Elon and Catherine Carman had three children. My great-grandfather Joseph and his brother Jacob survived into adulthood. Their sister Caroline did not. Elon’s Declaration for Pension (1910) listed the three of them, with the word living after Joseph and Jacob and dead after Caroline. Census searches indicated that Caroline probably died sometime between 1870 and 1880, at a young age. She was born in 1869.

Recently, I discovered Caroline’s death certificate. She died in 1872. She was only 2 1/2 years old.

I am always struck by how common death in childhood used to be when I find these relatives of mine who didn’t make it to adulthood, and how fortunate we are that medicine has progressed so much that such deaths are now rare.

This week I am going to highlight someone who is not really related to me, but I am fascinated by the name. Maria Sara Knieriemen was the wife of my first cousin five times removed. (My computer program, TMG, figured that out for me). I had never heard of this name before, so when her marriage to David Horneff on January 7, 1845 showed up in my genealogy this week, I thought I would look into it.

Like many names, Knieriemen has many variant spellings. The Knierman DNA Surname project includes these variants in their project: Knearem, Knerien, Kniereman, Knieriemen, Knierim, Knierinm, Knierman, Knireman, Nearman, Niermann. In their description of the origin they state: “The German word Knerem is defined as a shoemakers’ strap or stirrup, a cobbler, Knieriemen.”

A search on Knieriemen also brought up the Ancestry surname page. They didn’t have a meaning for Knieriemen, but they did have some other statistics. In 1920, there weren’t very many Knieriemen households in the United States, with 3 each in Ohio and Indiana, 2 in New Jersey and 1 in Maryland. Places of origin gathered from the New York Passengers Lists shows they were from Germany. In the United States in 1880 they were farmers, and there was one Cobanus Knieriemen who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Maria Sara Knieriemen was born about 1818 and was the daughter of Conrad Knieriemen and Katharina Albrecht. She married David Horneff in Otterberg, Bavaria.

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to post more to this poor neglected blog. So I’ve decided to start a weekly post, This Week in my Genealogy, highlighting some of the people in my Conrad-Todd-Garrison-Carman database.

And to show how far behind I am in updating the web version of that database, I am going to start with two people who are not even on that site, along with their brother whose information is way out of date. Georg Peter & Johannes Hornef were born December 28, 1824 in Otterberg, Germany and are one of the few pairs of twins that I have in my database. They were born to Georg Peter Hornef & Katharina Cherdron. I found them through the FamilySearch Record Search pilot. Their older brother, Jacob Hornef, was my Great-great-great grandfather who emigrated to Philadelphia in the 1840’s. He was born on January 2, 1819 in Otterberg. I’ve already posted about my Hornef discoveries through Record Search, which is also where I found Jacob’s birth information, so I won’t go into it much here.

From some of my newest finds, to one of my earliest. Actually this wasn’t my find at all, but my grandfather’s. When I first became interested in genealogy, my grandmother brought out some papers of my late grandfather’s research into the family history. Included were the Civil War pension file records of his grandfather James B. Garrison. One hundred fifty years ago this week, on Jan 1, 1859, James B. Garrison married Emma M. Ireland in Bridgeton, NJ. The image below is from those pension file documents. Click on it to see the full-sized scan.

I came across Katharina Horneff’s obituary by accident. I wasn’t expecting to find it. Horneff¹ is one of the few unique surnames I have and I search it on any new database I find. In this case it was in GenealogyBank which has the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1834-1922. In my results was an obituary for Katharina Horneff from 1911. It stated that the funeral would be at her grandson, Jacob Carman’s house. Seems cut and dry, but I still had to check to make sure it was my Jacob Carman since there were two of the same age in Philadelphia at the time. It took me awhile to be convinced, too, despite the unique name and the grandson being named. The truth was I thought I would never find Katharina Horneff. Indeed, I didn’t even know that was her name.

My grandmother’s grandmother was Catherine² Horneff Carman and she passed away in 1913. I had no luck in finding her on the Census records³ before she married and only her father was listed on her death certificate. I thought her mother had therefore passed away long before and Catherine’s family had either not met her or had forgotten her name. Not only had they known her, she had passed away only two years before her daughter!

Another new genealogy site, FamilySearch’s Record Search Pilot, brought me more on Katharina Horneff. I found her death certificate which listed her birth date and her parents’ names (Leonhard Faber & Eva Huber). And then, I hit a gold mine. The family I thought I would never get anywhere with, led me straight back to Europe for the first time in my genealogical research.

Record Search has indexed church records from Otterberg, Germany and like a clichéd plot device, that is exactly where my Horneffs happened to be from. I found the Marriage record for Jacob and Katharina Faber Horneff which listed both of their parents. I found Katharina’s christening record with the same birth date as on her death certificate. I found Catherine Horneff’s christening record listing her parents Jacob and Katharina, as well as her full birth date. I had had only the month and year before. I was certain that these were my ancestors.

The Fabers were a bit of a dead end, but the Horneffs were all over the place. I found Jacob’s parents (Georg Peter Horneff and Catherine Cherdron) and grandparents (David Horneff & Susanne Weber and Johann Philipp Cherdron & Margarethe Port). And I found siblings of them all as well.

After doing some googling, I found a book called 300 Jahre Auswanderung aus Otterberg which I was able to get through Interlibrary Loan and which informed me rather mysteriously that Jacob Horneff and his wife and daughter, and later Eva Faber and her son Carl, had emigrated “secretly” from Otterberg in 1846 and 1850 respectively.

This gives me some hope my other dead ends as well: Nicholas & Catharine (Emmering/Emmerling?) Conrad, Joseph & Frances Funston, Charles & Caroline (Brill) Carman, Samuel & Lydia (Burch) Garrison, and more. There will always be dead ends. May they all be temporary.

1. Horneff was also found as Hornef
2. Mother and daughter, Katharina and Catherine, were found as Katharina, Katherina, Kathrina, Katherine, Catherine, etc. I settled on Katharina and Catherine to help keep them straight.
3. I have since found the Horneffs on all the applicable censuses.

“Turnersvill [sic] NJ. Near Ware Home” is what is written on the back of this photo. I came into possession of this photo after my Uncle Milt passed away and it has always held a bit of a mystery for me. I wonder what road this is. I wonder when it was taken and where the Ware home is in relation to it. I wonder which Ware home.

My Wares lived in Gloucester Twp, Camden County & Washington Twp, Gloucester County, near Turnersville, NJ. They were farmers and the addresses on the census records were not very clear. I’m not even sure if they lived in the same place or moved around:

Road names change, and sometimes have unofficial names. I love that “Road to Sicklerville”. I may never know where this picture was taken, but I have an idea of the region. This is a google map of the area:

View Larger Map

Things have changed a bit since early last century in that area. Maybe the Ware home is underneath the Atlantic City Expressway now. 🙂 I don’t know that my “Road near Ware Home” is even remotely recognizable to anyone, but on the off chance, leave a comment below.