Johann Stueve has actually been one of the main characters in two previous posts. One of Johann’s three wedding anniversaries led me to this story once again today. Even though his story has been told before, some new information has been found, so I decided to revisit his story again today. I also wanted to write this post because Johann Stueve is the great grandfather of Kathy Berkbigler, who is responsible for http://zionrootsgenealogy.org, an online database of family histories of people with Perry County roots. I think I may have found a few documents that may interest her (if she hasn’t found them already).

First of all, back in the first year of this blog, 2016, I wrote my first post about Johann Stueve. That article was titled, Bringing Back a Bride. That story was a whopping 165 words long. I checked our stats. This year, our average number of words per post is 950 words. I guess you can say I’ve gotten “wordier” over the years. In that post, it was implied that Johann had come to America and settled in Perry County, and then, at a later time, went back to the Hanover area of Germany to bring back his first wife, Rebecca von Glahn. He returned to America aboard the ship, Carl, that also carried many other passengers that settled in Perry County. Coming with Johann Stueve were his future bride, her sister, Margaretha von Glahn, and Johann’s mother, Adelheid.

To back up the claim that Johann Stueve was living in Perry County before he went back to Hanover to bring home a bride and his mother, we can find a John Stueve in the 1860 census living in the John Smith household. This would have been the household of Johann Schmidt, who had married Rosina Noennig.

The ship, Carl, arrived on October 22nd in 1866. Then a little over a month later, on December 6, 1866, Johann Stueve married Rebecca von Glahn. A civil marriage record for this wedding is displayed below. Toward the bottom of this document, you will see that Rev. J.F. Koestering recorded this marriage. However, Rev. Koestering’s church records for marriages during that time period are not to be found for either Concordia Lutheran Church in Frohna or Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg, the two churches that Rev. Koestering served.

I want to let you in on a little research trick that I recently discovered. I think I should give Fred Eggers credit for this. I kept wondering how Fred was able to find marriage records that I could not on Ancestry.com. First, let me say that we have books that contain indexes to Perry County marriages, so we often have information about the dates of marriages that took place in this county. However, finding images of those documents on Ancestry.com is not that easy. Often, these documents, like the one above, are very difficult to read, and Ancestry.com often transcribes the names in such a way that they don’t even come close to being correct. If you attempt to find the above document by placing the names, Johann Stueve and Rebecca Glahn into Ancestry’s marriage search, you will not find the above record. I got to thinking about how Fred Eggers was able to find such records when I couldn’t. I think I now know how he does it. I discovered that if I simply place the date of the marriage and the location (in this case, Perry County, Missouri) into the search boxes, Ancestry.com will provide a list of marriages that took place on that date. I have used this technique a few time now with success. This time, the Stueve/von Glahn marriage was not on the list. I clicked on another marriage that took place on that date in Perry County. After paging back a few pages and then forward a few pages, I was able to find the above record. If you are a researcher using Ancestry.com and get frustrated when you cannot find such a marriage record, you could try this strategy.

Rebecca gave birth to two children, but then she died not long after the 2nd child was born in 1869. She was buried in the Concordia Lutheran Cemetery in Frohna. I don’t think I have displayed her gravestone before, so I will now. Rebecca is spelled with two “k’s” on her gravestone.

Next, Johann Stueve married Maria Luehrs. In this case, we do not even have an exact date for this marriage, plus it took place during the Koestering Hole, so I cannot display a document for this wedding. The index for Perry County marriages does not include this marriage. Perhaps Fred Eggers can perform his magic and find it. We do know that Johann must have married Maria before they took the 1870 census. She is found in that enumeration in the image below.

Four more children were born to this couple. We find the Stueve’s in the 1876 Missouri state census living in the Brazeau Township. Apparently, none of the 4 children born to this couple survived until this census, because the two children shown are the ones born to Johann’s first wife.

That leads us to the marriage that took place on this date. Johann Stueve married another Maria. Maria Wichern was the daughter of Friedrich and Engel (Volckmer) Wichern. This Wichern family was relatively newly-arrived when Maria and Johann were married on June 26, 1879. The Wichern’s had arrived in Baltimore in 1878 aboard the ship, Leipzig. Their names are on the passenger list below. Maria’s mother had died before the family came to this country.

I had to use the previously described strategy locate a marriage record for this couple on Ancestry.com. It is shown here.

This couple has 7 children listed in our German Family Tree. Kathy Berkbigler descends from the very last one born in 1893. In a previous post about that last child, much additional information was given about the life of Johann Stueve and his 3 wives. That post was titled, Polish (or Palisch) Off the Stueves.

I want to close by describing another new valuable resource at our fingertips. A church death record for Johann Stueve mentions that he died in 1897 as a result of an accidental gunshot when he was cleaning his gun. Now that there are some archives of old newspaper articles available through the Missouri Secretary of State’s website, I decided to look for a story that was written about that unusual death. I found one that was printed in the Perry County Republican on November 18, 1897. An image of that story is shown below.

I found a photograph of a Flobert gun on Wikipedia. I am supposed to attribute the person’s name who took the photo, but I was not able to find that person’s name on that website.

If you are interested in the archives that are now available for Missouri newspapers, it can be found at the link below.

https://shsmo.org/collections/newspapers/mdnp

I am glad this post gave me the opportunity to share a new research strategy and a relatively new source of information with our readers.

By the way, if you haven’t looked at Kathy Berkbigler’s site lately, it has undergone some improvements and has a slightly different look to it.