♂Jean Jacques Burckhardt

Jean Jacques Burckhardt (born 18 January 1794) was a laboureur, or farmer, in the Alsatian village of Nehwiller-près-Woerth, where his daughter Catherine Elisabeth was born on his twenty-ninth birthday. He was the third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), probably through that daughter, Elizabeth Burkhart (1823–1876).

Early life

He was born on 18 January 1794 at Niederbronn-les-Bains, in northern Alsace, the son of Jean Jacques Burckhardt and Catherine Elisabeth Baehr. By 1816 his father was a laboureur at Nehwiller-près-Woerth, and the son, still unmarried, lived and farmed there too.

Marriage and family

On 11 July 1816, at Nehwiller-près-Woerth, Jean Jacques Burckhardt, a laboureur aged 22, married Anne Marguerite Pfeiffer, aged 25, of Pfaffenhoffen, the daughter of Jean Jacques Pfeiffer, a farrier there, and Anne Catherine Conrad. Both fathers were present and gave their consent, and the banns^W were published at Nehwiller and at Pfaffenhoffen.

A daughter, Anne Catherine, was born at Nehwiller on 29 July 1816, eighteen days after the wedding. The young father declared the birth himself and signed the act “Johann Jacob Burckhardt”, the German form of the name the clerk wrote in French. Another daughter, Catherine Elisabeth, was born there on the evening of 18 January 1823, her father’s twenty-ninth birthday. He declared that birth too, as a laboureur of Nehwiller, with two other laboureurs as witnesses, and signed it “Jacob Burckhardt”.

America

The family probably emigrated to America about 1830 and settled near Millerstown, now Millersville, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Both parents are said to have died at Lancaster about 1831, when Anne Catherine was about fifteen and Elizabeth about eight. Elizabeth married John F. Schneck (1812–1857) at Lancaster on 26 January 1843 and spent her adult life in Posey County, Indiana.

Notes

Elizabeth Burkhart

The link between this couple and Elizabeth Burkhart of Lancaster and Posey County rests on agreement between records, not on a record that states it. The Nehwiller birth act of 19 January 1823 (no. 4) records Catherine Elisabeth, born the evening before to Jacques Burckhardt and Marguerite née Pfeiffer. Elizabeth’s gravestone gives her birthday as 18 January, though in the year 1821; an 1883 county history and a family chart compiled in 1994 give 1823, and the chart’s full date, 18 January 1823, is the day of the act. The chart names her parents as Jacob Burkhardt and Margaretta Peipher.

Emigration and death

The 1883 county history, in a sketch of Elizabeth’s son Jacob Schneck, says she “was only seven years of age when her parents emigrated to America, and settled near Millerstown”, which the 1994 family chart places in Lancaster County. The 1994 family chart says that Jacob Burkhardt and Margaretta Peipher both died about 1831 at Lancaster; no record of either death is known. The ten-year lists of deaths at Nehwiller for 1823–1832 show no death of Jean Jacques, of his wife or of Catherine Elisabeth.

The 1994 chart’s dates

The chart gives Jacob Burkhardt’s birth as 1793, and his wife’s as 1797 at “Neuville (?)”, Alsace. The 1816 marriage act gives 18 January 1794 at Niederbronn for him and 12 March 1791 at Pfaffenhoffen for her; the act’s dates are used here.

Other children

The ten-year lists of births at Nehwiller (tables décennales) show further Burckhardt births between 1814 and 1829, but at least two Burckhardt households lived in the village, and each child’s birth act would show which were this couple’s. A FamilySearch tree gives the couple four more children: Anne Marguerite (1818), Jacques (1820), Marguerite (1825) and Madeleine (1828); the death list records an Anne Marguerite Burckhard who died on 27 December 1818.

Anne Catherine

A FamilySearch tree gives Anna Catherine Burkhart, wife of David Emmanuel Rhein, a birth on 30 June 1816 at Nehwiller; the Nehwiller birth act gives 29 July 1816, used here. The same tree gives her marriage at Lancaster in September 1835 and her death on 14 November 1899 at Carmi, White County, Illinois. The two eldest Rhein children in the 1850 census, Caroline, 14, and Theodore, 12, were born in Pennsylvania.