Latest news from the Wrocklage - Esch Families

One of the most rewarding aspects of genealogy work is finding long lost (or previously unheard of) cousins.  And even better is being on the receiving end of their generous sharing of family details you did not have. Recently a 4th cousin contacted me through a comment on this blog and has shared exciting information with me.

As I wrote in a previous post, I have been trying to figure out some details regarding my 3rd great grandfather Christian Mathias Wrocklage, whose given surname was Esch. I had earlier speculated that he might have been adoped as I could not understand why he had changed his name from Esch to Wrocklage. As it turns out, his wife's maiden name was Wrocklage and in order to keep the farm after her father died, it had to pass into someone's hands whose name was Wrocklage.  Her older brother had already left the farm, married a woman and changed his name to hers so they could inherit her father's farm, so Christian changed his name to Wrocklage so that he, his wife and her younger siblings would not be kicked off the land.  This was apparently the law in Germany - you had to keep property in the family name.

I have also learned that Christian had three wives.  With his first wife, Anna Catharina Wrocklage, he had 4 children, one dying at birth.  With his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Gerdeman, he had 7 children, 2 of whom died young.  Then he married a third time and had another daughter.  With his 3rd wife and youngest children he emigrated to America in about 1845, and settled near some of his older children who had already arrived. Unfortunately, he and his wife both died the following year. 

Theodore Wrocklage, Christian's oldest son, was a founder of the city of Delphos, Ohio, along with a Catholic priest, Fr. John Otto Bredeick and his brother, Ferdinand Bredeick, and Bernard Esch, whom I assume to be related to Theodore (perhaps a cousin) as he has the same last name as Christian, before he legally changed it to Wrocklage.  

Now I am going to start searching for the Esch family in Germany and see if I can learn who Bernard is.

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.