Annual Report for 2003
RIP -- With great sadness, I report here the death of my aunt, Christine Ella Oechsli, born Prahl (March 1, 1919-February 23, 2003). She was the last of my four aunts. To her, as well as Georgine Felbinger Campbell (+1991), Henrietta Felbinger Cooper (+1994), and May Felbinger (+1979), this year's work is dedicated.
This year 2003 is an anniversary year. It is the 150th anniversary (1853) of the Prahls coming to America from Oldesloe in Holstein, and the 150th anniversary (1853) of the death of great-great-grandfather Martin Felbinger in Ickelhelm (November 4th). It is also the 100th birthday of my aunt, Henrietta Felbinger Cooper (May 18th).
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Work on the family history was interrupted in November 2002 because of more immediate, extremely difficult family crises. In early November my mother Constance broke her hip in a fall, a serious matter for anyone, but potentially life-threatening for a woman 91 years old. Considering her general health and physical condition to be good, I was much more optimistic about the end result than Mom's doctors. On my orders, they performed the necessary surgery to repair the hip, and Mom came through it all very well.
My aunt Christine Oechsli, Mom's sister, was less fortunate. While Mom was in the hospital for her surgery, the nursing home also informed me that Aunt Chris was showing significant signs of failure, and by New Year 2003 had entered upon her final decline. She finally succumbed, dying in the early morning of Sunday, February 23rd.
Settling Aunt Chris's affairs and caring for Mom postponed any significant work on family history until June. Yet Aunt Chris's death also gave significant impetus to the work I was to do this year. Her passing indicated to me how little documentary evidence I possessed about the Felbinger and Prahl families here in America, so I decided to find as many records as I might, to come to more specific knowledge about them.
My research objective led me first to the New York City Municipal Archives on Chambers Street, where I was able to find the birth, marriage and death records for several family members.
For the Felbinger family:
For the Prahl family:
These researches led me far afield, both in New York and to Germany.
I In June, I wrote to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn and obtained information on the Felbinger family plot. I also inquired and received information about the grave of my great-grandparents Meyer, shown to me by my father only once more than 30 years ago.
I was able to find the Lutheran church in Brooklyn (Sts. Matthew, John, and Emanuel Lutheran Church, the successor parish to Emanuel) where my father William was baptized. My sister Alice had planned a visit to New York, and I promised we would go look at Emanuel's records together. The Black-Out of August 13th put an end to that plan: Alice was already airborne when the lights and air-conditioning went down, could come no further than Minneapolis, but was able to return safely home the same day. A few days later I visited Sts. MJ&E, and read through the actual baptismal registers for my father's record, and those of his sisters Georgine and Henrietta.
During the summer I also visited New York Public Library's Genealogical and Local History Division in the hope of obtaining several records. There I found a drawing of the Prahl family crest mentioned in Schlegel. In the book Germans to America I found the New York passenger list for the bark Rastede, the ship that brought Anna Prahl and the two children to America in 1853, and the New York passenger list for the Hermann, the ship that brought John George Felbinger and Maria Barbara Fichtelmann, their two children and her father Ulrich to America in 1867. Curiously, they are listed in the passenger manifest under their individual names (Johann G. as "Felbinger", then above him Ulrich (as Johann), Maria (as Barbara) and the two children as "Fichtelmann").
At this time I also started going to the Mormon Family History Center in Rego Park in Queens, to look at microfilm records. I obtained the baptismal record of Charles Edward Prahl (b. February 1, 1854; baptized October 8, 1855) in the records of the First German Presbyterian Church of New York, located on Rivington Street in Manhattan. I also found the Hamburg version of the Rastede's passenger list.
In the death certificates of Charles and Edward Alfred Prahl, I noted they were both buried in Woodland Cemetery in Staten Island. After several telephone calls and a letter (all unanswered) to the Cemetery, plus some telephone calls to the New York State Cemetery Board branch office here in Manhattan, I made a trip to Staten Island on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. I found the caretaker in the Cemetery, who was able to confirm that both men were buried in the same grave (No. 1506), and graciously helped me look for it. In the event, I could only get to within a few feet of the grave, as it is greatly overgrown and there is no marker to indicate its exact position.
These discoveries gave me much confidence to go to Germany in November to continue the research. In November 1853, 150 years before, the Prahls were traveling to America: it took them 51 days. It took me 18 hours to go back in the opposite direction. In November 1853, 150 years before, great-great-grandfather Martin Felbinger died in Ickelheim, and I arrived there within a few days of the anniversary. Doing family research has its ironic moments.
I went first to Bad Oldesloe to see the town where the Prahls came from, and to Bad Segeberg to visit the Kirchenbucharchiv there. The records there allowed me to confirm Charles Prahl's full name (Carl Johann Hans Prahl) and birth date, and that he had a younger brother and sister. I could find no further record of the brother, the sister married a doctor 20 years her senior. I also found the baptismal records for Charles' first two children. Even better, I found the names of his parents and grandparents. I continued on to Nuremberg, that I might travel by rail to Ickelheim where I visited the cemetery listed in the Ickelheim records (though found no tombstone earlier than 1908) and took several pictures. I traveled on to Regensburg and completed transcription of the Ickelheim Felbinger records (at 11 A.M. on the 11th day of the 11th month, just in time for the 85th anniversary of the end of World War I), and started working more intensely on the Westheim and Burgbernheim registers. I also worked on the Oberdachstetten/Obersulzbach records, to discover that Johann Paul Felbinger has a brother (older/younger?) Leonard Friedrich. I returned to Nuremberg to the church archives there, finding the letter of dispensation for the marriage of Johann Sturm and Sybilla Schmidt (later married to Jobst Felbinger), some military records, and started researching the Ickelheim Armenkasse records.
Last, the Internet has made easier not only the process of finding information, it has also expanded everyone's ability to locate relations one might not otherwise know about. Late one Sunday afternoon while playing with the Internet, I entered the name "Cangialosi" as a search term; the name relates to one particular branch of the Prahl family. I was rather surprised to obtain several "hits" for the name, including an entry in an Ancestry.com message board. I discovered the person asking about the Cangialosi family proved to be none other than Robert Prahl, the grandson of Mathilda Prahl, my grandfather Edward L.S. Prahl's younger sister. This is a part of the family about which I have known little or nothing, so it is indeed wonderful for me to be in touch with them.
Except for writing up all the research, my labors for this year are done. The work is not complete; more research needs to be done.