Kaub Family

[DBCoup]

Can anyone please advise me as to how I can locate the birthplace of Christian Kaub. Christian and his wife Barbara were in Pennsylvania by 1745. Their eldest son Johann Valentine Kaub was born about 1742. It is not known whether he was born in "Germany" or Pennsylvania. Baptisms in Pennsylvania were at Lutheran Reformed or Evangelical church. All I know for sure is Christian was from a German speaking area of Europe. Christian Kaub was probably born 1700-1720 but this is a guess.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Replies do not need to be in English.
Thanks
daryl

[Gastonian]

Hi Daryl:


Sorry to have to say so, but without more specific information from Pennsylvania, this is going to be essentially impossible. Keep in mind that German-speaking Europe in the early 18th century contained about 20 million people. Even if half of them were Catholics or Jews, that still leaves you around 10 million Protestant Germans. In the 1740s Pennsylvania, by contrast, had only on the order of 100,000 people.


Moreover, the conditions for finding someone in Germany at this time (without already knowing a specific locality) are even worse than for finding someone in Pennsylvania. Many of the baptismal records in Pennsylvania have been lost, but you do have extensive sets of tax lists and the state censuses that have been indexed by ancestry.com, as well as lengthy lists of marriage records, state property records (warrants and patents), probates, military records, etc., that have been published and indexed in the Pennsylvania Archives series.


For Germany, the parish books (registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials) are your primary source for genealogy (there are also land records, tax lists, probate records, etc., but these are all essentially undigitised, unindexed, and of no use to you unless you already know what village you are looking at and willing to dig around in the local archives for that village). There are essentially four places that are making German parish books available: (1) and (2) both ancestry.com (pay site) and familysearch.org (free) have copies of parish books microfilmed by the Nazis in the 1930s/40s or by the Mormons from the 1940s to the 1960s; these records have generally been indexed, but they cover only a small fraction of all churchbooks. (3) archion.de (a service of the Protestant Church of Germany) is digitising Protestant parish books and putting them online (albeit behind a paywall); this already covers lots of parish books not on ancestry.com or familysearch.org, but archion.de is not indexing the entries (so you cannot do a digital search for a name like in ancestry.com or familysearch.org, but need to already know what parish book to scroll through to find your ancestor - and also need to be able to decipher the old script). (4) Catholic parish books are similarly being digitized and put online at data.matricula-online.eu (which is a free site). What this means is that, if you haven't found your Christian Kaub on ancestry.com or familysearch.org, you won't find him elsewhere without already knowing in what parish to look.


There is one site, gedbas.de, that is putting German family trees online (without much documentation). But it has fairly low coverage.


Even if you find a record in Germany on ancestry.com or familysearch.org for a Christian Kaub around this time, how will you know that it is *your* Christian Kaub? Given that the Protestant population of Germany was about 100 times larger than that of Pennsylvania, it is likely that there were multiple Christian Kaubs in Germany, probably even Christian Kaubs with wives named Barbara.


This is also a problem with those seeking the English origins of Puritan migrants to New England. Essentially, you cannot establish that a John Smith from a particular village in England is your Puritan immigrant John Smith unless that John Smith was accompanied by a wife and multiple children born in England, and the order and ages of children in American records matches the order and dates of the baptismal records in the English village (or else you have an English-born child with an exact birthdate in American records, and that birthdate exactly matches the date in the baptismal record over there - but you generally find exact birthdates only in 19th-century or later records). The other strategy is to look for associates - was your Puritan ancestor part of a religious group with a minister who can be identified as a minister in England with some of the same names in his flock back there? Or are there records of in-laws in America that can also be identified as in-laws in England?


In the English case, the situation is easier in the sense that the English have done a quite good job of indexing all of their existing parish records, and thus you can actually find all of the John Smiths in England you need to check as to whether they might have been *your* John Smith. That is not the case in Germany, so here the task is even more difficult.


One strategy that has had some success with German immigrants to Pennsylvania (as well as to other American colonies) is to look at the shipping lists - determine which ship they came in on from Rotterdam, and then have an experienced professional historian look at the records in Rotterdam to see from which German towns brokers had been transporting immigrants down the Rhine River at that precise moment (for German immigrants to Pennsylvania at this time, what usually happened is that recruiters or brokers would scour the poor villages in what is now southwestern Germany and adjoining areas of France and Switzerland, and when they had enough people willing to pay for passage across the sea, would arrange a boat to take them down the Rhine River to Rotterdam). But for this you need to actually find the immigration record for your Christian Kaub.


--Carl-Henry

[Gastonian]

Hi Daryl:


By the way, I note that there is a record in the Pennsylvania shipping lists for a Christian Caup, age 24, who arrived in Philadelphia 12 October 1738 on the ship Snow Fox from Rotterdam (https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer...232?pId=320109). The whole set of passengers on this ship were classed as Palatines, so if this was indeed your Christian Kaub, then you can at least narrow down the search to the area along the upper Rhine River (which is where most other Pennsylvania Germans of this time also came from).


--Carl-Henry

[DBCoup]

Kia ora Carl-Henry
Many thanks for your full and frank answer. It would seem that my efforts should be directed toward finding the ship that Christian Kaub arrived on.
My ancestors used "Kaub" for the first generation in Pennsylvania before they succumbed to the inevitable anglicising of the name (Kaub-Kaup-Koup-Coup). My 3xgreat grandfather, Frederick (Friedrich), the son of Valentine, and grandson of Christian, signed his name to his will in 1854 as "Kaub" - the will is indexed in the records in Ohio as "Koup".
The record-keepers in America were not above taking shortcuts so I am of the opinion that describing a shipload of immigrants as "Palatines" does not necessarily mean that they were *all* Palatines, although the majority may have been.
As for Christian who arrived on the Snow Fox, I do not believe he is my Christian Kaub, although many researchers do. The Snow Fox Christian signed his name "Christian Kaupp" and I cannot see that he would then change it to "Kaub".
I take note of your caution that finding *a* Christian Kaub in german records does not necessarily mean that he is *my* Christian Kaub. There is uncertainty as to whether Valentine was born in "Germany" or in Pennsylvania, so I cling to the hope that it was in "Germany" so I have that to differentiate between potential Christian Kaubs.
Thanks again for your most informative answer
Daryl

[Pat10]

Hi,


familysearch has a family tree of the Kaup / Kaupp family. Registering with familysearch is free. I can`t find Christian Kaup's birth entry in 1714 in the church book of Oberiflingen. The births of his sisters Anna Maria * 1711 and Anna Barbara * 1714 already.

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/pedigree/landscape/L6MX-Q9S

Pat

[DBCoup]

Thanks for this Pat. Unfortunately the information in the tree is so full of errors I cannot have any confidence in its accuracy of earlier generations, but I will make notes.
Thanks again
daryl

[gki]

Hi Daryl!

The Snow Fox Christian signed his name "Christian Kaupp" and I cannot see that he would then change it to "Kaub".

Kaupp and Kaub are almost indistinguishable when spoken, IMO, so I would not dismiss this possibility that the two are identical.
There were no rules on how to write names (or anything else) at the time. I've seen marriage entries with the surnames of father and son spelled differently.

[sternap]

The record-keepers in America were not above taking shortcuts so I am of the opinion that describing a shipload of immigrants as "Palatines" does not necessarily mean that they were *all* Palatines, although the majority may have been.

palatine=ein feudalherr oder pfalzgraf.
pfalz=der moderne name fuer die pfalz. der name leitet sich vom roemischen wort palatin (fuer einen berg, einen huegel) ab.

ich denke, es ist vielleicht ein schiff mit menschen aus der pfalz gewesen.
man hat das faelschlich als pfalzgraf uebersetzt.

[Gastonian]

Hallo Sternap:


Leider nimmt das Englische es nicht so genau. Hier (besonders in der amerikanischen Ahnenforschung) wird "Palatine" generell für "aus der Pfalz stammend" benutzt. Siehe z.B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Palatines oder https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Projec...tine_Migration. Im oben angeführten englischen Satz ist also korrekt davon die Rede, daß die Behörde alle Immigranten auf dem Snow Fox als Pfälzer (Palatines) bezeichnet haben.


VG


--Carl-Henry