took his theology seriously.

3. Deutsches Geschlechterbuch 

Nein.

Deutsches Geschlechterbuch (German Lineage Book) is an ongoing series of published family histories; researchers have been submitting their family histories to be published in this series since 1898, which now is in 220 volumes.  The focus of this series are German non-noble, middle class families- often farm families.  Each article includes an introduction about the family (the meaning of the name, a narrative history) and then a family tree as far back as recorded documents go.

Luckily, the first 160+ volumes are on CD and as they digitized them, they indexed the names listed in the old volumes.  Even then, there are hundreds of thousands of names (common names like Schwartz are 20+ pages of index entries).  Having relatively unique names helped, there were few entries for each family.  However, I didn't hit the mother lode of a published genealogy for the Wegehaupt, Geidel or Gehner families.  The entries I did find were for marriages of women in the family subject to the article to men with these last names.  The Geidel and Wegehaupt lines did have mentions of men in the right areas of Germany in the early 1600's, but without any lineage to the families when they arrived in the 1800's, this isn't much to go on.

4. New Haven, MO books.

Really cool stuff.

While not related to us directly, New Haven, Missouri has some information for us.  About 100 miles west of St. Louis, New Haven, MO has a sister city relationship with Borgholzhausen, Germany- the ancestral home town for Henry Gehner and his first wife Maria Schweppe.  The reason?  Many of the settlers in New Haven came from Borgholzhausen in the late 1840's- just before Henry Gehner, Sr.  The St Louis County Library has two books written about the settlers in New Haven which describe the conditions and daily life they had in Borgholzhausen.  Short of finding Henry Sr.'s diary or a stack of letters from him, this is probably as close as we'll get to a detailed description of Gehner life in Germany in the 1830's and before.  That's the next post.