Kempen family update - Our German cousins (Fanning side)

Thanks to some networking on Ancestry.com I was contacted by a man named Bernhard Kempen who currently resides in Berlin, Germany. He has been working on the Kempen family history dating back to 1678. He is my 4th cousin twice removed.

Below is some information on our branch of the family that he has furnished to me...

Gerd Kempen (1839-)

Gerd Kempen was born August 12, 1839 in Loga, at that time a small town next to the city of Leer in Ostfriesland (East Frisia) and nowadays a borough of Leer. Obviously he was baptised unter the name „Geert“, but in later records he appears only as Gerd, which is the more common German form of this name. He was the first child of Folkert Gerdes Kampen (1811-1880) and Hinrika Boekholt (1812-1877), married May 22, 1838 in Leer. His father worked as a cartwright in Loga in 1863, and later in a factory, probably somewhere in Leer.

Gerd was one of nine children born to Folkert and Hinrika. Here’s the complete list:

Gerd Kempen * August 12, 1839 in Loga oo Wendelina Niemeyer (1841-)

Geertjelina Hermina * November 11, 1840 in Loga, † February 13, 1851 in Loga

Hermann * October 21, 1842 in Loga

Volkmar * February 15, 1844 in Loga

Frauke * October 14, 1845 in Loga

Hinrika Talea * October 24, 1847 in Loga

Onno Johann Gebhard * January 2, 1850 in Loga

Gerdjelina Agtemina Kämpen * March 29, 1851 in Loga oo Carl Ludwig Böse (-)

Grietje * February 18, 1853 in Loga

Gerd’s sister Geertjelina Hermina died young, at the age of six. The second youngest child Gerdjelina Agtemina Kämpen married Carl Ludwig Böse from Straßburg in France, a hofmeister, which is a private tutor, probably at the court of the von Wedel counts, who resided at the two castles in Loga. Gerdjelina and Carl were married April 28, 1878 in Logabirum, a neighbour town of Loga. No children are listed in the church records of the area. And so far there is no trace of Gerds other six siblings. Maybe some of them died at a young age, which was quite common at that time, or they went to other places.

Gerd was married to Wendelina Niemeyer on December 6, 1863 in Detern. The Niemeyers are a family from Altenoythe in the southwest part of the Duchy of Oldenburg. Later they spread to the western parts of Oldenburg and to Ostfriesland.

Gerd and his wife moved to Augustfehn, a new town founded in 1850, in the west of Oldenburg, not far from the East Frisian border. All the „-fehn“ towns in Northwestern Germany were started as projects to colonise the raised bogs of that area, formerly considered waste lands. The first settlers dug a canal into the bog to drain the land, then houses were built along the streets at both sides of the usually dead straight canal, finally the peat was exploited and shipped to factories, at a time, when coal was still too expensive in regions far away from the coal mines of the Ruhr area. In 1856 the Eisenhütte was built next to the Augustfehn canal, a factory for processing bog iron found under the peat. Here Gerd Kempen worked as a molder specialising in sand casting. In 1863 he is mentioned as „Sandformer“, in 1864 also as „Heuermann“, which means that he rented a house with a plot of land. In the years 1867 to 1872 he lived as factory worker in Bokel, nowadays called Vreschen-Bokel, a village next to Augustfehn. His last three children were born in Augustfehn between 1875 to 1880. It’s not clear whether the family actually moved, because in the course of time Augustfehn expanded over parts of the neighbouring villages. It’s also possible that Gerd later worked at the Augustfehn Stahlwerk, a steelmill founded in 1872.

Gerd and Wendelina had seven children:

Folkert Georg Kempen * August 29, 1864 in Bokel oo Emma Helene Margarethe Kühne (1866-)

Bernhard Hermann Kempen * December 4, 1866 in Bokel oo Mary Fredericka Rittel (1872-1947)

Hinrich Volkmar Kempen * July 20, 1869 in Bokel oo Annie Dertinger (1876-)

Talea Wendelina Kempen * May 15, 1872 in Bokel

Gerhard Friedrich Kempen * May 9, 1875 in Augustfehn

Hinrika Kempen * June 19, 1876 in Augustfehn

Carl Kempen * August 8, 1880 in Bokel oo Sophie Schmidt (-)

Two years after the birth of their last child Carl the whole family had emigrated to the United States, most probably for economic reasons. The 19th century were hard times for the rural areas of Germany, due to industrialisation and a general population boom. Many families who couldn’t find work in the villages decided to emigrate, and often, as with Gerd Kempen, it was a two-step emigration. First they went to colonise the bog lands, and during the next econonomic crisis they moved to the United States. At that time many canals and railways were built (in 1869 Augustfehn was connected to the Oldenburg-Leer railway line) to ship the peat that was needed as fuel. But at the same time the improved infrastructure made it cheaper to transport the more effective coal to all parts of Germany, so the peat industry went down.

Wendelina and all seven children departed with the Ship „Neckar“ from Bremen on November 11, 1882, and they arrived in New York on December 5. On the passenger list their names and ages are given as follows:

Wendelina Kempen, 42 years

Fulkert, 18 Jahre, farmer

Bernhard, 16 years

Heinrich, 13 years

Felix, 10 years

Gerd, 7 years

Rieke, 6 years

Carl, 2 years

Obviously a clerk had problems with some of the typical East Frisian names. Folkert is misspelled als „Fulkert“ (in later records he even appears als „Holbert“), but the name Rieke is a common familiar form of Hinrika. The most interesting mistake happened with „Felix“, which must be as misspelling for Talea. In old handwriting both names actually look quite similar.

It seems that the family followed Gerd to America because he later appears in the censuses as living with his son Bernhard, in the 1888 New York City Directory as George Kempen, molder, living 231 East 89th. So he must have emigrated somewhere between 1880 and 1882, but he couldn’t be identified on the passenger lists yet. In 1910 he is listed as widower, age 70. So Wendelina must have died around 1900. So far no record has been found stating when Gerd aka George died.

Personal note: It’s a strange coincidence that my branch of the Kempen family moved to Augustfehn and Bokel exactly 100 years after Gerd and Wendelina. Folkert Gerdes Kampen (1811-1880) was the brother of my great-great-grandfather Carl Julius Kämpen (1821-1876), married to Wübke Berends Winterbuhr (1828-1912), but my living relatives don’t remember any great-great-uncle in America, and nobody knew that he spent some time in Augustfehn. Carl and his descendants mainly lived in Nortmoor, and my grandfather was the only one of them who left Ostfriesland in the 1940s to live in Holtgast. In the 1960s he moved to Vreschen-Bokel, where most of my uncles and aunts settled. My father married in 1960 and moved to Hamburg, where I was born in 1961. In 1964 our family returned and rented a house at the Augustfehn canal. In 1966, after my brother was born, we moved into an old farmhouse in Vreschen-Bokel, where I spent most of my childhood and youth, before I went to Berlin in 1984. Until I started researching my family history in 2004 I didn’t know that my namesake and cousin of several degrees Bernhard Kempen was born in Vreschen-Bokel in 1866! I still have to find out where the family of Gerd and Wendelina lived before they emigrated from the tranquil countryside to metropolitan New York.

If the umlauts don’t work, try to replace them like this:

ß = ss

ä = ae

ö = oe

ü = ue