Seraphim Wolf: Consorting with angels
The story
Well, it’s been ages since I bored you with what I’m learning about our Wolf ancestors. It’s about time I gave you some more sleep-inducing material. So here’s a new saga. It’s born from a four-day trip I took to SW Indiana quite a while ago to immerse myself in Wolf roots. I had a wonderful time, learned a lot/little, depending upon how you weigh these finds. I have a TON of data to sort out and make sense of, and the story that follows is the first I’ve considered. It wasn’t supposed to be about a woman, but, of course, it is. Women are the soul of genealogy.
Let’s recap. Our great-great grandfather Martin Wolf came to the US from Alsace in 1837, bought land in Indiana in 1842, got married in 1847 and started having kids, eight of them. This is about my quest to find the eldest, Seraphim, mainly because he has such a cool name.
[By the way, the area I’m talking about is at the southwestern-most point of Indiana. Mt. Vernon, where some of these early records are kept, is on the Ohio, just past the juncture with the Wabash. If you went north on the Wabash instead of east on the Ohio, you’d go right past Mt. Carmel, Illinois. The rest of the area I’ll talk about is a little north and east of Mt. Vernon, really pretty country. If it weren’t Indiana, I’d move there.]
I first discovered Seraphim in the 1860 census that called him Sarafene, making him sound like a girl and confusing the hell out of me when I learned otherwise. I struggled hard to figure out if the name could be some bastardization of a familiar name, like Xavier (okay, maybe not Xavier; but what?). When I finally saw his baptismal record, I learned that his godfather was Seraphim Weber, and I’ve been told (and seen demonstrated) that Germans like to name their children after their godparents. Why Herr Weber was named Seraphim is a question I won’t try to answer; maybe HE had a godfather Seraphim. Regardless, we have a great-great-great uncle who’s an angel!
Seraphim was born in 1848 while Martin and Mary Ann were still farming in Marrs township, Posey County, Indiana. In 1860, when Seraphim was twelve, his dad sold their 160 acres for $3500 and bought another 80 acres for $3680 a bit north and east, outside a tiny German community called Haubstadt. It’s possible that in making this move Martin went from crop farming to livestock; I make this guess because of the nature of the land in the area and the presence of some serious meat-packing and slaughtering operations that started up around that time. If that’s true, then that would explain why Seraphim became a blacksmith; he liked livestock. In any case, in 1870, Seraphim, 22, was living in a boarding house in Evansville and working as a blacksmith. And then, on November 3, 1870, he married Magdalena Lamey (the Lameys are one of the principal families in the Haubstadt area where Seraphim was raised) and they started a family. William was born in 1871, Mary in 1873, and Rosa Josephine in 1875. Then things turned bad. In Nov. of 1879 they lost an infant daughter, Sara Louisa, and in Oct of 1880, another infant died, Maria. And there’s more: Sometime before June of 1880, in between the loss of these two baby girls, Seraphim, too, died. He was 28 and he left behind a wife and three little children.
The1880 census, taken in the case of Magdalena on June 2, says that in her establishment there were three children and five boarders. Since I don't know when Seraphim died, I don't know if the boarder arrangement was born of desperation, or if she and Seraphim were already managing a boarding house. I also don't know just how much boarders were a part of their lives. He was a blacksmith, which suggests stables. Did they have space they just let out, or were they running a serious boarding operation? Whatever the case, Magdalena kept the family together, at least partly by letting rooms to men, and on October 2, 1883, she did the smart thing and married Henry Klaser, with whom she had at least two more children: two daughters, Elka Elizabeth and Stella. And then she, too, died, at age 42, in 1893.
If you're paying close attention, we've just witnessed our great-great-great uncle's kids (cousins of some sort) lose their dad in 1880, get a stepfather in 1883, and lose mom in 1893. For their sake, it appears that Henry was pretty resourceful as well; he was at that point responsible for his and Magdalena's own children (at least the two daughters I know of) and Seraphim’s youngest, Rosa Josephine who was 18 and didn’t marry and get out of his hair until 1913. (I’m guessing the other two children, William and Mary, were grown and gone, but I could be wrong here). Henry waited eight years before marrying again, this time to Helena Kraus, 51, who reported in the 1910 census that she had born nine children, five of whom were alive in 1910, a grim reminder, in case we needed one, that life was hard in the 1800s. Henry and Helen had two boys, Henry and Fred, and then life got even harder. In 1913, Henry died and left Helen alone, again, with two teenage boys, 18 and 16, to raise.
I don’t know what happened to Helen. I have my hands full figuring out where our own folks are. Magdalena is buried in Old St. James Catholic Cemetery in Haubstadt, IN., along with her baby girls. I still don’t know where Seraphim is buried; perhaps angels don't get buried. It took some digging, but I found Magdalena Wolf Klaser (Lena Klaser on her headstone) buried in the old section of St. James cemetery near Haubstadt, In. Since so many headstones are gone (hers is still there), I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if she’s buried with her baby daughters. I also wonder what possessed Henry Klaser to bury her there. But that’s a question I should probably let go.
One final comment here: Two of the major places that one searches for genealogical information are FamilySearch and Ancestry. Both sites maintain family trees submitted by anyone who wants to upload his or her tree. (I won’t do that, just so you know.) There are millions of these trees, some with 15,000 people in them, and they are searchable. That means that I can search for Seraphim Wolf among countless family trees that track millions of people. And you know what? He doesn’t come up anywhere. Nor does Martin Wolf or for that matter his brother Peter. Frank Wolf, Eva Hertling, the Bushus, the Burkeys, all of them have thousands of descendents trying to find their roots and posting their trees on line. But apparently Martin Wolf produced progeny with little curiosity about their origins. Should we then blame the curiosity that consumes Susan and me on the Rivers or the Cahills, or both?
The detective work
So this is the part you don’t have to read, but it’s the part I love: the search. How does someone piece together a story this convoluted when dealing with 19th century records? It wasn’t easy, but it was fun.
I started with Seraphim (once I had that baptismal record that gave me his real name) and found a Seraphim Wolf in the 1870 census living in Evansville in a boarding house; he was a blacksmith. Now, ask yourself: Just how many Seraphim Wolfs, born in 1848 in Indiana, can there be? I remained open to the fact that he might be a doppelganger, but much of what happened later fell together in such ways that I’m sure the story I just told is true.
Next, in the 1880 census I found a Magdalena Wolf, widow, in Evansville, with children whose names resonated, especially Rosa Josephine. And there I stalled. Maybe a blacksmith in Evansville, and perhaps, just perhaps, a wife and kids. I turned my attention elsewhere.
And then I took this trip. On it, I got Seraphim’s father Martin’s will, and learned that in 1882, when Martin made his will, Seraphim had a) died and b) had heirs. (Martin apparently had begun distributing his estate before he died in 1893, and Seraphim had gotten his share, so he was to get $5 when his dad died.) It got lots harder to imagine that there was another Seraphim Wolf born in 1848 in Indiana who had married and had children and then died before 1882 (when Martin made his will). That 1870 census for Seraphim Wolf in Evansville and the 1880 census for Magdalena Wolf were looking better.
And add to this one heart-breaking cemetery. St. James Church, outside Haubstadt, IN., is old. It's the church some of our ancestors attended and it’s quite lovely. It hosts two cemeteries, an old one that apparently fell into ruin for a time (most markers are gone), and a new one, markers intact. In the old one, they’ve established a moving memorial to the 500+ people buried there with five marble slabs engraved with their names. (There’s a small booklet that also provides this information that the wonderful office manager gave me. Danke!) There on the marble are recorded the names of the infant daughters of Seraphim and Magdalena Wolf. So now I’ve got a another link between Seraphim and Magdalena and the family; this is home for both the Wolfs and the Lameys. Martin Wolf is buried here as well, so the connections among the family are very powerful.
Now I was very curious and I searched for Magdalena Wolf on Ancestry, and found her as mother of the bride for three marriages: Rosa Josephine Wolf, who was included in the 1880 census when Magdalena was a widow, and two other women, Elke Elizabeth Klaser and Stella Klaser. Father of the Klaser brides was Henri Klaser.
Huh! The data made it clear the same woman was mother to all three brides so I investigated if Magdalena had married Henry Klaser. In a 1910 census, I found a Henry Klaser in Evansville, Indiana married to Helen Klaser, and for a time I thought maybe “Magdalena” had been transmuted to “Helen,” but that was a leap of faith I was reluctant to make. But meanwhile, on another search, I found a data card (I can't begin to explain what this is or why we should trust its information, but we should) that listed Henry Klaser with a wife, Helen, a son, Henry (who was in the 1910 census with Henry and Helen) and three daughters: Mrs. Anna Klaser, Mrs. Earl Edmundson and Mrs. Toni Aschoff. These last two were the names of the spouses listed with Magdalena as mother of the bride. So now I had Henry, I had him in Evansville, I had him with Helen, I had him connected to Magdalena and I had him connected to Seraphim’s daughters. To add icing to the cake, the Evansville 1875 city directory has two listings for Seraphim: one for his blacksmith operation (says he shoes horses and makes wagons) and one for his home, listing his occupation as “horse shooer.”
But was Helen another name for Magadalena? I uncovered one last document that produced an alternate name for our Magdalena: Lena. I searched for Lena Klaser and found her; she had married Henry Klaser, died in 1893 and was buried in Old St. James Cemetery.
From there it got easy. I found a marriage record for Henry when he married Helen Kraus in 1901 and another for Henry when he married Lena in 1883. Voila! The pieces fit.
And then, because of a lengthy conversation with the archivist at Sts. Peter and Paul, Kim Goedde, I found Seraphim’s marriage record. And why couldn’t I find it before? Because the name on it is Terafin Wolf. I found it by searching for Magdalena Lamey, the woman at the center of it all. Of course.
How certain am I of all this? Very. Do I have all the proof? Nope; until I have the full marriage record for Seraphim and Magdalena providing me with his parents’ names, there is still a slight possibility that the Seraphim Wolf of this saga and our great-great-great uncle are two different men (In other words, maybe there’s a Seraphim Wolf who was a blacksmith, married Magdalena Lamey, had kids and died who ISN’T related to us). Imaginative as I am I cannot imagine a scenario in which that is the case, but I cannot in good conscience say we have definitive proof. But we're close. I suspect I'll nail it in the coming months.
And there you have it, part whatever of the saga of the Wolf family.
Stay tuned.
