This is the first article in which I used AI to help with the content. I wrote a draft first, then asked Claude.AI for assistance. After decades of writing government reports, I sometimes find myself challenged by descriptive and creative writing! I wondered what suggestions it would make. While I did incorporate some of the ideas, I was not comfortable with its statements written as if they are fact. I have no diaries, letters, or personal memorabilia from these ancestors and therefore can only guess at what ideas, discussions, arguments, or agreements stood behind their decision to leave their homeland. I don’t know if grandmother Eva was the person who pushed to leave her homeland, as the AI edits suggested (and I deleted) or if she had to be convinced to join her family. I would think it more likely that the younger generation was ready for a chance at a new life and they convinced their elders to take the leap.
This story includes the fate of two widows. A sixty-year-old woman of that era was nearly two decades past her life expectancy, making her daughter of 37 beyond middle age. 🤯 From my perspective their choice was a bold move—to step off into the unknown. To sail across the ocean on a not-large-enough for me ship where they would have felt every wave, then arriving in New Orleans and perhaps taking a couple of days to rest on dry land before joining the queue to get on the equally small riverboat to St. Louis. I get a little queasy thinking about it! Claude.AI added a more personalized perspective, but I did not allow it to write this story. I have noted where I made changes based on the suggestions Claude provided.
The Löhr & Rodenbach Families of Puderbach
On June 17, 1848, the ship “Seth Sprague” arrived at the Port of New Orleans carrying passengers from Le Havre, France. Among those arriving was a party of six: a widowed grandmother (Eva), a widowed mother (Maria), an uncle (Heinrich Christian), and three children: seventeen-year-old Helene (my 2x great grandmother), fourteen-year-old Maria and their younger brother, eight-year-old Christian. The group rode up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, then switched to the Missouri River to Boonville. They would have taken a wagon overland to Morgan County, Missouri where all seven would live for the rest of their lives.[1] This is part of their story.
On November 10, 1807, Eva Katharina Schäfer married Johann Henrich Löhr (1782-1842) in the Evangelical Church in Puderbach, Rheinland, which lies in the northeast area of modern-day county of Neuwied in the Westerwald region of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Eva was born in Reichenstein, part of the village Puderbach. She was baptized on March 24, 1788 in the same church in which she married nineteen years later.
Johann, born in Sensenbach in 1782, was baptized on July 2 at the Evangelical Church of Niederwambach, a few miles to the north. Johann could have walked to Puderbach in about an hour on a small footpath, avoiding the more-direct road where the near constant wagon traffic made it difficult. Meeting a group of soldiers sometimes required nothing more than a nod, while others demanded to see papers, asking why an able-bodied young man was not serving the prince/king/ruler of the province.
Life in Germany
While their social class is unknown, Johann and Eva’s early married life unfolded during an era of political turmoil as the Rhine region was occupied by the French during the Napoleonic Wars (1790s-1815), followed by local government shifting between Prussian, French, and Germanic control.[2] That means that their harvest might have been requisitioned by French soldiers one year, then Prussian the next. The church bells that called them to worship on Sundays might have been melted down for cannons, then replaced, then taken again.[3]
Most families lived in small houses, grew vegetables and had a few animals. Life revolved around agricultural seasons and the church. It is not known if Johann was pressed into military service, but his survival to age sixty is remarkable in the early 1800s. As a sixty-year-old widow Eva made a bold decision to leave the only life any of them had known and see what the new world had to offer. She would spend the last twelve years of her life in America.[4] Johann and Eva had three children:
- Heinrich Christian Löhr (Loehr/Lehr/Lear/Lohr) (1809-1890)
- Maria Katherine (1811-1850)
- Elisabethe (1815-?)
Little is known about the youngest child Elisabethe. She did not immigrate with her family so it is possible she did not survive to adulthood or married and stayed in Germany. She and her siblings were baptized in the Puderbach church, making it likely that the family lived close enough to the town to attend regularly. The church that now stands in Puderbach is not the same building that existed while the Rodenbach and Löhr families were there, but it is in the same location and also is steeped in history.
Heinrich Christian, known by his middle name, married Mary Catharina Tohtz (1806-1894) in Morgan County in 1860. They had no children. Chris farmed land in Richland Township. His mother lived with him and Mary for the rest of her life. Christian and Mary are buried in the United Church of Christ cemetery in Florence, Missouri. The location of Eva’s burial is unknown.
The third sibling, Maria Katharina Löhr, married Johann Henrich Rodenbach on January 28, 1832 in the same church where her parents had married in Puderbach. Maria and Johann also had three offspring who survived to old age in the United States.
Johann Rodenbach died in 1843 at the age of 48. It sounds young, especially when you passed that mark a few years back, but life expectancy in rural Germany in the first two decades of the 1800s generally was in the mid-30s to low 40s for males. Six surviving Löhr and Rodenbach family members embarked on the intrepid journey to find a new world of possibilities.
Part Two of this series will examine the journey and early life in the United States.
[1] This is a slight simplification because Maria Elizabethe Rodenbach Lehr lived her final days at her son’s home in Lawrence County. She had remained in Morgan County through at least 1910 when the census taker found her living with her daughter Katharina Zumsteig’s family.
[2] I asked Claude AI what life would have been like in the Westerwald region during the late 1700s and early 1800s. I edited and verified facts from Anchor Atlas of World History Vol I: From the Stone Age to the Eve of the French Revolution and Vol II: From the French Revolution to the American Bicentennial. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1974 and 1976.
[3] Claude AI added this descriptive sentence.
[4] The last record of Eva is the 1860 U.S. Federal Census for Morgan County, Missouri. She may have lived nearly a decade more but was absent from the 1870 census.