♂John Adams

John Adams is known only as the father of Mary Adams (1850–1940), a German-American woman of Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois. He was the great-great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Mary Adams (1850–1940), her son Frank Frederick William Schulz (1882–1961) and his daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Everything known of him comes from a single record: the Cook County death certificate of his daughter Mary, who died at Chicago on 15 September 1940, aged ninety. It names her father as John Adams and her mother as Marie, with no surname for her. The person who gave those names is not identified in either index of the certificate, and parents’ names on the death record of a woman of ninety are often supplied at second hand. His parents are not known, and no record of his own birth, marriage or death has been confirmed. The census of 1880, which lists Mary with her first husband, gives the birthplace of both her parents as Prussia. Searches of the Chicago censuses of 1850 and 1860 did not find the family, and a search of the 1880 census of Chicago and Cook County found no John and Marie Adams or Adam household.

A Chicago census of 1870 lists a household that may be his: John Adam, aged 45, a teamster born in Mecklenburg, with his wife Marie, aged 42, also born in Mecklenburg, and children Frederike (13), John (10) and Emma (7), all born in Illinois. The eldest daughter’s name matches Friederike Adams, a witness at Mary’s wedding in 1873, and Emma’s age matches the Emma Adams who married Charles Mielke, later Mary’s second husband. An online family tree also names John Adams as Emma’s father, but cites no record for it. The household has not been proved to be his. Its birthplace of Mecklenburg does not match the 1880 census’s Prussia, and the two grand duchies of Mecklenburg were never part of Prussia.