It is going to be a difficult week for me to research and write for this blog. There are two main reasons. First, our museum is hosting three different school groups this week. One of my volunteer responsibilities is to help tell the immigration story to larger groups that visit our museum. Secondly, my laptop has developed a cracked lid, and I have decided that its time to get a new one. It should arrive tomorrow, but it will take a lot of time to get my old laptop’s data onto a new machine. There may just be days this week on which the blog goes without a post. I figure it is not the end of the world.
Today, I am still able to work carefully on my damaged laptop, but I also have a tour to lead. So, I have chosen to re-publish an old post. I chose the attached post because I discovered that one of the main characters in it would be celebrating a bicentennial birthday today. Plus, as I read this post again, it looked as if the main attention was on the husband in the story. Today’s birthday girl was the wife who spent most of the post in the background. I will focus on her today and supply some more documents that were not in the original post.
Justina Goehring was born on November 2, 1826 in Ronneburg, Germany. An image of Justina’s German baptism record can be found on Family Search, and I am displaying it below. It definitely confirms that she would be celebrating her bicentennial birthday today.
As reported in the previous post, Justina came to America when she was quite young with her widowed mother and two older brothers. Back in 2018 when the original post was written, I did not often include census entries. There were none to be found in that post. I will display the census entries for Justina today. First, even though we do not see Justina’s name, we find her mother, Rosina Goehring, listed in the 1840 census living in Perry County. Justina would be one of the tally marks in this entry.
Justina Goehring married George Kluegel in 1845. In the previous post, I displayed the church marriage record and one civil marriage record for that event. Today, I will show a better image for that civil record that is found on Family Search, and another civil record that was not displayed. First, here is a better image of the one shown in the 2018 post.
Here is the additional marriage record. You can see on both of these civil records that it was Rev. Gotthold Heinrich Loeber who officiated at the wedding.
Justina, along with George, are found in the 1850 census with 3 children born after these two got married. You can see that George was considerably older than Justina. Also living in the household was Justina’s mother, Rosina.
The 1860 census shows Justina as head of the Kluegel household. Her husband, George, had died in 1853. Justina is called a farmer, and her mother is still living with them.
The Kluegel’s are next found in the 1870 census. Justina’s mother had died in 1860, so she is no longer found in this entry. Her sons were doing the farming.
The last census in which we find Justina is the one taken in 1880. Just 2 single children were still living with her.
In the previous post, which called George Kluegel the “Piano Man”, it mentioned that the Kluegel’s were the owners of a valuable piano that was mentioned in George’s will. That piano used to be on display inside the Log Cabin College. Here is a photo of that piano. The museum still has that instrument, but it is not in good condition and is stored in our basement.
Justina Kluegel died in 1899 at the age of 72. Her husband’s gravestone was pictured in the previous post, but not Justina’s. Below is the gravestone photo for Justina which is found on Findagrave.com. Like her husband, Justina is buried in the Trinity Lutheran Cemetery in Altenburg.
We wish today’s birthday girl, Justina Kluegel, “Mrs. Piano Man”, a Happy 200th Birthday.