Doing family history research often causes a person to scratch the head.  I think I lost some of the few hairs I have left over a few issues in today’s story.  One issue has to do with a date.  The other is a spelling question.  All you have to do is look at the strange spelling of a word in today’s title to see a potential problem.

We start with a rather special birthday, one that took place 175 years ago.  Conrad Scholl was born on June 10, 1845.  Or was he?  I found this date by doing a search for birthdays in our German Family Tree that took place on June 10th.  I found Conrad’s date of birth and began my search on Ancestry for other documents and information.  I gathered several census records because it looked like an interesting story.  However, this morning, when I renewed my efforts, I noticed a family history on Ancestry had Conrad’s date of birth given as January 9, 1845.  I looked at other histories on that site and discovered that almost all of them gave the January 9th birthday.  I almost gave up on doing Conrad’s story today.  I went back to the GFT to see if my eyes had deceived me.  After all, the abbreviations used there for January and June are only one letter different…Jan and Jun.  There I found several places that used the June 10, 1845 date.  I had already saved a photo of Conrad’s gravestone for the story, but hadn’t noticed whether his birth date was on it, so I took another look.  That photo is shown here.

Uh-oh!  There’s yet another date of birth…June 9, 1845.  I decided to go ahead with this story anyway, even though I still wonder when Conrad celebrated his birthday.  Let’s take a look at a few documents.

Conrad was born in Hessen-Cassel, Germany.  When he was a boy, his family came to America and settled in Perry County, Missouri.  In a family binder we have in our museum which tells the story of Conrad’s brother, Tobias Scholl, we find this paragraph describing the arrival of the Scholl’s.

The first record we find for Conrad is his confirmation record from 1858.  Conrad is the last name at the bottom.  This record gives his birthday as June 10, 1845.  There is a note in this list about some confirmands being from Altenburg.  This was that time period when Rev. Schieferdecker was ousted from Trinity, and Rev. Beyer was installed at about the time when this class was confirmed.

Conrad died in 1906, which was before the time when Missouri death certificates began to be used.  However, we do have a death record for Conrad in the Immanuel, New Wells books.

Here is an enlarged portion of this record.  It shows Conrad as being born on June 9, 1845, and this would explain the date of birth on his gravestone.  I also think this may be where someone doing family research may have deciphered this birth date as January 9, 1845.

I found no document in our research library that indicated a January 9, 1845 birth date.  I do not know how that birth date came to be used so often on Ancestry, but I have this feeling that once it was used by one person, it was copied by many others.

The first census in which we find Conrad Scholl was the one taken in 1860.  According to his birth year, he should have been about 15 years old.  Here we find another head-scratcher.  First, here is a census entry for Brazeau Township showing a family that looks like Schulle, and they have a 15 year-old named Conrad.  The other siblings are names which correspond with Conrad’s brothers.  This document gives us his parents’ names as Conrad and Elizabeth.

However, here is another entry from the 1860 census.  I have to show two images of the entry from Jno. G. Darnstaedt and included in that household is another Conrad Schall who is a farm laborer at age 16.

Which one of these two Conrad’s was he?  Or was Conrad shown twice in the 1860 census?

In 1864, Conrad spent some time serving in the military during the Civil War.

Now we take a look at the early life of Conrad’s wife.  And here we find our spelling dilemma.  Her name was Anna Marie Kössl.  In our German Family Tree, we find Anne Marie’s surname as either Koessel or Koessl.  This seems to be a case of removing an umlaut and adding an “e” after the vowel.  The second “e” may just come from placing a vowel into the second syllable as you pronounce it.

Anna Marie Kössl was born on September 9, 1849, the daughter of Matthias and Maria (Haberfeldman) Kössl.  In the 1860 census for Shawnee Township, we find Anna Marie and her family.  She was 11 years old.  It indicates that she and her parents were born in Austria.

Not only do so many Ancestry family histories show a different birthday for Conrad, but almost all of them have Anna Marie’s maiden name changed to Kassel, which is a familiar name in our German Family Tree.  However, the Kassel family was from the Alsace-Lorraine area found on the border between Germany and France.  It is nowhere near Austria.  I think this Kössl family was totally disconnected from the Kassel’s.

Conrad Scholl married Anna Marie Kössl on April 29, 1869 at Immanuel, New Wells.  Here is the church record for that wedding.  This record shows Anna Marie’s maiden name spelled with just one “s”.

Our German Family Tree shows this family had 9 children.  I looked at the baptism records for several of these children just to see how Anna Marie’s maiden name was written.  Here are several images I found.

I have settled on using the Kössl spelling for this post.  We find Conrad and his family in the 1870, 1880, and 1900 census records.  First, here is the one taken in 1870.  They had their first child, Henry.

Next, we find a larger household in 1880.

Then we have to skip to 1900 to see the next census.  By then, several children had moved away.

I have already displayed the fact that Conrad died in 1906.  You have seen his death record and his gravestone in the Immanuel Lutheran Cemetery.  Anna Marie died a year later in 1907.  Here is her death record from her church’s books.

Anna Marie Scholl is also buried in the Immanuel Lutheran Cemetery in New Wells.

I know I have written a few Scholl stories in the past on this blog, but I think all of them have come out of the Tobias Scholl branch of the family.  The Kössl surname is a new one for me.  It’s also one that seems to have disappeared from this area.

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Some more concrete was poured today.  Here is a gallery of photos taken this morning at the job site.  The thumbnails are clickable.