ABRAHAM STAUFFER and MAGDALENA SHUPE

(1814-1866)

(1820-1901)

   

The original version of my write-up on Abraham and Magdalena was rather pitifully short, just one page. After learning what we have from Eby, I set out to expand the write-up. While working on it, I gained access to some new sources and did a lot of sleuthing, processing, and calculating. The result? Three write-ups tied to our ancestors and their family members who moved from Ontario to Michigan. 

 

Abraham G. Stauffer was born in Ontario, Canada, nine years after his Grandfather Abraham moved his family there from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Abraham was the sixth of eleven children of Samuel and Esther Groh Stauffer. He grew up with more than thirty first cousins around. Both his mother's and his father's families had migrated from Pennsylvania when they were young. His grandfather Michael Groh had died on the journey shortly before his family's arrival. Young Abraham  was nine when his grandfather Stauffer died.

     

SUSANNAH'S FAMILY

Abraham married a girl named Susannah Latschaw, who was born in 1812. She had four brothers and six sisters (she was the third child). The year she was ten, her two littlest sisters died within four months of each other. We don't have much information on her marriage to Abraham. One record says they were married in 1835. By then, Abraham's family had been in Canada thirty years. The bride would have been 23 and the groom 21. The only set of records we've found on the five children born to them says that the two boys and three girls were born every other year from 1835 to 1843.  

At that point we come upon two very full years--1843 and 1844. If the scant records we have are correct, during the space of twenty-one months the fifth child was born, Susannah died of hydrophobia (rabies), Abraham married again, and a son was born to the second wife--all by September 30, 1844. Twenty-one months is not a lot of time for those things to happen, but it is possible. Susannah left an infant as well as four children under eight or nine. In the circumstances of those days and with no teenage daughters to carry on, getting a new mother for the family was an urgent matter. By the end of September 1844, the family had six children under ten.


MAGDALENA'S FAMILY

Magdalena Shupe
So who was this Magdalena Shupe who responded to the need of that 30-year-old father and at the age of 23 took on five stepchildren, including a baby? She was the second daughter of George and Elizabeth (Scheirich) Shupe. George was the Mennonite Bishop in Waterloo, Ontario, for many years. Both his family and Elizabeth's had come from Pennsylvania  when he and she were children, so both sets of Magdalena's grandparents were in Canada. One grandfather died before she was born, and both grandmothers died when she was five, but Matthias Scheirich lived until she was fourteen. 

Abraham named his two sons by Susannah Isaac and Jacob. He named two of Magdalena's who died in infancy Moses and Aaron. The baby born September 30, 1844, was named Samuel, and he grew up to be our ancestor who died in the well on his farm in Michigan. Two years later Abraham named his next son George. After many chuckles in our family over how the name George got into a family with so many Bible names, we learned from Magdalena’s death certificate that it was her father’s name. (It was a daughter-in-law of George's, Ruth Stauffer, who helped me acquire my original information on the Stauffers.) The three daughters born to Susannah had good Bible names, too--Esther, Mary, and Susannah.  

 

THE MOVE TO MICHIGAN

When Abraham was 40, he decided to do what all his grandparents had done--pull up stakes and move to another country. In this case, the other country was back to the one his grandparents had left, but an entirely different part of it. We don't have rich accounts of this move such as Eby has provided us on the others. We do know that they moved to Michigan in 1854.

Michigan at that time had been a state for ten years. It had been a political football between the French and the British before being given to the Americans as spoils of war. How much "virgin" land was there to be claimed, we do not know, though it may have been considerable because the fur trade had thrived before it became a state. Or perhaps Abraham was looking for something more settled, not less. 

We know that sons Samuel, 10, and George, 8, went with Abraham and Magdalena to Michigan, and we now know that they had a three-year-old named Noah. We're quite sure Moses and Aaron, likely born in the interim between George and Noah, had already died. We've also discovered the likelihood that Magdalena was pregnant when they made the trip and that the baby son born that September 1854 lived only thirteen days.

What we have not been able to establish is whether any of his children by Susannah went with him. The two oldest would have been in their upper teens and the others 11, 13, and 15. We have searched rather fruitlessly for them in our sources such as Eby, the Stauffer booklet, and information from Jo Kelly, who is working on a detailed history of Chester Township. It seems strange if at least the younger ones did not go, but we have not found any dependable records on the lives of those offspring.

Apparently Abraham lived in Gaines Township near Caledonia about eight years after his arrival from Canada. His two sisters and their families had been there for some time as well. Then for reasons we have no clue on, the year young Noah was eleven, the family moved from south of Grand Rapids to Chester Township, northwest of Grand Rapids. That's where all the members of immediate Abraham's family are buried, including a nephew we have only recently learned about.

Abraham was in Michigan only twelve years before he died in 1866, two days after his 52nd birthday. Magdalena was left a widow at 45. Michigan didn't start keeping formal records until 1867, so we don't know anything about his death except the dates from his headstone and cemetery records. His sister Susannah, already a widow six years, died two years later in 1868. She was 59. Younger sister Sallie, born in 1820, lived until 1892. 
  

MAGDALENA

Magdalena lived 35 years after Abraham’s death, until she was 80. She lived to see a son traumatized by his wife's infidelity and a divorce, a 19-year-old granddaughter apparently pregnant before marriage, and the traumatic accidental death of her son Samuel, all in addition to the death of her 27-year-old son Noah in 1878. Two pictures have survived in the family which we believe to be her, one a portrait and one with the family of her granddaughter Esther Stauffer Porter. In the 1870 and 1880 censuses she was listed in the household of her son George, but the picture with the young Porter family  strongly suggests she was living with them near the end of her life, likely after the breakup of George's family in the mid-1890s. (We estimate a date near the end of the century based on the size of the two little girls, Effa and Fern, in the hammock.) (It is interesting to imagine the discussions that might have taken place about "who will take Grandma now?")  


Grandson Frank Stauffer’s wife, Emma, recounted that when Magdalena “came to their house in 1900 she would be dressed in a long black dress and her bonnet that she never removed” [quote from first Ruth Stauffer letter, Aug. 9, 1966]. She died in June 1901. 

 


And so another chapter on our Stauffer ancestors comes to a close. Many of the same themes appear, such as family closeness and solidarity, but some changes can be noticed. Most families were not as large any more (less than ten rather than more than ten), and by the middle of the 19th Century a few un-Stauffer-like names are slipping in, such as Hiram, Malcolm, Sidney, Foster, and even a Linus. 

It would be satisfying to know Abraham's reasons for moving to the United States since his father and grandfather had abandoned it for Canada. I also wish I knew what took him to Chester Township, leaving the rest of the clan behind, but none of that really matters. The important thing is that he ended up where he did because arriving in Michigan the same year as the Stauffers, from Painted Post, New York, was the Wells family. Their eleven-year-old daughter Roxy would become son Samuel's wife in 1865. They would name their first daughter Esther, she would be my great-grandmother, and so the chain of generations continued.