Monday, November 26, 2012

Sommer Homes

Cousin Janice and I recently returned from a fun-filled week at the Family History Library in SLC.  One of the highlights of our digging was finding the home village for our 6th great-grandfather, Johann Georg Sommer.  Georg most likely came from the village of Freistett in Baden, Germany, just across the river and northeast from Strasbourg.  His parents were Matthias Sommer, an innkeeper, and Anna Barbara Huebster.  Georg had several other siblings, and we think two of his brothers, namely Johannes and Johann Martin, came with him to America.  There is still some question about exactly when Georg came to Philadelphia, and specifically whether he married and had children before he emigrated from Germany or after.  That part is still being researched.

Our second discovery was confirmation of something we already suspected, and that is that Hermann Sommer emigrated to America with five sons, namely Philip, Henry, Martin, Mattias, and Peter.  There has been so much confusing and contradicting information on the internet about this line, but we believe we might have settled it!  We did that by tracing this family to the village of Hoch-Weisel in Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany.  A village genealogy we found clearly spells out the family of Hermann Sommer and his wife Anna Elisabetha Anschicks, and their six sons, one of whom remained behind in Germany.  The youngest son, Peter Sommer, would end up marrying (and divorcing) Catharina Menge, thought to be the niece of our Ernst Menge. 

So it appears, at least at this moment in time, that these two Sommer lines are not related except that they both married into the Menge family in America.  This is all very exciting because it gives, finally, a much clearer picture of where these families came from and how their paths crossed in America.

See our article Differentiating Sommer Surnames, which can be found in the library on my research website.

2 comments:

  1. To be clear, all subsequent research has confirmed that there were two Sommer families arriving in PHL in 1750s: Georg, Johannes, and Martin Sommer, brothers from Freistett, Baden, Germany, arrived on 22 Sep 1752 on the ship Brothers. Hermann Sommer of Hoch-Weisel arrived with 5 sons on 30 Sep 1754 on the ship Edinburgh. The oldest son, Philip, was listed on the passenger list as sick, the other four sons were too young to be listed at the time they arrived.

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  2. Also see MisTaken Sources regarding the Montgomery County history with an account of the Summers family which is incorrect.

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