By the time you are done reading this post, you may be totally confused.  I know that I am having trouble trying to keep several families straight.  The story starts with the wedding of Ernst Heinrich Bock and Maria Lina Hemmann on November 17, 1907.  The marriage took place at Grace Lutheran Church in Uniontown, Missouri.

Maria Lina Hemmann came into this marriage with connections to three different “H” names:  Hemmann, Hecht, and Hofmann.  Maria’s parents were Joseph and Elizabeth (Hecht) Hemmann.  Joseph was the first child born to J.G. and Rosine (Hofmann) Hemmann in 1840.  J.G. Hemmann had come to America with several children after recently losing his first wife.  He immediately married Rosine after arriving in Perry County.  In fact, the very first events recorded in the Grace, Uniontown records were a baptism and a marriage on Sunday, February 2, 1840.

Later that year, on the day after Christmas, Joseph Hemmann was born.  Joseph would marry Elizabeth Hecht in 1869.  The exact date is not given in the Grace records.  Maria Lina Hemmann was this couple’s third child, born the day after the Fourth of July in 1875, one year before our country’s centennial observation.  That makes Lina the granddaughter of J.G. Hemmann.  We have a photo on exhibit in our museum of Joseph and Elizabeth Hemmann.

Before we get to the fourth “H” name, we need to look at the marriage records in the photo above.  The second marriage to take place at Grace Lutheran was that of Michael Bock and Christine Hemmann.  Christine was another daughter of J.G. Hemmann who was his second child by his first wife, Maria Bachmann, who died in Germany in 1838.  Christine was one of the passengers in the Gruber Group that arrived in Perry County in December of 1839.  She married Michael Bock on January 14, 1841.  So a child of a Bachmann (pronounced Bock-min) married a Bock.  This couple had a child named Benjamin, and Benjamin had a child named Ernst in 1880, who married Lina Hemmann.  Ernst, therefore, was J.G. Hemmann’s great grandson.  So yes, this story is about how the granddaughter of J.G. Hemmann married the great grandson of J.G. Hemmann.

Meanwhile, Ernst’s father, Benjamin managed to bring the fourth “H” into this situation.  On the day before Reformation Day in 1873, he married Alwine Sulamith Hopfer who was also a member of Grace Lutheran Church.  Sulamith was the baby in the family of Michael Hopfer who was in a previous post, Cooper Hopfer.

So this marriage finalizes the Grace Lutheran chapter of the 4-H Club, featuring the names, Hemmann, Hofmann, Hecht, and Hopfer.

Ernst was a farmer in the Uniontown area all his life.  I found a photo which shows an Ernst Bock standing with a Paul Hopfer in front of the Hopfer Store in Uniontown.  Paul Hopfer would have been Ernst’s cousin.

Ernst died in 1966.  Lina had died either two or three days before Christmas in 1921 (There is a discrepancy between the Grace Lutheran death records and her tombstone.)

For some reason, I could not find evidence that Ernst is buried in the Grace Cemetery, although his death record can be found in their church books.