Fegel
Research with a much closer relative shed more light on the Fegel Family. Last time, I thought that Christian Fegel married his widow's younger sister after his wife passed away and little Emilie was raised by her aunt/step-mother. This is all true, but as I looked closely at the actual films, I discovered something terrifying.
It all started because I wondered about what happened to the Fegel family. Due to some excellent Ancestry.com researching by a close-ish cousin of mine, we discovered that the Fegel family immigrated to America on 29 May 1848 through the port of New Orleans and ended up in Evansville, Indiana! The Franconia ship's list records the Fegel family as: Christian (26), Wilhelmine (25), Emilie Ottilie (9months), and Carl Friedrich (3). It also mentions that Emilie died on the voyage. My question was, who is this Carl Friedrich? Going back to the birth records available online in Germany, I couldn't find any Carl Friedrich Fegel. Then I went to the films to look at the marriages of the Holzgraefe girls to Christian Fegel and the birth of Emilie. Each of the three records indicated that Christian's first wife passed away in September 1847 shortly after Emilie's birth. I then decided to look back at the birth records for Carl in the same church book film as Emilie. There I found a Carl Friedrich (no last name). His mother was the younger sister, Justine Wilhelmine Caroline H. The father is difficult to read as it has some explanation along with it in sloppy German handwriting:
The father's name is listed as Karl Dietrich Hartmann. Judging by the fact that the child's birth was illegitimate and that Mr. Hartmann did not stay with the family, I assume something terrible took place which must have been very embarrassing for the Holzgraefe family. Christian and the older sister were married and had Emilie and then the older sister died. When that happened Christian married her younger sister taking little Emilie under his wing as well. Emilie was raised by her proper mother and a step father, Christian Fegel.
The embarrassment must have been too much for the family which added to their decision to travel to a strange new land following after her two younger brothers who probably left around 1845. They left in 1849 and made their way to Evansville. After loosing Emilie on the voyage, the two of them began again. A new life in America. They lived for a long time at 116 Lafayette Ave. about 15 blocks from her brothers, Henry August and Johann Friedrich Holzgraefe. The Fegel family is burried in the Oak Hill Cemetery. Their descendants lived in Evansville for a long time before suddenly moving to Rome, Georgia where many of them still reside.
The embarrassment must have been too much for the family which added to their decision to travel to a strange new land following after her two younger brothers who probably left around 1845. They left in 1849 and made their way to Evansville. After loosing Emilie on the voyage, the two of them began again. A new life in America. They lived for a long time at 116 Lafayette Ave. about 15 blocks from her brothers, Henry August and Johann Friedrich Holzgraefe. The Fegel family is burried in the Oak Hill Cemetery. Their descendants lived in Evansville for a long time before suddenly moving to Rome, Georgia where many of them still reside.
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