I recently found some church records on Ancestry for my Wolf family that offered up some unknown details about my immigrant ancestors, including the existence of another son. This week’s prompt for Week 13 of 2024’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge is “Worship.”
Jacob Wolf’s family, as I’ve mentioned before, were Lutherans. When they first arrived in New York, they lived in Manhattan and attended the German Evangelical Mission Church. Their first son born in America, Philip, was baptized there in 1837. The family relocated to Brooklyn sometime after his birth where they attended the Schermerhorn Street Evangelical Lutheran Church. The ministry was founded in 1841 to meet the needs of the expanding German community in Brooklyn, and the church was built in 1845. The Wolfs may have been without a regular church for a time after their move to Brooklyn but before the Schermerhorn Street Church was officially founded, as baptism records for my direct ancestor, Ferdinand (born about 1840) aren’t available. The next son, Charles, was baptized there in 1845, but born three years earlier in 1842. The church has many records for this family, including the 1845 baptism and 1846 burial records for little Franz, whose short life occurred before most vital records were collected in Brooklyn. These church records are the only evidence of his existence. The 1848 burial record for my 3rd great-grandmother, Juliana Gurtelschmidt Wolf, contains a wealth of information such as her birthdate and location as well as her parents’ names. 1848 also marked the untimely passing of another son, 12-year-old Johann. In 1849, Jacob married his second wife, Clara Dorre there. In 1850 the two eldest Wolf sons, Conrad and Jacob, received their confirmations, followed by Philip in 1852, Ferdinand in 1855, and Charles in 1856. Most of the Wolf sons married in that church, and a few of Jacob and Juliana’s grandchildren were baptized there.
The original Schermerhorn Street Evangelical Lutheran Church that my family attended became too small for the burgeoning German population and was torn down in 1888 to make way for a larger and more elaborate church. The new church seated 900 people and was adorned with stained glass windows from Munich. It closed its doors in 1969. In 2006, the beautiful church that was once the heart of Brooklyn’s German community was demolished to make way for luxury apartment buildings.
Comentários