One of my more interesting genealogical finds was that of the immigration records for my Kolter family. Back in 1999 a distant cousin on the West Coast sent me a Word document titled, History of the Kolters that gave, among other information, birthdates for my 4-great grandfather Henry (or Heinrich) Kolter, wife Rachel Nicol, and children. It also mentioned that the family emigrated to the United States in about 1837, and that many of the family were born in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.
These were the early days of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org and I couldn’t easily find the immigration record. I looked for Kolters in Berchtesgaden and elsewhere in Bavaria. No luck. I looked at Hamburg passenger lists. I finally put the Kolters on the back burner for a while. Then about fifteen years ago, I searched for the Kolters in Germany at FamilySearch.org. One of my search strategies when looking for a family is to search by the ancestor’s sibling or child with the most unusual given name, to try to narrow down the results. For this search I decided that searching for my 3-great grandfather might be the best idea—his given name was Valentine.
Looking at the German Births and Baptisms database on FamilySearch, I found a Valentin Kolter that was born and baptized in 1821 and had a father called Heinrich. This was interesting, of course, but I was confused, because on this record, Valentin’s mother was named Friederika Profit not Rachel, and the birthplace of Rockenhausen, Pfalz, is clearly not Berchtesgaden. However, this area of (present-day) Germany was, at that time, governed by Bavaria, and Berchtesgaden is in present-day Bavaria (though nowhere near Rockenhausen). I searched for other children of this Heinrich Kolter and Friederika Profit. I was pleased to find the birthdates and baptism dates for Valentine’s siblings! Not surprisingly, some of the siblings had Anglicized their names after arrival in the US—Philippina became Phoebe, Dorothea became Dorothy, and Karl became Charles, for example. But the birth order for the children was consistent, and the birthdates were, in most cases, close to the information I already had. I also found a marriage record for a Johann Henrich Kolter and Friederika Profit in 1814 in the nearby town of Breunigweiler. I had found my Kolter family in Germany! I was still determined to find the Kolter’s immigration records.
In 2011, I searched Ancestry.com for immigration records for Johann Heinrich Kolter and was shown a Jean Henry Colter with a wife Frederica arriving in New York on 22 August 1837. Could it be possible that this was my Kolter family? Why was his name Jean instead of Johann? Upon examination of the record, I learned that the ship, La Fortune, sailed from the French port of Le Havre in northern France. Of course, the French clerk of a French shipping line might record the family names in French! Johan was Jean, Karl was Charles, Peter was Pierre, and so on. I was unable to find an image of La Fortune, but here is perhaps a similar ship.
So to circle back to Henry’s wife Rachel Nichol, where did this name come from? The birth/baptism records of the children in Germany give Friederika’s name as the mother, and Friederika arrived in New York with Henrich. Some people have given Friederika’s name as Friederika Rachel Profit Kolter, but her birth/christening record and marriage record give her name only as Friederika Profit, and in none of the children’s birth/baptism records is her name given as anything other than Friederika.
While it’s possible that Friederika died after arriving in the United States and Henry Kolter married a woman named Rachel, no marriage record has been found. In the 1840 census in Licking County, Ohio, Henry’s unnamed wife is enumerated as between 40 and 49 years old. In the 1850 census in Crawford County, Illinois, Rachel is 53 years old, born in Germany. Both Friederika and Rachel were born in February 1796, which would be an odd coincidence, but could happen. Friederika’s birthdate is given in German church records, and Rachel’s birthdate is calculated from dates on her grave marker. So this mystery will need to wait for another day—are Friederika and Rachel the same person?
