Katharine Geishiert Singelmann

OK once again lost in a sea of possible spellings. Katharine/Katherine/Catherine/Catharine/Kate, Geishiert/Gishirt/Geishirt/Geishurt/Geshurt/Geshirt/Gushurt/Gushirt. Singelmann/Singleman/Singlemen/Singelmen/Singelman/Sinyelmann etc. Any combination. She seems to have fallen through the cracks.

As Katharine Geishirt (1841), she immigrated around 1863 and married in 1864. Her new husband John Singelmann had arrived in 1858; if she knew him before she came she would have only been sixteen or seventeen when she met him. More likely she met him here at German Valley.

She seems to have an older sister Caroline (1839) who immigrated and married in 1862; she married a man named Knott, had seven children, and actually died in Holcomb, which is where the family lived for a while. When she arrives and gets married the same year I suspect she knew this Knott guy before she came; perhaps the house in Holcomb was his?

A brother and father also showed up. The brother, Johann Adam (1845), arrived in 1864 but I see no sign of him coming with Katharine. He would marry, have children, and die in Winnebago County (Rockford) and so stay in the area. The father, Johannes Geishirt (1811) arrived in 1868, well after the children, and somehow ended up in Wisconsin. No sign of his wife; he died in Wisconsin in 1878.

So she married this Singelmann guy in 1864, and they lived in Ogle County, near Holcomb, where the census found them in 1880. That's the census that has their children Ana Lucinda (15), Ida Louise (12), Lizzie (11) and Mattie (4) whom we will never see again. A family of parents and four girls on a farm outside Holcomb. I'm not sure where her sister was at this time but I'll find out; the sister, remember, died in Holcomb. Did she get the house upon their leaving?

It's unclear exactly when they moved to Minden but the girls started marrying in 1889; Louise married Louis Mischler (1889), Lizzie married Charles (1891), and Ana married a guy named Young (1893). By 1898 Katharine Singelmann had died but I find no local obituary. John Singelmann died also but I'm still not sure when. Who outlived whom? No local obituaries in spite of the fact that newspapers were big and Minden was small. But I'm not done looking.

Louis Mischler looms tall. He was a farmer not from Minden (from Missouri, and before that Switzerland), but arrived in Minden 1880 before marrying the first of the Singelmann girls in 1889. They were prominent and successful; Lizzie no doubt was jealous as her own man, Charles, was more of a Death-of-a-Salesman type. Not sure who got the parents' farm upon the Singlemanns' deaths. Not sure why they would even make the move from Holcomb to Minden, sometime in the 1880s, leaving Katharine's sister and brother behind, not to mention Mattie/memory of Mattie, if that was the case. No death notices at all for Mattie, a total lost cause, no matter how you spell Singelmann.

I have found two new things that indicate that the search is not over. One, they are all Dutch Reformed and Dutch Reformed keep their own records, which I have not scratched the surface of. Dutch Reformed was a minority religion (about 1/3) of Ostfriesland, but they started their own church in German Valley near Holcomb, and also in Minden; both had Silver in the name. Second, German Valley itself is in Stephenson county, not Ogle County, which may indicate that I could widen my search for ancestors or relatives of Singelmann, Geishirt, etc. There may be more people out there.

As I become more comfortable studying the life of Lizzie, Elizabeth Katherine, third child of John and Kate, I realize that whatever happened to Mattie, seven years younger than she was, turned her against young children or made it hard for her to deal with her grandchildren. Maybe I should investigate Matthew or Matthias? I was kind of assuming Mattie was a girl, their fourth, but maybe not. His/her mysterious disappearance is probably behind a lot of things here, but they did not seek out the news, or social pages, or recognition in the Minden/CB papers and seemed to be ok with slipping into obscurity which they would have done had it not been for me.