Karl Adolph Vogel was born on September 5, 1888 in Frohna, Missouri.  Today, I will use his birthday as a springboard for going backwards to discover how his name managed to get into our German Family Tree.

The name Vogel has been around Perry County for a long time, and the number of Vogels in the German Family Tree is voluminous.  However, the Vogels were not part of the original immigration to this area.  On the other hand, they did manage to find their way here quite early.  The first official record we have of the Vogel name is a birth and baptism in 1848.  But just how did they get here?

Let’s start by going back to Germany.  There was a Solomo Vogel who was a pastor in Crossen, Zwickau, Germany.  Here is a photo of the interior of that church.

In 1803, Solomo’s son, Solomo II, was married to Johanna Bitterlich.  We have this record of their marriage in a family history book that we have at our museum.  The sainted Clinton Wunderlich, a noted genealogist from this area, put this family history together.

The first of this Vogel family to arrive in America were Solomon II and Johanna (Bitterlich) Vogel who are said to have come in 1834.  They came up the Mississippi River, then into the Illinois River, and stopped in Beardstown, Illinois.  Solomon died in 1835; Johanna died in 1836.  One of their sons, August Edward Vogel, having been born in Germany in 1807, was about 23 years old when his mother died.  August then must have decided to move downriver because we find evidence that he was living in Scott City, Missouri for a while.  In fact, it is there that he reportedly found his bride, Catharina Doering.  We have this photograph of her.

This couple must have then moved to Frohna, Missouri, because we have their third child, another August Vogel, being baptized at Concordia Lutheran Church in 1848.  Here is that baptism record, probably written by Rev. Gotthold Loeber who was serving both Trinity, Altenburg and Concordia, Frohna in 1848.

It is probably because of August hearing about the German Lutheran settlement in Perry County, along with him finding some property to buy, that brought this family here in 1848.  Here is an image of a land patent that shows August buying some government property just outside the town of Frohna in 1848.

He purchased forty acres at that time.  We find later such records of him buying some other nearby land in 1853.  The 1915 atlas of land ownership in Perry County shows us where this land was located.

In this same atlas, on a map that zeroes in on the town of Frohna, we can also see August Vogel’s property showing just how close it was to the Concordia church’s location.

It appears to me that the August Vogel family could walk to church on Sunday.

We have nine children of August and Catharina who show up in the church records of Concordia, the last of which was born in 1865.  Their son, the other August that was born in 1848, was married to Bertha Gruenwald in 1872, but she died already in 1876 after having two children.  Then August remarried, this time to Marie Gerharter of New Wells.  This couple has 12 children recorded in the Concordia church books, one of them being Karl Adolph Vogel, who was born on this day in 1888.

In 1914, Karl married Emma Bergt.  On the above map, you can see how the Vogels and the Bergts lived very near one another.  This couple would go on to have five children.  When Karl registered for the World War I draft in 1917, he recorded that he had one child and two adopted.

The story of the two “adopted” children was told in the post titled, Montana Martin Mangels.  Karl’s older sister died in Nebraska in 1914, the same year that Karl was married.  She and her husband, Martin Mangels, had five children who were then “farmed out” to other family members here in Perry County.  Karl would take in two of them.

The Vogel family had a very small beginning in Perry County, but after all these years, there are now 21 pages in our German Family Tree that come from August and Catharina Vogel.  I am sure that this name will show up in this blog again someday.