I have finally broken through the brick wall of where my ancestor Simon Walter is from/who his parents are. To find an immigrant ancestor from Germany you've got to find a record telling you what town they were from -- Germany has states and there are no central repositories for vital records. Most of the time, records are still kept at the individual parish level only - so you really need to know exactly what town the ancestor was from.
Oftentimes, the only place in the U.S. that you'll find a birthplace listed for German immigrants before ~1907 is in church records (this being that before that time period, U.S. naturalization records did not tend to ask for, or document, exact birth places in the immigrant's home country). Civil records are often recorded by Anglo, English-speaking persons who both would not care where in Germany the immigrant was born nor would they understand/be able to spell it. But German immigrants would often belong to churches who had priests that also spoke German-- and it was these priests that were most likely to record this precious information for descendants to find.
Back around 2010-2011 I'd found out where Simon was buried in Wisconsin, and the cemetery adjoined a church. The church very graciously allowed me access to the records (literally, put me in their basement and allowed me to spend the whole day looking at them/taking photos of the books) and aha! His funeral record at the church stated a birthplace in Germany... "Neubeuren bf. Wiesenfeld." Awesome! A birthplace! I figured I was all set.
Not so fast. I discovered after that, that there are quite a few towns with names similar to Neubeuren and similar to Wiesenfeld. The second problem was that there was no area in Germany where there are towns so named that are next to each other. This resulted in many emails and letters written to archivs across Germany in areas where towns similarly named existed.. and many disappointing responses (if I ever did get a response) telling me that they did not have a record of Simon, or that they did not have the ability to search records for me.
So, I was stuck. Census records did nothing to help, either. The 1860 census said he was born in Hanover, the 1870 census said "Prussia" and the 1880s census said Bavaria. His Declaration of Intent from 1847 stated he was from Bavaria as well.
Over the years I had occasionally looked at DNA matches (for my grandpa whose direct line this is, as well as other cousins on the Walter(s) side who had shared their results with me. I had seen a Johann Walter in the trees of one or two matches, and he lived in Illinois. I had also gotten tripped up on a Christiana Walter who married a Dittmar and belonged to a parish just up the road from Simon Walters' parish. We even had a DNA match or two to descendants of that couple so it seemed somewhat promising. That Christiana Walter had come from an area known as Schlesien. It's a large area that is now parts of several different countries including Poland, and I'd never made enough progress in identifying where she was from, much less if there was a real connection between her and Simon.
In January of this year I decided to take another look at the DNA results to see if there were any new matches in common that might point to a connection. I found more matches who descended from the Johann Walter from Illinois. This Johann was born in 1807 in Bavaria and ha moved to the area around Waterloo, Monroe County, Illinois. His gravestone was excellent in that it provided exact birth and death dates (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/54573678/). He's only 3 years older than my Simon, and based on the DNA amounts shared with these matches, I became convinced that this Johann could be a brother of my Simon.
I couldn't find much about this Johann Walter so I contacted a couple of local places and one lady wrote back who just so happened to have an old photocopy of church records for the Lutheran church in town and his funeral record mentioned his birth in a town called Wiesentfels, Oberfranken, Bavaria --- very similar to the "Wiesenfeld" from Simon's funeral record. This seemed like a good sign!
I then turned to a Bavarian Genealogy Facebook group whose main membership is actually German and German-speaking folks, to try to get more information about Wiesentfels and whether records were available anywhere that I could access. Unfortunately, this is one of those parishes (Kroegelstein parish, to be exact) where records are kept at the church rather than being available online or at a larger archiv.
On my post, a man who lives nearby volunteered to help me and was willing to go to the parish to look at the records. He had a chance to go to look at the parish records today (yesterday for him), and he found them! Simon, and the Johann Walter in Illinois, are indeed from Wiesentfels, Oberfranken, Bavaria and they are brothers. Their parents are Andreas Walter and Anna Schmeusser.
The man sent me records of siblings of Johann and Andreas, as well as the marriage record for their parents -- both Andreas and Anna have fathers named Johann. I need to dig in now to see if I can find evidence of any of the siblings coming to the U.S. I also need to hope that some day the Kroegelstein parish records will be digitized and put online so that I can try to trace this line back further. For now, it's at a standstill until I can access more of the records. So- some questions still remain:
1) When I saw the name Andreas Walter that pinged something in my brain. I looked at the records from Simon's church in Wisconsin and was reminded that I'd found an Andreas Walter fathering two children (one in 1852 and one in 1854) who were baptized at the same church, with a godfather named Johann Walter. When I'd found those records initially I had not been able to find anything for this Andreas, Johann or the children. This Andreas is almost certainly not Simon's father Andreas, because he'd likely be at least 70 or so in 1852. He would be the right age to possibly be a sibling of Simon, but he's not among the records the man found for me today (though I do not know the date range he searched). So, something to look into further.
2) Something has always made me think that Simon might've been married before he was married to my ancestor Maria Magdalena Kaemmlein. When they married in 1852, Simon was already 42 years old. The other thing that has always puzzled me was that they were married literally two weeks after Maria Magdalena Kaemmlein had immigrated to the U.S. (her passenger list is dated 11 May 1852 and she was married in Milwaukee on 27 May 1852). How?? I now know that Maria Magdalena and Simon were not from the same area (she was from just north of Stuttgart in Baden-Wuerttemburg) -- so how did it happen that she arrived and was married so quickly, unless they'd met in Germany prior? Simon immigrated in June 1847 according to his naturalization papers. So had he gone somewhere in Germany prior to immigrating to the U.S., and somehow met her/someone in her family then? Was it just chance that they met and married as soon as she arrived? Had he been married in Germany and left when something happened to that wife and any children he might have had with her? Or was he simply unmarried, setting off to the U.S. and marrying older?
Of course, there are many other questions as well -- but those are for another day.
