Major Surprise In Store for July 2003 Reunion Attendees! (Part 1)

[18 November 2002] by Frederick W. Vogler

This past June, our Foundation had the good fortune to receive an entirely unexpected message from Heather Crain, a young Vogler cousin of ours now living and studying in Florida, having been urged by her aunt Gwenda Williams (also a Vogler cousin) to take the initiative in getting in touch with us. How glad we are that she did, for what she has brought to our attention is a family tradition involving a treasured heirloom that will surely be of interest to every living descendant of Philip Christoph Vogler (1723-1790).

Just what that tradition is and how it is expressed in visible, tangible form will be revealed in a later announcement. For the time being, though, we will limit ourselves to suggesting how and approximately when that tradition came into being, as Heather herself presented it to us several months ago.

As it happens, Heather’s line of descent from Philip Christoph is through his fifth son George Michael (1759-1795), himself a late-18th-century silversmith and gunsmith of note in what is now Old Salem. In turn, George Michael had a son (thus PCV’s grandson) named Johann George, whose long life (1788-1865) seemed quite predictable until close to its end. Long after he had fathered a son, John Utzman Vogler (Heather’s great-great-great-grandfather, 1812-1856), by his first wife Christina Utzman, the by then twice-widowed Johann George Vogler was remarried to a much younger woman, Henrietta Love (1817-1905), by whom he had another son at the age of 68, James Long Vogler (1856-1908), and soon thereafter left North Carolina forever with his new family to resettle in Texas. That late-appearing son was to be the great-grandfather of our Foundation’s own Edward Young Cooper, now living in San Antonio, TX, and an active contributor to several recent major Vogler family history research projects, as was his mother Hattie Belle Vogler Cooper before him.

But that special long family tradition mentioned earlier happens to have been restricted to Heather’s line through John Utzman Vogler, spanning a period of at least six generations including his own near the outset of the 19th Century. For, as Heather has informed us, a certain unusual object has been passed down in that line as a precious legacy from generation to generation during that time until it has now reached her — and us.

(TO BE CONTINUED…)