Recent communications between top Holzgrafe family history expert and genealogist, Candi Holzgrafe of Palm Desert, California, USA with a Kersten Floring of Germany yielded the most phenomenal discovery since the founding of Holzgrafe Histories in 2011. Candi and Kersten met via Ancestry.com and compared their family line. Candi, who married into the Quincy, Illinois Holzgrafe family, had a suspicion that the Quincy, Illinois and Evansville, Indiana family lines connected at some point in Germany.
Utilizing their combined expertise in FamilySearch and local German church records, a connection was indeed discovered. It was found that Johann Fredrich Holzgrafe (1828) of Schweicheln, North Rhine-Westfalen, Prussia (Old Germany), who emigrated to the Evansville, Indiana around 1845, is the second cousin of Herman Heinrich Holzgrafe (1829) of the same little town in Prussia, who emigrated to Quincy, Illinois in 1854.
The connection continued as Kersten found many church records for the Holzgraefe family in the little town of Schweicheln just outside of Herford, Germany. In fact, the Holzgraefe genealogy was traced all the way back to the 1500s when Holzgraefe was an occupation and not just a surname. Dr. Manfred Holzgraefe of Seesen, Germany explains, "The name Holzgraefe of Holzgraf is a discription of a special function belonging to a farm. The farmer of this farm always had to take the name Holzgraf although his name of birth (surname) was different. The owner of this farm was responsible for the forest belonging to the village".
And so the research continues. There are approximately 160 people with the last name of Holzgrafe in the US today and there may be fewer than that in Germany and other countries. The work is great and the laborers are few, but how sweet the fruits of their reward.
