Marriages – Page 4 – News about dead people

This Week in my Genealogy – Conrad-Bowers Marriage

One hundred thirty-seven years ago this week, on 25 September 1875, Lena Conrad and John Bowers were wed at the St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. Lena Conrad was the eldest child of Nicholas Conrad and Catherine Emminger and my great grandaunt.

I found their marriage record in the Pennsylvania Church and Town Records collection on Ancestry.com. This is a collection from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and includes church, town, and funeral home records from Pennsylvania and surrounding states. I have also found some of my New Jersey ancestors in there.

Like the other St. James Church records I found for my Conrads, this record is in German. At the top of the full image, it says Verheirathet. Â In the online german dictionaries, I have found verheiratet for married, without the ‘h’. Â I don’t know if this was an older spelling or a mistake. Â Notice also in the partial image below it says ‘mit’ before Lena’s name, which means ‘with’.

Lena Conrad and John Bowers Marriage, 1875. Click to see full page image.

John and Lena stayed at this church and I have also found baptismal records for some of their children in this collection.

This Week in my Genealogy – Carman-Brill marriage

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.

Carman Marriage 1839 — 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.

Marriage records destroyed in Riots of 1844 — 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.

This week in my genealogy

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.