Anton Fortman

The goal of many genealogists is to find the home of the immigrant ancestors.  On my Fortman side that brings us to Anton Fortman and Anna Catherine Schwartengräber.  From church records we know that Anna was baptized in Füchtorf – now part of Nordrhein-Westfalen Germany. It is also where Anton and Anna married in 1836.  There don’t appear to be other records of Fortman’s in that parish so Anton was probably from a nearby town.  Other Fortman’s migrated from an area just north of Füchtorf so we can speculate that Anton came from there.

Family records show that Anton was born January 10, 1806.  Naturalization and census records show that he was from Prussia or Germany.  However, I recently found an old newspaper story recounting his settling in Ohio.  This story, from the April 23, 1933 Lima News, states that he was from Hanover.

 

 

So where was he born?  Germany did not become a nation until 1871.  Before that the term Germany referred to a geographical area made up of many states populated by German speakers, and that was a very broad area.  Prussia was one of the largest states and frequently shifted borders.  A little research showed that the newspaper story most likely refers to the Kingdom of Hanover, not the city.  This kingdom came and went and also had shifting borders.  The challenge is which of those to record as the birth place of Anton. 

Anna and Anton could have lived in different countries. One mile to the north of Füchtorf is a political boundary that remained pretty constant even as the rulers of the two lands changed.  A family living north of that line in 1800 would have lived in the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück which was part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1803.  The land then went to the Kingdom of Hanover, passed to Prussia in 1806 [the year Anton was born], the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807, to Napoleonic France in 1810, and again to Hanover in 1814 (thank you Wikipedia!).  In 1866 this area was annexed by Prussia and in 1871 Germany was formed.  Therefore Anton most likely was born during the time his land was a part of the Kingdom of Hanover.  More research is needed to determine exactly where…

 1800

Red circles are points of reference

Füchtorf is about where the blue x is located

1818

 

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