Heidi (Phillips) Nead

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Biography

Warning: this is a long and perhaps disjointed post ahead. Memories are precious things. This post is the result of my dad and precious others who willingly shared their memories, some with someone that they had never met and who was a stranger to them. I am grateful for their willingness to share with me. Thank you cousins, one and all. I hope we can meet in person one day.

I am seeking the descendants of people who lived at the addresses at this link: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Addresses_in_address_book

The above link includes surnames:

• aufm Keller, Gebauer, Gehse, Goehmann/Goehrmann, Hellweg, Temme and Treptau.

I was born and raised in northern NJ. I remember spending time with my dad's maternal relatives, the children of his cousins. Those memories spur me to find out who my own kids' cousins are through my husband's side. I would like them to meet their cousins whether in person or online, and go on to create memories with them

On my dad's side we have Phillips, Kilduff, Downey and Murray on his father's side. All were hard-working families who came to the USA at various times for a better life. In the case of my 3x great grandfather John Phillips, my dad said he was sent to the US on a prison ship for stealing a horse in Ireland.

The only thing I know about my Kilduff ancestors is my 2xgreat grandmother, Bridget Kilduff, who had many children and must have been a lady of great faith. It is quite a testimony when your dad never met his own great-grandmother yet spoke so highly of her and kept the prayer card from her funeral Mass.

The Phillips family lived in the area of Upper Tyrone, PA for a while, in close proximity to the railroads and mines there. They moved to northern NJ, again in close proximity to mines and railroad. A widowed Bridget moved to Philipstown, NY, by 1910, ostensibly to be near her daughter Margaret, who was living there as well. Bridget always had family with or near her. In her later years her grandchildren lived with her. One was my grandfather John, who I never met ( he died when I was a baby).

My dad repeatedly told me stories about the same relatives: "the Hale boys", "Hoagie Phillips" and Georgie and Jimbo Phillips, his "distant cousins", the Phillips lady who was kidnapped by Indians and had children with them before all were repatriated, the one about a Phillips family member having documents that the town clerk transcribed incorrectly because he was drunk, and finally, the one about the his great-great grandfather having come to the US on a prison ship for having been a horse thief.

Cousin Hoagie Phillips could be my dad's great-uncle Harry, who married Catherine Wynne and had 2 kids with her, Millicent Frances, or he could be Harry's son. My guess is with the former. Harry did join the fighting 69th of NYC. He would fight in WW I, and then return home to Bridget and stay with her until he met his Catherine, married and moved out of the home.

Harry is also the person whose documents were written incorrectly by the town clerk.

Regarding Hoagie's time in the Fighting 69th, there is conflicting information about him and my mom's father. One side says that Hoagie saved my grandfather, Martin. Another side says it was Martin who saved Hoagie. Who knew their paths would cross then? I wonder if they knew each other's families then, and if that played any part in how they would intermingle as families?

Georgie and Jimbo!!! Illustrious guys, those two! Georgie worked for the Teamsters. Daddy repeatedly told me that Georgie tangled with Tony Provenzano for the helm of his Teamsters local. Dad stated that Georgie was attacked with hammers and that the campaign headquarters were bombed, along with one of Georgie's friends being killed in a separate incident. He challenged me to research this online, and the claim held true. It was a hotly contested race and it is a testament to Georgie that he survived it. Georgie also took part in a lawsuit against the Teamsters and the Provenzanos. Georgie married and had a family.

Jimbo was also called "Big Jim" because he was a big guy, dad said. Dad also said he died in the 1960s, but I have not found information to support that. As Jimbo died in NJ in the 1990s, I wonder if Dad confused Jimbo with someone else in the family; another Jim or another George.

Jimbo was a big, burly stevedore who worked the docks at the time he signed on as a soldier during WW II, and later. I think daddy said HE was the one who liked airplanes and like to fly. He or George kept an airplane in PA. Jimbo " liked to make trouble", according to dad, and sure enough, he was part of a lawsuit relating to his work as a stevedore.

The lady who was kidnapped by the Indians is a tale I have yet to investigate thoroughly and prove or disprove. Dad always claimed that a Phillips lady in past generations was kidnapped by Indians....Tuscarora, he thought?. My guess is that it would be the wife of my 3x great-grandfather, but I really don't know.

Lastly, that claim about being shipped to the US as a prisoner for stealing horses. Is that something that was being done at the time? Is the US a place where the UK sent penal ships?

I know that in my immediate family, the first Phillips here was John Phillips, the one who purportedly stole the horse in Ireland. I don't know from whence he hailed in Ireland. Based on information from one of his grandson's birth documents in Baltimore, MD, he could possibly have come from Tipperary. I don't know when he reached these shores. I only know that he lived in Pennsylvania with his son George, he was still alive in 1880 and wasn't on the 1900 census, so ostensibly he died. When and where he died is uknown. Did he serve in the War Between the States? Did he marry here or in Ireland? Was his bride Irish or from the US? What was HER NAME?

Then there are my dad's maternal ancestors. They came here as a family in 1905, a family of teeming millions to walk the halls and pathways of Ellis Island and see the glorious face of the Colossus called Lady Liberty as they first made their way to strange shores.

My great-grandparents kept in contact with their loved ones back in Kirchhoerde, Germany and Alten Essen, Germany. They wrote letters. They sent photos.

Why did they come here? Were they related to the few other Gehses who made their way here?

My grandmother, Hilda Gehse, was a hard-working woman who married an orphan boy. You know how I said that Bridget took in her grandchildren? Her oldest son, John ( my great-grandfather), died when my grandfather wasn't even yet in school. Bridget, his grandmother, took in grandpa and his siter, Julia. They would live with Bridget, for the most part, until they left the home as adults. Hilda met the orphaned John, fell in love and married him. They raised my dad in Weehawken, right across the street from the church where he was baptized, St. Lawrence, which still stands in the same spot today.

Hilda's family was from Kirchhoerde, Germany, where Gehses still reside ( are they related to her?) and Alten Essen, where her mother, Catherina aufm Keller, she of another unusual name, came from people who worked for Krupp, now Thyssen-Krupp, when it manufactured metal munitions parts.

Dad had no stories to tell about Hilda's family other than that his grandparents stayed with him through his childhood years. They used to speak in different dialects of German than each other, and when in an argument, Dad said they used to curse at each other in their respective dialects, as well as argue in their dialects. He said he had to translate between the two, and he was just a school boy. Dad said he did not learn to speak English until he started school. Hilda must have spoken only German at home, although she wrote post cards to relatives in English. Interestingly enough, in English to the same parents who yelled at each other in German.

Oh, Dad did say that Hilda was one of the first women in NJ to earn a NJ driver license. He said that his grandfather liked driving cars and had some of the earliest ones to come off the assembly line at the time.

His family used to own a lake house in Lake Hopatcong, NJ. For some reason, it burned to the ground in the 1930s. They must have spent summers there. Hilda wrote a postcard, in English, thanking her parents for a visit and saying that her son, John, had a lovely time. Daddy ( John) signed it in his own, very developing early handwriting!

Henry, Hilda's oldest and only brother, was a conscientious objector, according to Dad. Henry did not go to war. I have to wonder, then, how he met his Carolina bride? I always though that they met when he was in the South for military training. ( or is it that he just didn't go fight but rather stayed in a non-combat position Stateside due to his conscientious objector status?)

I have already shared all I know about Bridget Kilduff.

On the maternal side of dad's paternal side there are the Downeys and Murrays. I know the least of the Murrays. I only know that Julia Murray was the mother of my dad's grandmother, and she came from Ireland. She met and married her husband before coming to these shores, but where is a question. She and David Downey lived in Scotland and Wales before coming to the US; census reports do indicate both were from Ireland. They reached the US and lived in Belleville, NJ by the 1860 census. Because David Downey was a miner, it is possible they both were born in Ireland, married there, and then moved to where the mining work was in Scotland and Wales before coming to the US.

The Downeys were said to be experts in dynamite blasting, according to relative MD in multiple emails. One Downey is known to have died in a blasting accident; it is unknown if his younger brother died in the same accident.

Like the Phillips family, the Downeys moved around a fair amount, following where the work was. This included Belleville, NJ, North Adams ( to work on the Hoosac Tunnel) and back to NJ to live in Mount Hope which was near other mines and the West Point Tunnel project, which is where the Downey mentioned in the previous paragraph died.

That is just dad's side. Then there's mom's side. The Metzners, Wagners, Roths and Sauers.

By now I know that mom's great-grandfather, Fritz Metzner, came from Wismar, Germany. He emigrated here in the 1880s and met his bride, Marie Sauer. According to their marriage information, he was the son of Johan Metzner and Luise F. Schmidt. Marie was the daughter of Heinrich Sauer and Marie Stamer. They married at the German Reformed Church in Hoboken, which is no longer, and started a family post haste. I wonder if Fritz was a stevedore? How did he and his wife meet? Fritz was married at least one other time previously, according to his marriage certificate. Who was she? What happened to that relationship? Did he have kids with her? Did she get sick and die like Marie eventually did, leaving him with several children, the youngest just barely in school when she died in 1905 of illness?

Fritz and Marie had several children, at least 5 or 6. One was my grandfather, Martin. I have talked to the descendants of Martin's siblings and they say that Fritz was a great shooter. He was "King of the Schuetzen" at Schuetzen Park in N. Bergen, NJ, at least once, maybe a couple of times. He liked the water.....hm. That could explain my love for water, too!

The children of Fritz and Marie went on to be in the military, to marry and have children of their own. One, Bob, would be the first to attend college. He became a PE teacher and married the lovely Anne, living and teaching in Ft. Edward, NJ. My grandfather, Martin Metzner, met and married Catherine Margarethe Wagner, she of German or Austrian father and a Jersey girl mother. Catherine and Martin had triplets. They were born on the kitchen table and the third child died. The two surviving children were my mom and her twin brother, Bob.

Catherine may have been called Kate or Katie. Fewer stories exist of her family. Her brother, Bob, was the first in their family to go to college. He obtained a teacher's degree and became a PE teacher in Fort Edward, NY, where he met and married his lovely wife Ann, and where they raised their family, which had at least one girl. Her sister, Louise, met and married Bob Lyle and they had two sons. I don't know what her brother Henry did or what became of him, and her sister Elsa ( Wilhelmine Elizabeth).

Catherine's mom, Kate Roth, met her husband at the very same church where my great-grandparents married. In fact, Kate Roth witnessed, with her friend/boyfriend/future husband Fritz Wagner, the marriage of one Wilhelmine Roth and Theodore Lorenz. I have long wondered if this was Kate witnessing the marriage of her sister.

As to the parents of my grandmother, I know that her parents' siblings married Gebauers, Hellwegs and Temmes in Germany. They kept in touch throughout WW II and then it ended after the rebuilding started in post WW II Germany. I would love to meet the children of those ancestors.

The story of my life is colored with just that: stories. My family is not a bunch of faceless ancestors. They had lives. They loved, they suffered. They married. The stories of our families are the stories of their lives, and as such, the stories of our lives.

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Heidi Phillips at registration.

Information in this biography about ancestral relatives includes numerous accounts that my dad told to me that have been proven true through obituary information, as well as information from a web site of German immigrants in the NY/NJ area that has been revised and doesn't display the same information it used to display ( re: Metzner, Roth, Wagner marriage information)