Help needed to find two brothers who died the same day in America
I am looking for information on the death (place and reason) of two brothers, but know little about them. Both were born in Diessbach, Canton of Bern, Switzerland.
Hans Hermann Schneider, https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/G6P4-5MD
Robert Schneider, https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/G26F-SF1
According to the register of citizens of Diessbach, both died in America on January 1, 1907. The exact place is unknown, as is the date of their passage from Europe. Unfortunately, no relatives are alive who could know more.
So far I have searched unsuccessfully on Ellis Island, Steve Morse, FamilySearch and Find A Grave.
Is there any chance at all to find out more about their deaths under these circumstances?
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@Daniel57704 Yes, there is a chance to find out more, but can you offer any more clues? Do you know if they stayed together? Could the date January 2, 1907 be the day their deaths were reported to an agency, and not necessarily the day they both died? Were they farmers or did they know some other trade? Did they stay on the east coast or head west?
I noticed in Family Tree that Lena is the only one reported to have immigrated to the U.S. Do you know if there were any others? Lena immigrated in 1907. Would she have known the story of what happened to her brothers? She married Carl Herzel and they had a very successful family canning business that still exists today and is still owned and operated by family members. Have you tried to contact any of Lena's descendants to see if they have any information about their great grandmother?
When I did a search for anyone from Diessbach with the surname Schneider that came through Ellis Island, there were four not counting Lena: Fritz (1905 age 20), Alex (1900 age 21) Emil (1901 age 31), and Mina or Nina (1907 age 20). Can you identify any of these people as related to your Schneider family?
The ship manifest for Lena says she was going to meet an aunt, H.C. Schroyer. Can you identify her?
It will be difficult to find a death record without being able to narrow down the place. If you know anything else that would be helpful, let us know.
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Thank you for your thoughts, which are exactly the same as mine. All I know is that the family wanted to keep the reason for their death a secret. As far as I understand it, the family was ashamed of it.
Robert was a good carpenter, his father owned a well known carpenter shop in Diessbach. I don't know anything about Hans Hermann, but he will certainly have known about agricultural matters, since Diessbach is still very rural today. It is not known to me whether the two were on the road together. So far I have assumed it, especially because of the day of their death. Also I have wondered if January 1, 1907 is a placeholder for an unknown date lost during the process of notification to the home village.
Whether Lena's emigration in May 1907 was planned long before or whether it was a short-term reaction to the death of her brothers, I do not know. Apart from the three of them, no one else from the family emigrated to the USA.
Unfortunately, the youngest son of Carl and Lena died four years ago. The great-grandson and current CEO of Hirzel Canning Co. did not respond to my contact request. Nevertheless, I was able to contact some descendants, but they could not remember Lena ever talking about it.
The Schneider surname is native to Diessbach. Nevertheless, I could not find anyone in the list of the Schneider immigrants from Ellis Island who could be assigned to Lena's family. All other family members remained in Switzerland, including my step-great-grandmother Johanna.
Lena's ship manifest is another mystery. Because she did not have an aunt named Schroyer, I hoped to get further via the Erie & Lafayette st. address in Toledo given below the aunt's name. But I had to realize that this was probably an address in an industrial area of Toledo with the name of a contact person who was passed off as an aunt to the immigration officer (https://community.familysearch.org/de/discussion/140329/search-for-information-on-a-1907-street-address-in-toledo-oh#latest).
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@Daniel57704 It seems you have been at this for a long time! I think if you use immigration records, city directories, and censuses to put together a time line it might be helpful. Here is a start:
1- The brothers supposedly died in January 1907 and in May, 1907, Lena arrives in the U.S. from Diessbach.
2- Lena states her intention to meet someone with the surname Stroyer in Toledo with an address near the intersection of South Erie St. and Lafayette.
3- From the Toledo City Directory, there is a George F. Stroyer, a bookkeeper at the Toledo Storage & Ice Co. boarding at 127 Avondale in 1908. This address is very close to the intersection of S. Erie and Lafayette. It might be a coincidence, but it's worth checking out:
4- The Hirzel family are also from Diessbach. Carl and his family arrived in 1898 and joined the older brothers in Toledo. It's very possible that Lena knew the family and that's why she went to Toledo. The question is, did her brothers have connection with the family?
5-As stated on Lena and Carl's marriage record, she is living in Buffalo, NY before the marriage. Do you have any idea why she went to Buffalo? The city directory for Buffalo shows a Lena Schneider living at 24 Carl St. The 1910 Census shows a William Schneider at this address. Unless you have other information, I think there's a good possibility this is your Lena because she is only in the directory that one year and this William Schneider only had one daughter, Anna K:
FamilySearch has some city directories, but not searchable. Ancestry.com has a great collection. If you do not have access, you could go to a FamilySearch Center to view for free. I'm sorry I can't post images as it is a pay site: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2469/
Ellis Island records are great for tracking who immigrants left behind and who they were going to meet. I'm sure you already know that.
The brothers had to have had their names recorded on some kind of document while they were in this country. Do you know if they were religious? If they attended a church their deaths would have been recorded. FamilySearch has many church records listed in the catalog under the place name of the city, most of them not indexed. Of course, it would really help to know what city. 😊
Let us know what else you find and happy hunting!
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Sorry for not getting back to you in so long. I'm recovering from a bad cold (luckily not Covid!) and had too little energy to write.
What you write under 3 is very interesting and I will try to find out more. Anyway, thanks for the tip!
Ad 4: Carl and Lena surely knew each other from Diessbach. The village is small and the two families lived only about 700 ft. apart. Furthermore, they will have attended the same school, perhaps even in the same class. The same applies to Carl's older brothers as well as Hans Hermann and Robert Schneider.
Ad 5: A distant relative of the Hirzel family wrote me the following about the families' beginnings in the US:
“Carl went to Chicago where he attended brewer’s school at the Walheinous Institute of Brewing Technology. He completed the program there and on April 5, 1910 married Lena Schneider. Lena was a trained nurse and had emigrated to Buffalo, New York, where she had family. Coincidentally, she came from the same village in Switzerland that had been Carl’s hometown.
The historical account goes on to tell how they first lived in New Kensington, PA where Carl had his first job as a brewmaster. Carl's next job was in Winnipeg, Canada, and his third was in Buffalo 'where Lena had relatives living', and where he was brewmaster and superintendent for the Schreiber Products Company."
According to my information, Lena was a teacher and not a trained nurse. However, it could be that she trained as a nurse during the time until her marriage. I will try to find out if there was a connection to William Schneider and his daughter. Hopefully the village historian of Diessbach will know more....
I too assume that the names of the brothers would have to appear in some official document. I guess that Hans Hermann and Robert were not overly religious and therefore not integrated in a church. If their death was an accident, there should be a police report or a newspaper notice about it. A friend in the US, to whom I told the story, sent me the following screenshot without citing the source, on which a Robert Schneider appears in the third last line (I am sorry for the poor resolution).
Unfortunately I can't do anything with it, because first of all no year is given and secondly only a reference to the much more interesting entry. Most likely the reference leads anyway into the void, because Robert had no middle name.
I think I will wait for the answer from the historian from Diessbach before I delve into the church records at FamilySearch. If he does not know anything, then there is much to do :-)
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The page you posted is from 1928. You can find the entire document on Internet Archives at
Scroll to image 986 and you can find the year date on the previous and subsequent pages. You might find it interesting to scroll through the complete document to see if there is anything that might be helpful.
If you go to the following link you will find indexes for the years from 1852 - 1944.
https://archive.org/details/buffalodeathindex?sort=title
Also check out:
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RobertWessel Thank you so much for taking the time to assign the document to a year. It can now be ruled out with certainty that the entry could lead to a successful result. From this point of view, I also consider this a success :-)
With your link to the Census Instructions ( https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/census_instructions/ ) you also helped me to clarify SerraNola's assumption about the relationship of Lina and William Schneider. To make it short: They are not related! The reasons for that are the following:
1. After a short search I found a freely accessible archive for the Buffalo City Directories ( https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/search/collection/nyheritage!VHB011/searchterm/Buffalo%20(N.Y.)--Directories/field/subjec/mode/all/conn/and ). It shows that William lived at the address 24 Carl St. from 1899 to 1911. William must therefore also appear in the 1900 Census.
2. Lina appears in the Directories only from 1909 to 1911, but interestingly not in the 1910 Census. Therefore, no further details about her are known. But if she was to be 'my' Lina, she would have to be Swiss.
3. The 1900 Census states that William immigrated to the USA with his parents in 1878 at the age of 13. Consistently, the 1900 and 1910 Census say that William and his parents were German.
4. Lina and William could be related under these circumstances only if an ancestor of Lina's father had emigrated to Germany and had himself naturalized there, only to emigrate to the USA later. This is not very likely.
5. To be sure, I traced Lina's ancestors back to 1751 and found no evidence of such a process.
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A few items for consideration.
- Don't discount the German connection. Both German and Swiss immigrants spoke the German language and census takers were not known for their accuracy. The information could have been provided by someone, like a neighbor, without perfect knowledge of the country of origin and may have been a guess based on the language they spoke.
- City directories often contain old information. The names etc published in any given directory could have been collected over a year before the publication date. I have seen city dirctory entries for people who died over a year before the directory was published.
- There is a website of old newspapers and a lot of random items called "Old Fulton Postcards" that is worth searching. It is home to a lot of obscure treasures and documents. It is not the easiest site to use but is often worth the effort. Try searching at https://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html
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