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Other Related EmigrantsIn the course of this work, we developed some excellent resources for genealogical research in Europe, while having a great time in the process. So upon largely completing our research work on the Zentmeÿer line in Germany, we turned our attention to some other emigrant surnames, which admittedly are associated with our little corner of the Zentmeÿer gene pool. Our emigrant ancestors we have researched include (and for our own clarity, our direct lines are italicized) . . . Joseph Brutsché, a German from Dogern, Baden-Württemberg, a small town on the Rhine River, who emigrated from Le Havre, France to New York on 29 December 1827 aboard the French Brig Deux Ernst. Curiously, in the 1880 US Census in Denison Texas, Joseph's son Joseph claimed that both his parents had been born in France. This could have resulted from post Civil War antipathy towards Germans in Texas, because many Germans there were opposed to slavery and were pacifists, and refused to fight for the Confederacy. But by the 1900 Census, Joseph correctly recorded his parents' countries of origin as Germany and Switzerland. Your webmaster's family grew up believing the Brutschés were of French origin, and it is unclear why we were not disuaded of this notion by our grandmother, Jeanette Brutsché, unless perhaps she herself was unaware of her German heritage. This is not as strange is it might seem, we have seen others in our family tree who have incorrectly identified their ancestral origins.
This was a very satisfying project for us, because the Brutschés are a small family in the United States and there had been little European research done, so there was little or no misinformation online to overcome. Hence many of the of the Ancestry.com trees which include the Brutschés have begun incorporating our data. Historically in Germany, the surname Brutsché was concentrated in southern Wuerttemburg and a slice of northern Aargau, Switzerland, so the seach area was limited. Nonetheless, this work required searching scores of parishes in the archives of Freiburg and Karlsruhe. When we finally located Joseph's birth record from Dogern, along with other information supporting his emigration, the reigning Brutsche genealogist in the area, Armin Brutsche from Murg, endorsed our conclusions.
Johann Michael Emmert, a German, who arrived in Philadelphia on 25 September 1732 with his son Johann Georg Emmert aboard the good ship Loyal Judith. Their arrivals had been widely known, having been described in Strassburger and Hinke's Pennsylvania German Pioneers. But their origins in Germany had been the subject of endless speculation on multiple websites. I queried some of these sites, and none could cite any sources for their data, except for other websites. So we went to work. The Emmerts are dear to us, in part because we possess a letter written in 1871 from John and Mollie Emmert to John Calvin Strahorn, their grandson and our great grandfather. John Emmert died later that same year. But this research project was a daunting one. We may have spent more time and treasure on this project than any other. The surname Emmert was relatively common in Germany, especially in the Palatinate, which was an area in central western Germany bisected by the Rhine river about the size of New York State. The Palatinate was also the source of the majority of German emigrants to America. So we searched, parish by parish, in scores of villages over a several-year period. We finally located the origins of this family in Haundorf-Schnelldorf, which is in western Bavaria near Feuchtwangen. But unlike our Brutsché data, this information may never gain the acceptance it deserves, because of the amount of bad data already out there on Ancestry.com and other websites.
Robert Strayhorn, a Scottish emigrant from Ayrshire who arrived in the United States in 1775 from Ireland, along with his sons Samuel and Nathaniel according to two published sources. Multiple sources claim Nathaniel and Samuel were born in Ireland. We have not yet located the records of their arrival in America, nor Nathaniel or Samuel's births. We have twice visited Edinburgh and Ayrshire, and also Belfast, Ireland, and the results of our research have been in a word, inconclusive. Another mystery is Robert's likely daughter Margaret, who married Edward Scullen in Philadelphia on the same day her brother Nathaniel married Olympas Jodon; why is she not mentioned in the literature? We have found evidence in Ireland for Robert living there, a newspaper article from Antrim in the year 1761. Additionally, Robert's son Samuel listed his place of birth as Ireland in the 1850 US Census. Research is continuing.
This Strayhorn line, in addition to producing our grandmother Mary Strahorn, was well known in the cattle trade in Chicago, as Robert Strahorn operated the dominant livestock brokerage firm there in the late 1800s. His younger first cousin once removed, Robert Edmund Strahorn, was a railroad builder who amassed a fortune in the Northwest before going broke in the Great Depression. The two cousins partnered to build the Hailey Hot Springs Hotel in Idaho in 1888. Both Robert Strahorns are interred in elaborate granite mausoleums in Chicago and Spokane.
Peter Hobart, an Englishman, who emigrated from Hingham, Norfolk, England to Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the year 1635. This is the earliest immigrant arrival we have found in our family tree (although Peter's father Edmund may have actually arrived earlier, in 1633) and this line is distinguished for among other things having produced a Vice President of the United States, Garrett Hobart, the fourth cousin of our grandfather Frank Grant Hobart. We visited Hingham, Massachusetts in December of 2018, and copied original records from the Old Ship Church in Hingham. Other interesting Hobarts are Walter Scott Hobart, a multi-millionaire Comstock silver mining magnate and Lake Tahoe lumber baron, the namesake of Hobart Mills near Truckee, California, and Clarence Charles Hobart, whose food service equipment company has operated in that market for over a hundred years. This line had previously been heavily researched and documented, including the volume Hobart History and Genealogy 1632-1912 by E. L. Hobart, Denver Colorado 1912, and One Thousand Years of Hubbard History 866 to 1895 by Edward Warren Day, Harlan Page Hubbard, New York 1895, which purports to trace the Hobarts back to the Norse King Hubba from the year 866 A.D. Our work on this line has therefore been website data entry, additions and corrections for which there is more recent and accurate data, and the addition of images of headstones, portraits, maps, and other documents which we have found.
Samuel Lehman, a stone cutter and quarryman from Switzerland who came to New York in 1824 with his wife and family, and soon relocated to Philadelphia where he remained for the rest of his life. Samuel was the father of Jeanette Lehman Brutsche, whose life is thoroughly documented on this web site. This research project turned out to be low-hanging fruit compared to our work with the Zentmeyers and especially the Emmerts in the Palatinate. The Kirchenbücher (church records) for Bern, Switzerland are online, and a surname search for Lehman turned up the birth record for Samuel's son David Friedrick Lehman. This record indicated that his father was from Muhen, Aargau, Switzerland. But since the Muhen records are not yet available online, your webmaster and Sabine Schleichert travelled in November of 2018 to Aarau, the capital city of Aargau, where the archives for Muhen are located. In our two days there we documented three generations of Lehmans, Piats, and others, including a five-year legal battle between brothers Samuel and Rudolf Lehman and various govermental entities concerning the rights to cut stone from a quarry owned by the town of Muhen.
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