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To Philadelphia, and Jacob Weiss (Jacob Wise)

To Philadelphia

The family’s compiled history tells the road to Philadelphia as a Reichert story. August and William Reichert, the two sons Auguste Charlotte had raised as her own, went first, and Caroline followed. The records bear out its outline. August Reichert, Caroline’s first cousin through their mothers and her mother’s stepson, married Christiana Traunecker at St. Michael’s and Zion German Lutheran Church in Philadelphia on 27 July 1871. The family’s Extended Family Chart gives her birth as about 1844. His brother, Johann Wilhelm, is probably the William J. Reichert (1844 to 1905) of the same chart, who married a Sophia, born about 1845. A Jacob F. Reichert, born in Württemberg, aged 21, a machinist, enlisted in the U.S. Army at Philadelphia in 1870. He is possibly Caroline’s half-brother Jakob Friedrich, born at Ochsenburg in 1848: the name, age and homeland fit, but nothing else ties him to the family. The compiled history’s order is not the whole story, though. Jakob Friedrich may have gone in 1866, and Caroline’s uncle, Jacob Weiss, had gone in 1854 (below).

Caroline came to Philadelphia in 1876 or 1877, at nineteen or twenty. On 24 October 1882 she married Charles Knoll, a butcher, at St. Michael’s and Zion. The register enters her as Caroline Weisz, born at “Ochsenburg, Brakenheim, Wurttemberg.” Her witnesses were her brother, entered as “Christian Weisz,” and Christiana Reichert, entered as her “half sister-in-law” . Christiana had married in the city eleven years before. Caroline and Charles had a long marriage and raised their children in Philadelphia, among them Mary Matilda Knoll, born on 24 June 1884, who married George Washington Wesemann (see George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907). She died in Philadelphia on 4 June 1939. Her married life is told in the Knoll and Weiss Families section.

The family remembers that Caroline may have had some Jewish ancestry. No record confirms it. Most, though not all, of the ancestors traced in this chapter were baptized Lutheran, and Württemberg had a long Lutheran history, so a conversion somewhere in the tree is possible, but nothing documents one.

August Reichert was a baker. He died at the Philadelphia Hospital on 20 June 1916, aged 69, a widower whose home was 727 Ritner Street, in the 39th Ward. The cause was arthritis deformans. His death certificate gives his birth as 18 January 1847, exactly as his Ochsenburg baptism does. The informant was Wm. Schultz of the same address, and August was buried at Fernwood, Delaware County, on 23 June 1916.

Caroline’s brother, Christian Friedrich Weiss, also came to Philadelphia and worked as a blacksmith. He married Charlotte, whom the Extended Family Chart gives as Charlotte M., born in 1862. He died at Philadelphia General Hospital on 15 July 1924, aged 65, of arteriosclerosis. His death certificate gives his birth a year late, as 14 February 1859, and his parents as unknown to the informant, Theodore Boehnlein of Manayunk. The undertaker, John Strittmatter, buried him at Leverington Cemetery in Roxborough on 18 July 1924.

Two more of Johann Weiss’s family followed. His daughter Rosina Sophia probably left for Philadelphia in August 1889, though nothing is known of her there. On 27 May 1893 August Wilhelm Weiss, born on 7 August 1879, the son of Johann Weiss’s unmarried daughter Auguste, was released from Württemberg citizenship and emigrated to Philadelphia. He was Johann Weiss’s grandson and Caroline’s nephew. His mother was possibly Caroline’s sister Auguste Elisabeth, the Auguste of the first family who grew up, but the entry does not say which daughter she was.

A Parallel Branch: Jacob Weiss (Jacob Wise)

Caroline had an uncle in America long before she came. Jacob Weiss, the youngest child of Johann Friedrich Weiss and Margaretha Schuele and her father’s youngest brother, was born at Ochsenburg on 16 July 1830 and baptized at Brackenheim on 18 July. A note beside his name on the family page, in words hard to read, says that he went to North America in 1854; his 1900 census gives his arrival as 1856. In America he became Jacob Wise.

Most of what follows comes from a family tree shared online by Tammy Young on Geneanet. Jacob was naturalized on 18 October 1860 and served in the Civil War. He was living in Philadelphia by 1863, thirteen years before Caroline arrived, and later settled at Pittsgrove and Upper Pittsgrove, in Salem County, New Jersey, where he appears from 1870 to 1905. In 1857, at Norma in Salem County, he married Johanna Gottliebin Thumlert, known as Hannah. In 1880 the census of Upper Pittsgrove found Jacob Wise, 49, a farmer, and Hannah G., 37, both born in Württemberg. In 1900, at Pittsgrove, the census gave her birth as March 1843, his citizenship, and the couple as married forty-three years. Hannah was probably born earlier than 1843, since that year would make her fourteen at her marriage and sixteen at the birth of her first child. Jacob died at Pittsgrove on 30 October 1906, aged 76, and is buried there. Hannah probably died in March 1926.

The births of Laura Elizabeth and Caroline are indexed to Jacob and Hannah; Caroline is not in the online tree.

Hannah’s parents are not known. Her surname is a rare one, and it was the name of a family in Jacob’s own village: his sister Margaretha had married into the Thumlerts of Ochsenburg in 1850. A tie between Hannah and that family is possible. It is not proved. No daughter born between 1838 and 1843 appears on the Thumlert family pages at Ochsenburg. One candidate for her father is Georg Friedrich Thumlert, born in 1815, the eldest son of Johann Friedrich Thumlert, who married in 1842 and went to America; he is possibly her father, but no record links them.

Nothing about Jacob Wise changes the Reichert account of how Caroline reached Philadelphia. It does mean that her father’s brother had known the same city long before she came. Whether she knew him or his family is not known.