Jacob H. Carman Death Certificate
Transcribed by Alex J. Conrad from photocopy of original

Place of Death: Hoyes Mechanics Home, Phila., Pa
Usual Residence:Hoyes Mechanics Home, Phila., Pa
Name of Deceased: Jacob H. Carman
Sex: M
Color or Race: W
Widowed
Wife: Lena
Date of Birth: May 26 1863
Age: 78 Years 9 Months 24 Days
Birthplace: Philadelphia, Penna.
Occupation: Bricklayer
Father’s Name: no record
Father’s Birthplace: no record
Mother’s Name: no record
Mother’s Birthplace: no record
Informant: Official Record, Hoyes Mechanics Home
Burial date: 3/28/42
Burial place: Mt. Moriah, Phila., Pa.
Date of death: March 20th 1942

This post is part of the Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month.

Today’s prompt is: “Working girl: Did your mother or grandmother work outside the home? What did she do? Describe her occupation.”

As far as I know, my father’s mother did not work after she married, but like most everyone else in her neighborhood she worked in the hosiery factories before then. My mother was a Registered Nurse and worked in a hospital before I was born and in a nursing home when I was in high school, and later in home health care.

It was my mother’s mother who I always thought of as a working woman. She did stay home with my mother for about a decade, but the rest of her pre-retirement adult life was spent working.

She worked at a book bindery and at least part of her time was spent packing boxes for shipping and she became an expert at that. If you needed items packed in a box wasting the least amount of space, she was the woman to ask. She could eyeball it and get it all in there on the first try.

I recently rediscovered this interesting piece of ephemera in my family documents:

It details all the pays scales and benefits negotiated for by her union. It even has raises built in with separate tables of pay for 1965, 1966 & 1967. This being the 1960’s there are different pay scales for men and women, even if they had the same job title, e.g. Male Helpers, Female Helpers, Journeymen, Journeywomen. Someday I plan to scan the whole booklet. It’s a fascinating look at the time period and industry.

I am not one for the whole bucket list idea, but as we pass from one year to the next I recognize there are some genealogical mysteries I would like to solve in my lifetime.  Here is an incomplete list in no particular order. Some are things that are likely never to be answered. Some are only a matter of time.

1. The disinheriting of Charles H. Ware.  In his will, Uriah Ware very explicitly excluded his son Charles. For the longest time, I was unable to prove the whereabouts of Charles after he left home. I have since discovered him in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania which seems a long way from Camden County, New Jersey. How did he end up there and why did his father disown him? I may never know.

2. What happened to Frances Funston? Joseph Funston was married twice according to his Civil War pension file. His first marriage to Frances ended in divorce. She was the mother of his children and according to what was found in the pension file, did not appear to contest the divorce. Joseph remarried right away. I have never found Frances in any record after the divorce in 1872, not alone or with any of her children who were by then grown. She likely remarried, but to whom I have no idea. (Update 7/17/14: I found her!)

3.  May Whitaker? When talking about her family, my grandmother always said there was a Whitaker in there somewhere. On death and marriage records for her uncles and mother, it was their mother who was listed as May (or Mary) Whitaker. I have her on the 1880 census with her husband Joseph and children, and with a Mary Partington who is identified as Joseph’s Mother-In-Law. Then she died in 1886. Did her mother remarry a man named Partington? Was the family wrong and May’s last name was really Partington? I have found no other records of her or her mother, under Whitaker or Partington. May was born in England around 1852. I have no immigration date so I do not know if she came over as a child or adult. Based on the ages of their children, she and Joseph married around 1871. There is still a lot more searching to be done on this one.

4. What ethnicity and religion were the Carmans? There are several Carman lines in the eastern United States. There was an Englishman who settled in Long Island and his ancestors stretched south into New Jersey and east into Pennsylvania. There was a German who landed in Philadelphia whose name became anglicized as Carman. My Carmans have been in the Philadelphia area a long time. My latest research suggests they were in Montgomery County in the late eighteenth century and likely well before that. Are they connected to the Germans, the English or some other Carman line? My 3rd great-grandparents were Catholic and their church was set on fire during the Riots of 1844. From what I read, it was the two Irish churches which were targeted while the nearby German church was left untouched. Were they Irish? My 2nd great-grandfather married a German Protestant. Was this when the Carmans became Protestant? The more I learn about this family, the more questions I have.

5. French! My grandmother had no idea where her Carmans came from and she knew there was a Whitaker but not who it was. Another thing she always used to say was that she had French in her, but she did not know from which line. My family ethnicity is fairly boring: lots of German, English, Irish, Scottish and way back on my father’s side a bit of Scandinavian  But mostly just lots and lots of Germany and British Isles. What I am trying to say is that French would be exotic. Ironically, the closest I have come to finding it has been through the only ancestors I have traced back to Germany: the Hornefs.  The area of Germany they lived in was near the border which by the little I have read moved around a bit. There was also the movement of people as Protestants sought safe havens. I have found church record indexes with their names in German and French. (Georg Peter/George Pierre) Is this the French my grandmother heard about? Since most of my grandmother’s ancestry has brick walls in the United States I may never know for sure.

6. The princess in the hogshead. I’ll end on this one, because it’s a bit silly. In the seventeenth century a young Swedish princess had to flee her home due to political troubles. She stowed away on a ship by hiding in a hogshead. The ship wrecked off the New Jersey coast and she washed up alive but destitute. A trapper, John Garrison, found her and eventually married her. And thus, all Garrisons in Southern New Jersey are descended from Swedish royalty. Or, so we claim. Who is ever going to prove otherwise? 🙂

From Catherine Hornef Carman’s death certificate (1913)

I first discovered Jacob Hornef ¹ on his daughter’s death certificate. His name and his birth place were the only clues. Not even his daughter’s mother was named.

I went searching for census records. Complicating matters, there were other Horneffs in the area, mostly in New Jersey, including another Jacob. I kept asking myself, how could they not be related? Hornef(f) is not a common name. This would turn out to be a distraction.

I knew my great-great grandmother Catherine Hornef was born in Germany. The 1900 census said she immigrated in 1846. I found her with her husband Elon Carman from 1870 forward.

I could not find her or her father Jacob in 1850 or 1860.

This is where I encourage persistance and revisiting brick walls. ²

After wasting time pursuing Jacob and Wilhelmina Horneff in New Jersey, I found my Jacob. I had searched various spellings, of course, but I had started before the internet and somehow either I or the indexer of the print index had missed my Hornefs, or as they were recorded by the enumerator in 1860, Harnoff. I found that thanks to the advances in internet search technology. Believe me, I did not type that in. I entered something much closer to Hornef, I am sure, and Ancestry found it. Magic!

Jacob Hornef, his wife Catherine and their three daughters, Catherine, Amelia & Mary, and his mother-in-law Eva Farver (Faber) – 1860 Census

Finding my Hornefs in the 1850 census was more difficult, for reasons I will simply illustrate:

Jacob, Catherine and Catherine “Orneff” 1850 Census

Jacob and Catherin “Orneff” are on lines 25 and 26. Their daughter is on line 32. The household and family numbers are all mixed up as well. I am thinking there may have been language issues involved here.

I did not get much farther with Jacob for quite some time. I found a naturalization record, but could not be certain it was my Jacob and not the other one. Then familysearch.org began uploading their records databases. First, I found Jacob’s death certificate. Then, as discussed in an earlier post, I found his wife’s obituary on genealogybank.com and her death certificate, which gave me her parents’ names: Leonhard Faber and Eva Huber.

With this new information, I returned to familysearch and found indexes of Otterberg church records and a whole slew of information on my Hornefs including Jacob’s christening:

name: Jacob Horneff
gender: Male
baptism/christening date: 03 Jan 1819
baptism/christening place: EVANGELISCH, OTTERBERG, PFALZ, BAVARIA
birth date: 02 Jan 1819
father’s name: Georg Peter Horneff
mother’s name: Catharine Cherdron
indexing project (batch) number: C97881-1
system origin: Germany-VR
source film number: 193110
reference number: 2:1GJM5M2

I still have not looked at the microfilm of the original records³, so I consider this information provisional. (Indexing is difficult and it is easy to make mistakes with names and dates.)

So, provisionally, this week in my genealogy, one hundred ninety four years ago, my 3rd great grandfather Jacob Hornef was born in Otterberg, Germany.

From Jacob Hornef’s death certificate. I realized every record I used in this post had Horneff. This is to illustrate the Hornef spelling.

One hundred seventy-three years ago this week, on 14 Sep 1839, Charles R. Carman and Caroline A. Brill were married by Reverend Father Weiland in Philadelphia. They were my third great-grandparents.

I learned of their marriage date from Caroline’s Widow’s Claim for Pension. Charles served as a private in company A of the 81st regiment of Pennsylvania.

Charles Carman and Caroline Brill marriage information from Widow’s Claim for Pension

Caroline was unable to provide a marriage certificate because the record of their marriage was destroyed when the church burned down during the Riots of 1844. There were two churches that were set fire during the riots in Kensington: St. Michael’s and St. Augustine’s.

Charles Carman and Caroline Brill’s marriage record was destroyed during the Riots of 1844 in Philadelphia.

To prove her marriage, Caroline had to submit a Secondary Proof of Marriage form which included affidavits from Eliza Mann and Mary Gray who had known Charles and Caroline for many years and which also listed the names and birth dates of their adult children.

Click on the images above to see full-sized scans of the documents.