Agnes Wrocklage

In my last post, I wrote of a child of Christian and Mary Elizabeth Wrocklage, a daughter I had not known about,  who was listed on the passenger manifesto with the family when it came to America.  At first, I wondered if I had the wrong family, but since everything else fit, I started to search records for evidence that this girl was part of my ancestral family and had somehow been overlooked by others who were researching the same family.

The first place to go was to the 1850 census records, the first census after the family arrived in 1845, but sadly, the parents died less than a year after the family's arrival.  That meant Agnes and her three young siblings would be orphans in a new and strange land.  So I searched for the children in the 1850 census and found both Agnes and her brother Matthias living together with Bernard Esche, a man who had come to America with their older brother, Theo, and who most likely was related in some way to the family. Why they didn't move in with an oder sibling, I don't know.

In 1860, Mathias appears in the census as a married man, but I could not find Agnes.  Then, she reappears in 1870, living with Mathias again and probably helping him care for his children, as by now Mathias was a widower.  In 1880, Agnes appears in the census in the household of her married sister Elizabeth.

I could not find Agnes in the 1890 census, as it was destroyed decades ago in a fire, and she does not appear in the 1900 census. 

In my search for records, however, I came across a website that offered information on Delphos, Ohio, where the entire Wrocklage family lived. (In fact Theodore, Agnes's older brother, was one of its founders.) This website helped my determine what had happened to Agnes.   Among the list of all burials in the cemeteries of Delphos was an Agnes Wrocklage, born around 1832,  who died and was buried in 1886.