[05 December 2003] by Frederick W. Vogler

Once again, it is our pleasure to report that contact has been made with German relatives of ours, these being direct descendants of ancestors who never left Germany to emigrate to North America, unlike Philipp Christoph Vogler and his father Hans Georg Vogler. Thanks to having unexpectedly come upon our Foundation website on the Internet (www.voglerfoundation.org), Andreas Bischoff has recently written us from his home in Berlin to inform us that his wife Sabine Dietz Bischoff is a ninth-generation descendant of Rudolf Vogler through his son Hans Georg’s older sister (Philipp Christoph’s aunt) Anna Barbara Vogler Kuehne (1696-1761), therefore our own cousin many times removed. It was our Swiss-born ancestor Rudolf (1657-1735) who had left Oberhasli (Zurich) a few years earlier to migrate to what is now Southwestern Germany (Gondelsheim / Baden), where he would marry Anna Maria Strauss and start a family of his own.

In the exchange of messages following Andreas Bischoff’s initial self-introduction, we learned of Anna Barbara’s death date in 1761 as well as that of her Swiss-born husband Johann Georg Kuehne in 1766, both occurring in Philipp Christoph’s hometown of Gondelsheim where the pair had met and married in 1715. After living in Gondelsheim for several generations, Sabine Bischoff’s later Vogler ancestors would move first to Heidelberg some 25 miles to the north, then years later to far-off Berlin, where her husband Andreas and she now live with their three young children. In return, we were able to inform them of the unusual circumstances of Anna Barbara’s baptism, delayed for nearly a month after her 1696 birth because Louis XIV’s French soldiers then occupying Gondelsheim would not permit a Protestant rite like public baptism to be performed in that town, even though baptism was usually carried out within a day or so of an infant’s birth at that time. Luckily for the Voglers, a few miles away in the nearby French-free town of Bretten an available Protestant clergyman (although Reformed rather than Lutheran like themselves) was finally located and agreed to perform the service there, as recorded in both the Gondelsheim and Bretten church registers.

We were also able to answer Andreas’ inquiry about Philipp Christoph’s younger sister Maria Catharina (b. 1724). Although our Virginia cousin Suzanne Hiller Bullock is her direct descendant, it was not until shortly before World War II that Suzanne’s own grandparents left the Gondelsheim area to emigrate to the United States – further evidence that Hans Georg and Philipp Christoph left all the rest of their family behind when the two of them left for North America and Maine in 1742.

Our warmest family welcome to the Bischoffs – Andreas, Sabine, Linus, Julius, and Victoria – herzlichste Gruesse aus Amerika!