Hartman - Koester Ancestry - Frank Oberle - Bog

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.