(c) 2020 Frederick Walton Kroll-Herzke Family researcher
Heinrich Herzke clearly had some influence over the decision made by his sister Ottilie and her husband, Julius Kroll, to settle in Chester, New York when they returned from Germany in 1902. What that influence was remains to be discovered. Why would Julius move his large family to a place he had never been, when he had many well established siblings and in-laws in Blue Island, Illinois, a place he had previously lived before returning to Germany? We could establish many theories, but perhaps one way is to learn more about Heinrich and his wife Augusta. Or is is Auguste? Both forms, along with Gussie, have appeared in documents discovered during my research.
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Henry Herzke and his wife Augusta (Circled)
at the 50th Wedding anniversary
of his sister Ottilie and Julius Kroll in 1943 |
It is her last name "Fiderowitzs" that gets really confusing. All I can say for sure after several weeks of research is that it starts with "F"! Trying to find her “real” maiden name took me on a month-long tangent, Here is where my research led and what I have concluded.
Before she married Heinrich, on 29 September 1892 in Chester, New York she was know as "Auguste F-i-d-e-r-e-w-i-t-z-s" (Fiderewitzs)... at least according to the "New York Marriage index" [1]. After that she is Augusta or "Gussie" Herzke. Of course just because it’s an “official” record doesn’t make it correct. This could have been a clerks phonetic spelling or it may have been incorrectly transcribed before it made its way to the final online marriage index we can search today.
Her final resting place in Chester is marked with a gravestone that identifies her as "Augusta F.".
So what is her F-ing name?
After her marriage, her maiden name is rarely used. I carefully checked the several places it might still occur:
Her first child, Herman, was born in Florida, N. Y. (near Chester) in 1896 [2]. I would expect her to be listed on his birth certificate by her maiden name. I manually searched the "New York State, Birth Index, 1881-1942" and did not find an entry for Herzke, Hersky, or Herske in the period 1895-1900. Likewise I was unable to find the birth record for daughter Julia born is 1899.
After much manual searching, I finally found both records in the “Official” records of New York State birth indexes, both misspelled and each spelled differently. If the clerks couldn’t get Herzke right, what hope is their for Fiderewitzs or whatever it actually was?
Herman J. Hedski [Herzke] was born 13 Sept 1896 in Warwick, N. Y.:
How do I know this is him? There are NO other records found anywhere for a “Herman J. Hedski” or any Hedski for that matter (i.e. his parents or siblings) so it is a valid assumption that this is really our Herman J. Herzke!
I can practically hear my grandmother pronounce “ Herzke” in the German manner, will a rolling R Hear-duh-ski) and totally understand how this could be phonetically misunderstood as something like Hedski.
Likewise, I also manually found "Julia L Hatski" born 13 April 1899 in Chester, N. Y.
I found NO other records anywhere for “Julia L. Hatski” or any Hatski (i.e. her parents or siblings) so it is a valid assumption and can be safety presumed that this is another phonetic misspelling of “Herzke”.
I did not obtain a copy of the actual birth certificate in either case, but we now have a certificate number if anyone wants to go through the grueling and expensive process of trying to get the actual certificate from New York State, and even then there is no guarantee we will find the maiden name we are looking for!
Marriage
Another likely place a maiden name may be listed is on her children's Marriage certificate.
I couldn't find a copy of Herman's, although I did found him in the New Jersey index and identified a certificate number. [3]
I did, in fact, find Augusta's maiden name listed in Julia's marriage record [4]. It was listed as "Freud", an "F" word, but not the one I would have expected, deepening the mystery. Did Julia not know her mothers maiden name and just pick something at random?
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| section of Julia Herske's Marriage License registration showing mother maiden name is Freud |
Death
One final place to look was an obituary. I searched Newspapers.com and NYS Historic Newspapers and found nothing, which simply means the paper containing her obit was not among the various online collections I checked . I would expect her Obit to be in a 1951 Middletown paper which was not online but may be available at a local archive if someone near Middletown cares to look. [5] Likewise, husband Henry’s 1944 obituary was not found because the entire year 1944 was not online. No Middletown papers were online for 1963 when Julia died.
I did find son Herman, who is known as John H. Harding by his death, but there is no mention of his parents. John H. Harding? Well that’s another name story still to be told, stay tuned!
So searching New York Records on-line from my office in North Carolina (while quarantined due to Covid regulations) was a total bust in finding Augusta's "real" maiden name!
(Interestingly enough, when I searched Ancestry.com for "Augusta Freud" I got several results, including Julia's marriage registration. Apparently there WAS an "Augusta Freud" and she was from Posen! She lived in Queens and was married to Adam Freud, but it does not take much sluething to determine that this is clearly a different person.)
Immigration
Augusta obviously immigrated to the U. S. A. under her maiden name since she was married after she arrived. However finding her immigration record is nearly impossible since we have no record of exactly when she arrived or what her name was! Both the U.S. Federal Census for 1900 and 1910 list her immigration year as 1892.
I searched immigration records for" Fiderewitzs" and found 21 "Fiderewitz" immigration records but none for Augusta or her siblings, so maybe this is not the correct spelling or perhaps the ships record is simply missing. I even searched the 65 million passenger records on the Ellis Island database using several variation and came up with no matches. [6]
Next I went back "overseas" to look for birth certificates in the online Posen (Poznan, Poland) archives, but they didn’t start recording until 1874. Another dead end! So the only name I have for her is F-i-d-e-r-e-w-i-t-z-s and I am not too confident that is correct, even though it is documentable! [7]
Other Family members sharing her maiden Name
Augusta had several siblings, so I thought I might have better luck finding how they spelled their F-ing name. I have discovered three siblings, but, again due to spelling discrepancies, there may be more to be found, although, besides spelling, there is clearing a family relationship among these three and Augusta:
1.) Bertha Herzke nee Fiedrovitz (1872-?]
2.) August William Fiedrovitz (1878-?]
3.) Emma Herzke nee Fiedrovitz (18881-1946) (Not to be confused with Emma Reich nee Herzke (1887-1951)
Since August William never changed his name due to marriage, there is a greater chance of finding him in multiple records and seeing how the spelling changed or remained consistent over his life as a clue to the possible "correct" spelling of the family name. (Or at least the Americanized spelling.)
Although August’s records are few, they are consistent. Starting with his World War One draft registration card in 1918, in his own handwriting, he consistently spells his name F-i-e-d-r-o-v-i-t-z (Fiedrovitz).
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| 1918 Draft regitration Card for August William Fiedrovitz |
Most U. S. Federal Census records also clearly spell his name “Fiedrovitz” and so do Church records for the Blue Island Lutheran Church. The census records indicate he immigrated in 1902 or 1904, but searching the immigration database on Ancestry.com for “Fiedrovitz” returns ZERO records. There are a total of 77 records of similar spellings, such as Fiedrowitz, Fiderovitz, Fiderowitz, Federovitz, Federowitz, etc. Any of these may be my target misspelled, but I reviewed all 77 and none match the family we are searching for.
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Section of 1920 U.S. Federal Census for August Fiedrovitz
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What about sisters Bertha and Emma? Bertha immigrated between 1895 and 1899, per census records, but is married by 1910. For the reasons above, there is NO Fiedrovitz immigration record found for her. What if I could find her in the 1900 Census after she immigrated but before she was married? That may give us an important clue!
It was during this search that I realized she was married in 1907, but her son William was born in 1899! Various sources stated he was born in Illinois or New York. Then I found his confirmation record in Blue Island Church records showing that he was born and baptized in Chester, New York in 1899! So it seems sister Bertha was possibly living near Augusta and Henry Herzke around the time of the sought after 1900 census.
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1910 U. S. Federal Census containing Bertha Fiedrovitz (Pe Drovitz) and her son William
Click to enlarge |
I started with Henry’s 1900 census and guess What ???... Bertha and William are RIGHT NEXT DOOR! At first it may not be obvious, because the name listed is Bertha “Pe Drovitz”. Searching the zillions of records in a very general Ancestry.com search for “Pe Drovitz”comes up with exactly TWO records...Bertha and William in the 1900 census. I must therefore conclude that this is the phonetic misspelling of "Fie-Drovitz”, in fact this may be a clue to its pronunciation. I have been pronouncing it as FEE-drow-Vitz ... emphasis on the first syllable. Maybe it's pronounced Fee-DROVE-its ... emphasis on the middle syllable????
This Discovery doesn’t help find the immigrations records, however and when Bertha married Paul Herzke in 1907, her maiden name is lost, EXCEPT for the use in the Baptismal records of her daughter Paula where her name is clearly spelled as Fiedrovitz the same as her brother August Fiedrovitz who is listed as a witness in the same record.
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| Blue Island Lutheran Church Register |
The handwritten church records are perhaps more reliable than state records because they are presumably written by a church clerk who knows the parishioner and is asking them for the information directly resulting (probably) in a more accurate spelling. In this case, looking at the pages and pages of tongue twisting German, Polish and Russian parishioners names, it is clear that the clerk in this German language Lutheran house of worship had more than an ordinary exposure and command of multiple European languages. In fact, by looking at the neat flowing script, there is no hesitation in the middle of a confusing name and the same clerk’s hand appears for many years at a time, suggesting a long term familiarity with fellow parishioners.
Emma offers even more evidence along this line. Starting with her marriage record in the Blue Island Luthern Church records where her name is spelled Fiedrovitz, we find baptismal records for all eight of her children, six of which use her maiden name spelled Fiedrovitz. For the two eldest children her maiden name is listed as the very slight variation "Fiedrovitsch" and Fiedrowitz.
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| Marriage Record Of Emma Fiedrovitz and Wilheml Herzke in Blue Island Lutheran Church register. |
Based on this evidence, I feel fairly comfortable declaring that the correct spelling of the family name (as used by them in America at least) was probably F-i-e-d-r-o-v-i-t-z (Fiedrovitz), since this is most commonly and consistently found among trust-worthy records.
With this new level of confidence, I circled back to the Polish archives to see if I could find this family name near Murowana-Goslin. Searching "Fiedrovitz" had zero matches. I did find several members of a family name Fiedrowitz/Fiedrowicz in the period 1890-1910 but they do not seem to match our family, although more research would be needed to confirm this. The Polish Genealogy site explains that Polish Genealogy is still disorganized and in it's infancy, so it is possible more records will come to light in the future.
Poland
In several census records the siblings identify their parents and their own birthplace as Poland (vs. Germany) and their native language as Polish. This may account for the difficulty in finding accurate records in Poland. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Poland’s neighbors constantly conquered and partitioned Poland in an attempt to systematically eliminate Poland’s ethnic identity. If the Fiedrovitz’s were, in fact, ethnically Poles, they had virtually no “identity” or freedom, as compared to the Germans, like the Kroll’s or Herzke’s, who occupied this conquered land. My mother, Jeanne Packhiser Walton, who as a child remembers Aunt Augusta, told me that she recalled overhearing some of the Kroll/Herzke family gossip, at the time, that wondered how Henry could ever have gotten involved with someone like Augusta who was in an entirely different and lower social class?
Summary
To date I have not found any immigration records for the Fiedrovitz siblings.
I found no indication that August ever married, so he never passed this name on, although his three sisters, passed on their Fiedrovitz DNA through their many children, but ALL with the surname Herzke.
A simple Google search for Fiedrovitz come up with No matches. If this is indeed the correct spelling, it is now extinct in the 21st century.
That is an F-ing shame.
Notes:
[1] New York State Department of Health; Albany, NY, USA; New York State Marriage Index;1892; Fiderewitzs
[2] World War One Draft registration card for "Herman J. Herske" lists his birthdate as September 14, 1896 and birthplace as Florida, N. Y. (Registration State: New Jersey; Registration County: Passaic; Roll: 1754432; Draft Board: 3)
[3] New Jersey State Archives; Trenton, New Jersey; Marriage Indexes (Available on Ancestry.com)
[4] New York, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1847-1849, 1907-1936 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com; Original data:Marriage Records. New York Marriages. Various New York County Clerk offices.
[5] There are no Middletown newspapers for 1951 in the database for Newspapers.com, Ancestry.com or Historicnewspapers.com.
[6] Searched various immigation databases on Ancestry.com and searched the 65 million passenger records on https://heritage.statueofliberty.org/passenger
[7] POZNAN PROJECT, POZNAN REGION MARRIAGE INDEXING PROJECT FOR 1800-1899- http://poznan-project.psnc.pl/# and BaSIA Project, Database of vital records from Greater Poland- http://www.basia.famula.pl/en/
