Welcome to the Koppelmania, the Koppelman Family History blog. This blog is a way to post news about the families in our Koppelman family tree, and about developments in research into our family history.
If you can trace your roots back to Lutheran Gardenville and Raspeburg, two small northeast Baltimore communites of truck farmers radiating north and south from Belair Road between Erdman Avenue and Raspe Avenue, please visit Lutheran Gardenville.
Clarence C. Boyle, Sr., long-time proprietor of Boyle Buick in Abingdon, Maryland, died on March 27, 2012.
A World War II veteran, avid pilot and talented baseball player who was scouted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mr. Boyle was well-known and widely esteemed in Harford County.
After working his way up from salesman to general manager of Lee Buick in Perryman, he purchased the franchise in 1968 and later moved the business to Abingdon, where the Boyle Buick GMC dealership continues to thrive.
He married Irene Kahoe, daughter of farmer Stephen Michael Kahoe, in 1948. ” ‘We courted in his plane,’ said his wife of 64 years . . . ‘He had a two-seater Stearman and he did stunt flying all over Harford County’ “(Baltimore Sun 2 April 2012).
The Boyle family became linked to the Koppelmans through the marriage of Lillian Betz Lynch’s son Donald Lynch Jr. to Clarence and Irene Boyle’s daughter Mary Sue.
The large Boyle clan has deep roots in Harford County. Their earliest identified paternal ancestor, Andrew Boyle (1823-1902), was farming in the Pylesville area by 1850.
Detail from Martenet’s 1878 map of Harford County, near Pennsylvania border, northeast of Pylesville. Andrew Boyle’s farm is roughly at center; the stream is Deep Run. The current Old Boyle Road may mark the environs of Andrew Boyle’s farm (Library of Congress Map Division).
Andrew Boyle was elected as Harford County’s representative to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1876.
He is buried at Tabernacle Cemetery, Hydes, Harford County, Maryland.
Clarence C. Boyle Sr. is buried at St. Ignatius Catholic Church, Hickory, Harford County.
Watch a 2010 interview with Clarence and Irene Boyle, archived at the Harford County Library.
Read a Baltimore Sun story about the family business, Boyle Buick GMC.
Thanks to Thom Painter for his painstaking documentation of the graves in Tabernacle Cemetery, and to the Harford County Library.
When my distant Soeder cousin Susan and I researched our immigrant Soeder ancestors, we found a mystery.
Bernhard “Barney” Söder, a miner born in Solingen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and his wife Maria, brought five children to Baltimore in 1853 aboard the ship Aeolus: Georg (1841-1927), Ludwig, Magdalena (1843-1922), Maria Phillipine (b. abt. 1846), and Dorothea Söder (b. abt. 1851).
Detail from the 1853 passenger list of the “Aeolus,” Bremen to Baltimore. The origin of Bernhard, Maria and eldest child Magdalena is given as Solingen.
Their destination on the ship’s passenger list is given as Ohio, but instead, most of them stayed in Baltimore.
Bernhard and Maria tried farming with their son Georg near Randallstown, but gave it up. They remained laborers.
Magdalena married a thriving Mount Winans blacksmith, Frederick H. Bealefeld, Sr. She opened a saloon/restaurant and amassed substantial property. Bealefeld’s blacksmith shop was on Mt. Washington Boulevard southwest of the city.
A number of Frederick Bealefeld’s descendants served in the Baltimore Police Department, including Frederick H. Bealefeld, III, until recently, Baltimore’s Police Commissioner.
Portrait of Magdalena Soeder Bealefeld, taken at the Russell Studio, Baltimore, Md. (courtesy of Susan Rozar)
Maria Phillipine married John Frackmann or Freckmann, also a blacksmith. Like Magdalena, Maria ran a restaurant, but on East Madison Street in the city of Baltimore proper.
Dora married a George F. Jackson and moved to New York.
But what happened to Ludwig, or Louis, Söder?
Years passed without locating him. But in 2011, we returned to a lead we’d previously passed over: A Louis Sader (1841-1973) buried in Minneiska, Wabasha County, Minnesota, turned up on findagrave.com, now with an excerpt from a biographical sketch and a drawing of “Mr. and Mrs. Louis Sader.”
Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Sader from History of Wabasha County, Minnesota (Winona, Minn: H.C. Cooper, Jr., & Co., 1920), courtesy of Kathryn Hill.
Two Wabasha County local historians, Tom Mauer and Kathryn Hill, had posted the memorial online in the course of their work documenting cemeteries and citizens.
Sader family plot marker, St. Mary’s Cemetery, Minneiska, Wasbasha County, Minnesota (photographed by Tom Mauer)
We excitedly contacted them, and Ms. Hill kindly provided the rest of the sketch. Thanks to Minnesota’s excellent digital resources, we were quickly able to acquire his death certificate and an obituary from the Minnesota State Historical Society.
Grave of Louis Sader, St. Mary’s Cemetery, Minneiska, Wabasha Co., Minnesota (photographed by Tom Mauer)
The 1920 biographical sketch confirmed that Louis Sader originally spelled his last name “Soeder,” his parents were Barney and Maria, and that he had come from Baltimore.
According to his biographical sketch, 18-yr-old Louis Soder ran off to join the 1st Maryland Regiment of the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. Later he became a teamster for the army until the end of the war.
“Then, having made up his mind to seek his fortune in the northwest, he came to Wabasha County, Minn., and took a homestead of 160 acres in Watopa Township.”
After hardship and privation, Louis Sader eventually succeeded as a farmer, married Angeline Cuvener, and had six children: Barney, John, Elizabeth (Sader) Doyle, Margaret (Sader) Kramer, Gerharth, and Eva (Sader) Day.
One thing in his biography is puzzling. We know from the passenger list of the Aeolus that the Söders, including 10-year-old Ludwig, journeyed to America in 1853. Yet in his biography, Louis claimed that he and his parents had been born in Pennsylvania. The 1870 census records his place of birth as Maryland.
Is it possible that he did not remember? Could a 10-year-old boy forget the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic? If not, then why did he obscure his German immigrant origin? Susan continues to investigate.
The Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church confirmation class of 1931 gathers at Reissert's Studio.
Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church‘s confirmation class of 1931 sat for a portrait at Reissert’s Studio, 321 N. Gay Street, Baltimore, to memorialize the Easter Sunday affirmation of their faith and full membership in the community of the church.
The serious expressions of these 13-year-old children reflect the solemnity of the sacrament of first communion. They had completed months of study with the pastor in order to understand the meaning of what they were undertaking. They had stood in front of the whole congregation in suits and ties, heels and hose, and affirmed their Christian faith by reciting, with the congregation, the Apostles’ Creed.
Their group portrait was meant to help them remember the day they had moved from child to adult in the church. The studio where they gathered, with its conventional painted background and faux marble floor, was owned and operated by Max J. Reissert (b. abt. 1867), like many of his customers, a German immigrant.
Memory fades; we know only a few of the names. Pastor Paul C. Burgdorf (1884-1948) presides; immediately to his right is his daughter, Beatrice Burgdorf. Beside Beatrice is Mary Boyer (b. abt. 1918, Md); third from the right is Julia Koppelman.
Extreme left, first row is Doris Weger. Leonard Malwitz (1917-2011) stands in the second row, second from the left.
Those are the only boys and girls we can identify. If you recognize someone, let me know.
The area around their church, located at Belair Road and Moravia Avenue in northeast Baltimore, consisted of newly-built working class neighborhoods that still had a scattering of small truck farms and dairies. The church mainly served the descendants of the many German immigrants who had come to grow vegetables and fruit outside Baltimore in the 19th century.
Mary Boyer’s father was an apparel salesman. The Boyers lived at 3508 Belair Avenue (aka Belair Road), less than a mile to the southwest of the church, on the other side of lovely Herring Run Park, one of Baltimore’s many strip parks created around the numerous streams that tumble to the Chesapeake Bay.
Doris Weger (b. abt. 1918, Md.) lived on Kenwood Avenue; her father, Harry Weger, was foreman in a upholstery shop. The Malwitz boys, Leonard and Earl, lived around the corner from the church, on St. Thomas Avenue; their father Edward, a recent German immigrant like Reissert, worked as a lithographer. Earl became part of the Schwarz-Koppelman clan when he married Gloria Jean Schwarz (1924-1998).
In those days, the modest two-story, two-bay brick row homes in the streets around the 1875 church buildings were new and clean. Many were built by the E.J. Gallagher Realty Company, and are marked by his distinctive innovations: deep porches, small lawns and fieldstone accents instead of marble, and basements (Holcomb, The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore Since 1660, p. 185 ff).
Clutching their confirmation certificates, every white-clad girl, ankles demurely crossed, sports the fashionable “bob” haircut that swept the nation after World War I. The perfect waves were achieved using the curling iron invented by Marcel in 1872.
The neighborhood has changed; hard times haunt the houses there now. Hair styles have changed many times since those days when the “bob” was a symbol of modernity. Some of the boys and girls lost their faith with adulthood; some deepened their commitment. But the park is still green, the church founded in 1842 endures, and Herring Run still burbles toward the bay.
Note: If you would like to know more about how Baltimoreans are working to preserve the area’s many streams, or “runs,” visit Blue Water Baltimore. To learn more about the Lutheran Church and its beliefs, visit The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Eric L. Holcomb’s The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore Since 1660 was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2005.
Mingled excitement and dismay. Charlie Herr, an intrepid and generous findagrave.com volunteer in Baltimore got in touch to let me know he had found and posted photographs of many Raab graves in the cemetery of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, in Fullerton.
Among those he found and photographed are the graves of the immigrant Raab ancestors: Barbara (Lehuetz) Raab (1832-1913) and Bengratz (aka Pankreuz or Pankratz) Raab.
Then I saw the pictures. Bengratz Raab’s marker has disintegrated into at least three pieces, and is riddled with cracks.
To see about repairing his marker, I contacted the church’s cemetery director. I wanted to make sure that Raymond Merkle Memorials would be an acceptable choice to make the repairs. She agreed, and I await an estimate.
Bengratz, Barbara, and son Bengratz, are listed on an 1860 passenger manifest for the ship Columbia, bound from Bremen to Baltimore, as Pankranz, laborer, Barbara and son Pankranz Raabe. Son Pankranz eventually anglicized his given name to to Bengratz and then to Benjamin.
The Raabs were fruitful and multiplied into a large clan, many of whom remain in Maryland and nearby states.
The Koppelmans are doubly related to the Raabs: First, through the marriage of Anna Mina Koppelman (1888-1980), daughter of Gardenville truck farmer John Harman Koppelman and Anna Schaub, to George P. Raab (1891-1953), son of Peter Raab and Emilie Brockmeyer; and second, through the marriage of Charles Dietrich Koppelman (1897-1983), son of John Harman’s brother Henry Koppelman, to Goldie Raab (1897-1976), daughter of Peter Raab’s brother John Andrew Raab and Alberta Barbara Harpel. Simple, right?
Rev. David H. Manrodt, Ph.D., passed away on 10 August 2010. He was 88 years old. According to his obituary in the Baltimore Sun, Manrodt served Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church for 38 years, from 1948 to 1986.
Rev. Manrodt, a third-generation Lutheran minister, came to Baltimore from New York City in 1931 when his father was called to the pulpit of Friedens Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Born in New York, he was the son of Rev. Manfred Manrodt (1893-1974) and Martha (Mueller) Manrodt. David graduated from Baltimore City College in 1938, and went to work for the Glenn L. Martin in Middle River; later he worked for the Johns Manville Company.
According to the 2011 Baltimore City College Alumni newsletter, after graduating from BCC, Rev. Manrodt worked to earn the money to attend Loyola College, then studied theology at Lancaster and at the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg.
Two sons, John and Paul, followed in his footsteps to become Lutheran ministers: Rev. John Manrodt serves in Minneapolis; Rev. Paul Manrodt in Wernersville, Pa.
David Manrodt’s wife, Miriam (Miller) Manrodt, died in 2008. They are buried in Parkwood Cemetery, Parkville, Md.
This year marks Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church’s 169th anniversary. In honor of the church’s birthday, the congregation will hold a Homecoming Day on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011.
In addition to the dedication of the church’s renovated bell tower, the church, led by Pastor Arwyn Gohl, will welcome descendants of one of JELC’s most beloved and longest-serving pastors, the Rev. Paul E. C. Burgdorf (1884-1948).
On 2 November, 1898, the Baltimore SUN reported that Private Henry Albert Koppelman, stationed at Camp Meade, in Middletown, Pennsylania, had been sent to the First Division Hospital.
Henry Koppelman died on 19 November, just over two weeks later.
If his illness followed the usual course of the disease, he endured high fever, delirium, diarrhea, drastic dehydration, and possibly septicemia before death released him from suffering.
His illness was, most likely, contracted from water or food contaminated by feces, but the cause of typhoid was not completely understood at the time. Little thought was given to sanitation at hastily-built mustering points such as Camp Meade. Even hospital orderlies, ill-trained recruits from the ranks, exacerbated the epidemic in the camps through careless hygiene in the division hospitals.
It was the volunteers and their home visitors who brought typhoid to the armed forces, according to the Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American War; 86.8 % of all deaths by disease during the war were caused by typhoid (656).
Eventually, widespread introduction of hydration therapy saved the lives of the many sufferers who contracted the disease. An effective vaccine was not developed and put into use for another decade. (Read the University of Virginia’s excellent essay “Walter Reed and Typhoid Fever, 1897-1911.”
The crisis and its eventual resolution were precipitated by the creation of large new camps in preparation for war in Cuba and the Phillipines.
In April 1898, the federal government put out the call for 100,000 volunteers in case of war with Spain. Maryland’s quota was about 1,500 men. By May, the Fifth Maryland Infantry, made up of Maryland National guardsmen and volunteers, received orders to move south in preparation for an invasion of Cuba; the First was to remain behind until needed.
Private Koppelman was hospitalized just as his regiment began preparing to move south to be ready for embarkation if needed. By then, 50 to 100 soldiers a day were ill enough to be transported from Camp Meade to hospitals in Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Henry had enlisted, over the objections of his family, with his friend Walter Hedeman. Henry died at the German Hospital in Philadelphia without ever having seen service. His body was returned to the family farm for burial and the service was held on 21 November, a little over a month after his 21st birthday.
Henry’s grave is now in the Koppelman plot at Baltimore Cemetery, along with those of his parents, grandparents and siblings.
