Bøger udgivet af Engenthal Press

On the night of 27 January 1726, Anna-Maria Anstett, the wife of Johann Oberle of Dagsburg in Lotharingia, took shelter in the Mauri Monastery while traveling in Alsace. With the help of a midwife, Anna-Maria delivered her fifth child, also named Johann, who is believed to be a younger brother of Balthassar Oberle, who was born in about 1711. More than a century later, on 17 July 1855, Balthassar's great-great-grandson Seraphin was born in the town of Engenthal-le-Bas in Alsace. The Oberle family had already lived through the climatic disasters of the middle eighteenth century, the French Revolution with its bizarre calendar and politics, and had seen the Napoleonic era come and go. After an almost eighty year period of stability, however, Seraphin was to experience the Prussian invasion of France, and he himself was to end up "drafted" into the Prussian military. Before too long, he encountered a young figure skater at his posting in Emden, a bustling shipping town on the Ems River in the northern reaches of the Prussian Empire. He and Sarah eventually made their way to the port of Baltimore, where they stepped off the ship and began a new life. With historical context provided as background, this book traces the history of Seraphin's family from Balthassar's birth in 1711 to brief discussions of the lives of his son Joseph's four children and the death of their mother in 1975. The book includes copies of many original records - the first of which is from the Mauri Monastery mentioned above, as well as photographs (including a few from the mid-nineteenth century) and examples of U.S. currency signed by Joseph Oberle during his banking career. A number of appendices are included - including tips on reading and interpreting early records, suggestions for those wishing to undertake further research or visit the areas of Alsace and Lorraine mentioned in the book, and well as a list of seven generations of Balthassar Oberle's family.

The earliest members of the Hartman family - Quakers from the Palatinate - had settled in William Penn's territory by late 1740, with the particular branch discussed her settling in Berks County, northwest of where the first Hartmans arrived in Philadelphia. In the late 1780s, when the many frontier (then in east-central Pennsylvania) disputes had been settled, the family migrated further northwest to what is now Pennsylvania's Columbia County. By the late 19th century, Grier Hartman had migrated to Illinois. This book summarizes the family history of this Hartman branch from colonial times, including marriages to Fox, Breece, and Caruth women along the way, until Ray Ellis Hartman's daughter met and married a descendant of Johann Johannsen Küster, who lived in what we now call Germany during the 17th century. Johann Küster's 5th great-grandson Anton Koester migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, settling originally in Iowa, then later in Illinois, where his youngest son met and married Ray Ellis Hartman's daughter. A brief history of this line of the Koester family and Anton's Bruns in-laws is given, along with a reproduction of "The Koster Family Album" originally created by some German descendants of Johann Küster in 1928. Copies of ancestry diagrams, and selected census pages, draft registration cards, and passenger arrival manifests and/or naturalization petitions related to members of these family lines are included, as well as a few maps showing where they lived in earlier years.

Possibly the most interesting descendant of Justice and Magdalen Gonce, the ancestors of virtually all Gonces in the United States today, was Abraham Rudolph Gonce. "Doc" Gonce was not only a medical practitioner and Missouri pioneer, but at various times was a public servant, bootlegger, and murderer. He married at least four times (including a pair of concurrent marriages that resulted in a prison term for bigamy) and had at least seventeen children. He is most infamous for the murder of his town's postmaster, for which he served another term in the Missouri Penitentiary. In addition to full transcripts of Doc's trials for bigamy and murder, this book also documents the outlaw activities and sometimes tragic stories surrounding a few of "Doc's" Gonce descendants that continued well into the twentieth century - a burglary committed by two of "Doc's" great-great grandsons was even featured on the popular television show "America's Most Wanted."

In about 1759, a ship carrying Justice Gonce and his family sailed up the Delaware River toward Philadelphia. When the ship (likely British) made its normal stop at the Fort in Newcastle (modern day Delaware), the family disembarked and soon traveled overland to Cecil County, Maryland. Within fifty years, descendants of Justice and Magdalen Gonce and their three sons Rudolph, Abraham and Daniel had not only settled in both Maryland and Delaware, but had spread as far south as the frontier areas of Tennessee and Alabama. Justice, Magdalen and their sons are the ancestors of virtually all the Gonces now living in the U.S. This book discusses the family's early days before and during the American Revolution, and traces the line from Justice Gonce's youngest son Daniel to his descendants in mid-twentieth century Baltimore, Maryland. Details about the early migration of the "Southern Branch" of the family to Tennessee and Alabama are documented, and Gonce family members (including a female POW) known to have taken part in both sides of the American Civil War are introduced. Various publications or postings have suggested at least twenty-one different countries as possible origins of the original Gonce settlers; an appendix debunks many of these theories, while providing commentaries on and references for the other proposals in the hopes of aiding those who wish to undertake further research into the Gonce family.