The letter
my great-grandfather Heinrich H.
Zimmerman wrote to the Zionbote
(17 May 1905) was the beginning point for all the genealogical research into
his family that I’ve done. Given that
letter, Tim Janzen at the 2006 Mennonite Genealogy Workshop at Tabor College,
Hillsboro Kansas, was able to pull up a surprising amount of information. The first thing he pounced on was the name of
HHZ’s grandfather, Jacob Dever. Dever is an alternate spelling of the
Dutch name “de Veer” (De Fehr, Defehr, Devehr, Fehr). It turns out one of Tim’s grandmothers was
Margaretha De Fehr (b. 1873), and he thought our family lines were probably
connected. Tim then spotted the name, Anna, HHZ’s sister. Since first-born daughters were named after
their mothers, Tim said that we can be pretty sure that the first name of
HHZ’s mother was also Anna.
So now we
had another full name to use in our search Anna
Dever/Defehr, daughter of Jacob Dever/Defehr, and Tim found her in the Molotschna
School Records for 1853-55: Anna, daughter of Jacob DeFehr, Prangenau, age 11, who missed 23 days in
the summer of 1853: 11 days in November 1854.
HHZ’s obituary gives Prangenau as the name of the town in the
Molotschna where HHZ’s family moved when he was 4 ½ . And there he was, Jacob Devehr of Prangenau in the 1858 Census for the
Molotschna Colony as well as in the 1864 List of Families Intending to
Settle in the Kuban Colony!
I quickly
jotted down the information Tim gave me while he turned his attention to the
name Heinrich H. Zimmermann. HHZ does not give the first names of his
parents in the letter he wrote to the Zionsbote.
However, given Mennonite naming practice, Tim said that it is almost certain
that HHZ’s father’s first name was also Heinrich. HHZ was the
first and only son. He would have been
named after his father, an assumption confirmed by the use of “H” as his middle
initial—(each child was given the father’s first initial as a middle
initial). Searching his various
data-bases Tim made a hit in the Benjamin
H. Unruh Immigration Records:
a Heinrich Zimmerman born in 1817
with a son Heinrich born in 1843. The dates were right: the Heinrich born in
1843 would have been 23 in 1866, the year HHZ was born.
As I
quickly jotted down the page numbers in the Unruh book of Immigration Records, Tim
packed all his material and rushed off to another appointment, this one with
his wife at a quilting shop.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
To read the
records Tim Janzen found, click on the Ancestry: H.H. Zimmermann “Page” in the column on the right. Included are Mennonite Encyclopedia articles
on the Dever/Defehr and Zimmermann names as well as the
information in GRANDMA on the Dever/Defehr family which now, thanks to Tim,
reaches back to early 1500s Netherlands.
