Were My German Ancestors Fortyeighters? 52 Ancestors 2025 Prompt “Migration”

 

Part of a Wave of German Immigrants: Hoffmans, Funks, and Streus

Johann Friedrich Streu: 1808-1883 (Maternal Third-Great Grandfather)
Friederica Christina Dethloff Streu: 1804-1883 (Maternal Third-Great Grandmother)
Sophia Maria Christiane Streu: 1840-1922 (Maternal Second-Great Grandmother)
Johannes Heinrich Wilhelm Hoffman: 1836-1906  (Maternal Second-Great Grandfather)
Charles Nicolas Funk: 1817-1889 (Maternal Second-Great Grandfather)

A friend who is also working on her family tree recently asked me if my German ancestors were “Forty-eighters”. I had no idea what the term meant, and headed off to do some research. Wikipedia provided me with a basic working definition of the group:

“The Forty-eighters (48ers) were Europeans who participated in or supported the Revolutions of 1848 that swept Europe, particularly those who were expelled from or emigrated from their native land following those revolutions…In the German Confederation, the Forty-eighters favoured unification of Germany, a more democratic government, and guarantees of human rights.” (3)

Wikipedia noted that after the revolutions failed, many of these supporters elected to emigrate, heading for Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ancestry’s article on German immigration stated:

“Between 1848 and 1861, many Germans, known as “Forty-Eighters”, immigrated to the United States. While the exact numbers are unknown, the best estimates are that between 4,000 and 10,000 Forty-Eighters immigrated along with many other Germans who arrived at that time.” (2)

“Forty-Eighters could be found across the Midwestern landscape from the Dakotas to Ohio.” (2)

Illustration of Forty-Eighters boarding ships to emigrate from Germany

So were my German ancestors part of this movement? First, I needed to check on the years they arrived in the United States—did their arrival dates fall within the period from 1848 to 1861?

Yes, they all did. My second-great-grandfather Johannes Heinrich Wilhelm Hoffman (Americanized name of Henry), was born in Oedelum, Hanover, Germany on June 4, 1836, and arrived in the United States in 1855 at the age of nineteen. He would have only been twelve years old when the attempted 1848 revolution occurred, so it seems unlikely he was involved in the movement, unless his family members, who all remained in Germany, were supporters.

Henry and Sophia Hoffman

Henry’s eventual wife and my second-great-grandmother, Sophia Maria Christiane Streu, was born May 29, 1840 in Mecklenburg, Germany, to parents Johann and Freidrica Streu. The family seems to have arrived in America in 1857 when Sophia was sixteen. Her family moved to the Milwaukee area, and that is where Sophia met and married Henry. Milwaukee was one of the areas that Forty-Eighters settled in, so Sophia’s father Johann could have been a follower of the movement.

My remaining German immigrant ancestor was another second-great-grandfather, Charles Nicolas Funk, the father of my great-grandmother Hellena Funk. Charles was born May 12, 1817 in Prussia. He appears on the 1860 census as a cabinetmaker in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and was naturalized November 8, 1864. His arrival date in America is unclear, but was obviously prior to the 1860 census and at least five years before his 1864 naturalization—five years of continuous residence was required by the government. He was certainly old enough to have been involved in 1848, and as a cabinetmaker, he shared some of the characteristics of Forty-Eighters, who were more likely to have been educated or tradesmen rather than the very poor.

What other characteristics did the Forty-Eighters share? Many of them joined the Turners or formed Turner groups in the United States. According to Wikipedia, “Turners are members of German-American gymnastic clubs called Turnvereine. They promoted German culture, physical culture, and liberal politics.” (4)  I don’t believe any of my second-great-grandparents were members.

In addition, many Forty-eighters supported the Union in the Civil War. While I know that Charles Funk registered for the Union draft, he was already in his mid-forties by that time, so he was apparently never drafted and never served. Henry Hoffman also registered for the draft while living in Wisconsin in 1863, but also never served. He continued to farm and father more children throughout the war years before moving to Minnesota in 1870.

I do know that all three families—Hoffman, Streu and Funk—ended up settling near Mankato, Minnesota. As seen in the map below, that area of southeastern Minnesota welcomed large numbers of German immigrants. Mankato had a German-language Lutheran church that my ancestors attended, and a large German population. The nearby community of New Ulm was all German, and was definitely settled by Forty-Eighters. New Ulm still has an active Turner Hall and Turner group.

1872 map of German population, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

There is no definitive evidence proving that my three German ancestors arrived as part of the Forty-Eighters movement, although all of them arrived around the same time period and settled near the Forty-Eighter community of New Ulm, Minnesota. I will never know whether their political beliefs led to their decision to emigrate or if they were simply part of a larger German migratory movement. Ancestry reports that nearly six million Germans immigrated between 1820 and 1910, and only a small percentage of those migrants were Forty-Eighters.

 

Sources:

1. “German Immigration in 1848. https://www.ancestry.com/historical-insights/migration-settlement/immigration/german-immigration-1848

2. The Forty-Eighters of Germany Come to America.  https://www.junctionbooks.net/blog-2/the-forty-eighters-of-germany-come-to-america

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-eighters

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turners

DNA Reveals a Secret: 52 Ancestors 2025 Prompt “Family Secret”

 

Two Siblings Each Give Up a Child for Adoption

 

With the advent of widespread DNA testing, family secrets about children’s parentage are getting revealed. I have been contacted by adoptees or descendants of adoptees who can tell we are related through DNA results on Ancestry who hope that I have information about their birth families. Two of those contacts ended up being a big surprise for me. I realized that they were more closely related to each other than I’d suspected. Each one had the same grandparents, meaning that one each of their parents were siblings. These siblings had each given up a baby for adoption years apart and may have never known the other sibling made the same choice.

Since relatives of these siblings are still alive, I won’t be including any names, locations or years. So yes, this will be a short post.

So how did I determine these siblings were the parents in question? I used the Shared Matches function on Ancestry, that allowed me to see how the adoptees/adoptee descendants were related to me and to my various cousins. When I found the adoptees matched one step closer to a particular set of cousins than expected, I knew the parent was a member of that family.

Once I had that family targeted, I was able to figure out which sibling in the family was the likely parent. In one instance I received verbal confirmation from a family member who knew a little bit about one of the unplanned pregnancies, and a birth certificate obtained by the adoptee confirmed the other.

I don’t know for certain, but I believe that one of the two siblings never told any family members about their child, while the other sibling only told their parents, who kept the secret as long as they lived. I doubt either sibling ever knew they had a shared secret in common, or that they had both made the same difficult decision to give up their child.

I made the decision to keep the secret as well. The adoptees got their answers, and I left it to them to decide what they want to do with the information they have uncovered. As for my Ancestry tree, these adoptee cousins are connected to my tree, with explanations in the private “Notes” function. All the important parties are shown as “living” on my public tree, whether they really are or not, so no one else can see the names and relationships. I wrote up what I learned for my own personal genealogy research records. But that is where this information will remain. Those two parents wanted the information to remain a secret, and I feel it is not my place to reveal it to our extended family.

 

Sources:

DNA double helix horizontal by Jerome Walker. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DNA_double_helix_horizontal.png

What Happened to Isadora? 52 Ancestors 2025 Prompt “Challenge”

Divorcee? Second Marriage? Early Death? The Mystery of Isadora Macbeth

Isadora Macbeth: 1876-? (Maternal First Cousin 3x Removed)

 

Female ancestors can be a source of frustration in genealogy. They can inexplicably disappear from records, leaving me to question whether they died or simply married and changed surnames. I wonder whether their death or marriage records exist but are just not yet available on Ancestry or Family Search, or whether they never existed in the first place or have been destroyed. Isadora Macbeth is one of those frustrating ancestors. She exists in a few records: I know when she was born, that she got married, and that she received a bequest in a will. But after that? Poof! She’s gone. So what happened to Isadora?

Isadora Macbeth was born July 7, 1876 in Blue Earth County, Minnesota. Her parents were Collin Macbeth and Ellen Downing Macbeth. She was the youngest of their six children. Curiously, the birth records seem to list her a male rather than a female, but I believe this was a transcription error, where the transcriber didn’t see the “a” on the end of Isadora, and the name was misspelled in the birth record index as Isidor with an “I” rather than an “a”. As a result, the transcriber assumed the child was male. Here is the index entry for Isadora’s birth.

Isadora appears on the 1880 census as a three-year-old daughter, so her sex was properly recorded there. Tragically, her father died three years later at the fairly young age of forty-nine. Collin had been a stock trader, and Isadora’s eldest brother Charles appears to have taken over the business. Perhaps he supported Isadora, her mother and any other siblings who were still minors until they were able to support themselves. As there are no 1890 census records, I don’t know.

Isadora’s next appearance in records comes in 1897, when she married a newly-minted attorney named Morton Wilkinson Brewster. A news article on the wedding notes the couple was “quietly married in this city (Mankato) last evening by Probate Judge Mead, but the fact did not leak out until this afternoon…The wedding was a surprise to their friends.” This news item seems to hint at some unusual haste in the marriage and perhaps a secret courtship that surprised their acquaintances as well.

The marriage did not result in a child, nor did it last. Morton Brewster married a woman named Maud Allen on December 29, 1903, just six years after his marriage to Isadora. I have found no divorce records, so I am unsure exactly when they separated. I had difficulty finding Morton on the 1900 census. I finally resorted to searching the entire 1900 census record for Wells, Minnesota where Morton and Isadora lived, and found only a partial entry—just the surname Brewster, that he had a wife who had no children, and that he was an attorney. It appears they were still married at that point.

Isadora’s mother Ellen died on July 14, 1905. She left a will that had been written a couple years earlier and lists Isadora as married. Interestingly, Ellen treated Isadora differently than her other children in the will. Isadora’s sister Jennie and brothers John, Colin and Frederick, each received lots of property in Mankato. Isadora received only a “life estate” in lot 5 of block 19 in Wells, Minnesota. Following her death, the lot was to be given to three of Isadora’s siblings.

Why the difference in treatment? Morton practiced law in Wells, Minnesota, and he and Isadora lived there. I hypothesize that the lot in question contained their home, which would mean that Ellen had purchased their home for them. Perhaps Isadora’s marriage was already crumbling when Ellen wrote the will in 1902, and Ellen was trying to ensure that Morton didn’t get his hands on the property. Obviously, Isadora was already divorced by the time Ellen’s estate was probated in 1905, as Morton had already remarried by that point. I’m sure Isadora would have found ownership of the property more valuable in 1905 than a life interest, so Ellen’s attempt to ensure Isadora had a place to live ended up leaving her without financial assets.

So what happened to Isadora after her divorce? I found a marriage record in Wisconsin for her. She had taken back her maiden name of Macbeth, and married Arthur Edward Hankin, a musician and telegraph operator, on Valentine’s Day, 1906. They married in Arthur’s hometown of Sparta, Wisconsin.  

After that marriage, Isadora disappears. I believe I have found another marriage record for Arthur a few years later. If it is for the same Arthur Hankin, did he and Isadora divorce? Did Isadora die?

I looked at other family trees on Ancestry that include Isadora, and I looked at the wiki tree on FamilySearch. None of these trees includes a death record or even a death date for Isadora. Like me , those researchers have found no end-of-life records.

Perhaps someday I will find a record or records that gives a glimpse of Isadora Macbeth’s life post-1906. Until then, Isadora remains a challenge.

 

Sources:

Isadora Macbeth birth record. "Minnesota, County Marriages, 1853-1983," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939Z-BPTV-G?cc=1803974&wc=MRJR-VZ9%3A146277801 : 15 May 2020), 004540653 > image 998 of 2162; county courthouses, Minnesota. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939Z-BPTV-G?i=997

Marriage Certificate for Morton Brewster’s second marriage. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939Z-YP2W-D?view=index&action=view&cc=1803974

Ellen Brewster Will Record, 1905. Minnesota, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1801-1925. https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/9070/images/007667673_00153?pId=4632107

Marriage record for Isadore May Macbeth and Arthur Edward Hankin. Wisconsin, U.S., Marriage Index, 1808-1907. Vol. 4, page 490. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Marriage/MR1516492