Today’s post, along with the next two, are authored by Timm Yamnitz. Timm is a young man who was born and raised in Perry County but now resides in Germany. He is a resource that our museum has used on several occasions to translate German writings and find German records that we request. Timm volunteered to write a three-part post for our blog, and I eagerly accepted his offer. He has once again told an amazing story about some people who are found in our German Family Tree. I know that you will find it fascinating.

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The German language is somewhat famous for allowing the creation of ridiculously long words by slamming together several existing words to convey a single idea. My new 28-letter word, “Hauptidentitätsverschmelzung”, combines “haupt” (main/primary), “Identität” (identity), and “Verschmelzung” (merger/conflation), so it literally means “conflation of main identity”, but I’m also intending it to be a bit of wordplay about two men named Christian Haupt, whose shared name and successive roles as the husband of the same woman in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri means their identities often get conflated.

The first Christian Haupt in our tale was born 200 years ago today on 8 Sep 1825  in Sudheim, Kingdom of Hanover (Germany) and baptized on the 18th by the pastor of the local Lutheran Church as “Christian Friedrich Haupt”, second son of linen weaver Andreas Christian Haupt and his wife, Hanne Wilhelmine Elisabeth née Siebrecht.

Augusta Fluegge, the woman who would go on to marry not just one, but two men named Christian Haupt, was born 9 Jan 1832 in Elvese, Kingdom of Hanover and baptized on the 13th by the pastor of the Lutheran Church in nearby Hillerse as Hanne Auguste Wilhelmine Fluegge, daughter of Helene Hacke of Elvese and August Fluegge of Winsen an der Luhe. Since Augusta’s parents weren’t married and her father was from a village about 125 miles away (near Hamburg), her baptism record explains that her parents had encountered one another while her mother was working as a domestic servant in the city of Göttingen. Augusta’s father was probably studying at Göttingen University, which has one of the most esteemed law schools in Germany.

The map below of modern Germany includes an inset at left with a historic rendering of the area where Christian and Augusta were born. Sudheim, Elvese, and Hillerse are each roughly 1½ miles from one another.

Beginning in the 1830s, a steady stream of immigrants left the Sudheim area for Cape Girardeau County, where they even established a village named after the original Sudheim back in Germany. The Missouri village later became known as Kurreville, after the family name of its first postmaster.

Augusta and her first Christian Haupt joined that stream of immigrants in 1854. They departed Bremen aboard the Uhland on May 7th and arrived at New Orleans on June 30th after nearly eight weeks at sea. It appears 20 of the 390 passengers (slightly over 5%) died during the voyage. Although Augusta and Christian weren’t yet married, the passenger manifest listed her surname as “Haupt”. It also indicated that they were accompanied by another young woman from Sudheim who was headed to Missouri.

On 23 July 1854, less than a month after arriving in the US, Augusta’s new name became official when she and Christian were married at Hanover Lutheran Church, just outside of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The church marriage record corroborates their respective birth dates and birth places.

The record that Rev. Lehmann filed with the civil authorities might be a little easier for many of us to read, but it doesn’t include the same helpful information about their birth dates and birth places, noting only that they were “both from Germany”.

Their first child, Heinrich Wilhelm Haupt, was born 27 Mar 1855. His baptism was recorded at Trinity Lutheran Church in Friedheim, Missouri, which shared a pastor and a church register with the congregation at Sudheim (Kurreville). The “Sdh.” at the right margin indicates he was baptized at Sudheim as opposed to “Dss.” for Dissen (later called Friedheim).

Over the next several years, at least two more children were born to them, but for some reason, their baptisms weren’t recorded at Friedheim. Nevertheless, the growing Haupt family was enumerated in Whitewater Township for the 1860 US Census. Inexplicably, Christian was called “John” (a name that would appear again later) and Augusta was called “Christina”, although the children’s names/ages match the expected values.

Augusta must have been quite miserable in the summer heat when the census man came by asking questions on August 11th, because the Friedheim church register indicates she gave birth to another son just five days later. Like his eldest brother, he was baptized at the church in Sudheim (notice the “Sudh. in d. Kirche” annotation in the right margin).

A daughter, Wilhelmine, would be born about a year later. Then during the US Civil War, in September 1862, Christian committed to a three year enlistment in the 2nd Missouri Light Artillery Regiment. Once again, we see that he was born in “Sutheim, Hannover”. His German education was still very evident in the German script he used to sign his name on the enlistment contract about halfway down the right side of the page.

Like so many other brave young men who enlisted in the military, Christian fell ill and died of disease. Typhoid fever took his life on 1 Nov 1864 at the US Army Hospital in Little Rock, AR.

It’s interesting to see what was included on his death/discharge paperwork and in the inventory of his personal effects to be turned over to his widow. (click the thumbnail to view a larger image. If you would like to enlarge the image even more, you can save the image to your device and then enlarge it.).

Before we close for today, we can view Christian Haupt’s memorial stone at Little Rock National Cemetery, where his body was buried rather than being transported back to Missouri.

Tomorrow, we’ll continue with part two of this “Hauptidentitätsverschmelzung”, where we’ll examine Augusta’s second husband, who was also from Sudheim and also named Christian Haupt.