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Wittrock Family Homepage    

This website was created to collect and share information about the Wittrock family who originated in the Oldenburg area of Germany. Four members of that family emigrated from Germany to America between 1875 and 1885. Five more family members arrived in the 1950s.

May 2009 — We've updated the family tree for Maria Caroline (Wittrock) Pfeifer. See the Ancestry page.
 
September 2006 — We now have 15 generations in our Wittrock family tree! Amy (Arkfeld) McCallan has provided new data on her branch that identified almost 150 additional descendants of Theresa (Wittrock) Siemer, bringing the total tree to about 1,560. Among the new names is Jace Petersen -- our first individual in the 15th generation . See the Ancestry page.

 

April 2006 — About 400 new names have been added to our family tree, thanks to newly acquired data sources from Germany. Genealogists in the Vechta region have done an incredible job of documenting the local family history, including a tabulation of births, deaths and marriages in Lohne from 1668 to 1811.

March 2006 — We've discovered a later group immigrants in our family tree — five brothers with the Meyers surname arrived in the 1950s. See their photo on the Photos page. Thank you Peter Meyers for filling out this branch of the family tree!
April 2005— We've added two earlier generations to our family tree, extending our line back to about 1560. We've also added several branches of Wittrocks relatives in Germany. See the Ancestry page.
September 2004— We've added photos of the original Wittrock farm in Germany. See the History page for pictures of the farm and house. Read about how our ancestors lived.
We have new information on the origin of the Wittrock surname. See the History page.

 

 

to the Wittrock Family homepage! We hope you find this website to be both interesting and informative.

If you have any info you would be willing to share with other family members, please contact the webmaster!


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Our family story begins with Johann Wittrock who was born in Germany about 1636. Earlier Wittrocks that lived in Brockdorf since the mid-1500s are believed to be our ancestors as well. Johann Wittrock was born during the "Thirty Year War" — a battle for power among Catholics and Protestants in Europe that caused great hardship and suffering for the people of Germany. Johann was a "Kötter" — a cottage farmer — who owned a small farm in the farming community of Brockdorf, between the cities of Dinklage and Lohne, in Landkreis (county) Vechta, Oldenburg, Prussia. That region is now part of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), Germany.

Aat least 14 generations of Wittrocks have been born in Lohne and the vicinity. The family farm in Brockdorf passed successively down through the generations until it was sold by Henry Wittrock in 1885. The Wittrock family's house still stands, but has been moved to a new site and renovated.

In the 1880s, four of the Wittrock descendants, all born in Brockdorf, emigrated from Germany and settled in America.

Maria Paulina "Mary" Wittrock was born in 1854 and, in the year 1875, was the first of the siblings to immigrate. She married Bernard Stallman in Carroll County, Iowa and they had nine children together—four born in Iowa and the rest in Nebraska. By 1900 Mary Stallman was a widow, living in Petersburg, Boone County, Nebraska with her nine children. She died a few years later of blood poisoning. Her orphaned children eventually scattered over several western states, including Nebraska, Texas, California, Wyoming and Washington.

Maria "Carolina" Wittrock was born in 1858 and immigrated about 1880. In Shelby County, Iowa, Caroline married Jacob Pfeifer, who was from the Alsace region of Germany—the part of the country which became France in 1919. The Pfeifers had seven children, one of which died as an infant. Their children, born in Iowa and Nebraska, settled mostly in South Dakota and Nebraska.

Maria Sophia "Teresa" Wittrock was born in 1849 and immigrated in 1885 with her husband, Clements Siemer and settled in Carroll County. They later moved to Butte, Boyde County, Nebraska, where her sister, Caroline Pfeiffer lived. The Siemers had six children, four born in Germany and the other two in Iowa. After her husband's death in 1912, Teresa Siemer lived with her daughter, Bernardine, in Butte, Nebraska.

Anton Heinrich "Henry" Wittrock was born in 1851. After his first wife died about 1882, he emigrated to the USA—arriving on the same ship as his sister, Theresa Siemer, and her family. Henry lived for a while in Carroll County, Iowa, then moved on to Boone County, Nebraska, where another sister, Mary Stallman, lived. That is where Henry probably met his future wife, Anna Sprenger, whose parents and brothers also lived in Boone County. Later Henry moved to Okarche, Oklahoma where he filed a homestead claim in 1893, just a few years after the opening of the Oklahoma Territory.

Henry Wittrock and Anna (Sprenger) Wittrock, had eleven children. One child died in infancy but ten of the children survived to adulthood, married, and raised families in Oklahoma, Iowa, and Nebraska.

The sister who remained in Germany, Margaretha Maria Wilhelmina Catharina Wittrock, married Johann Heinrich Strotmann. The Strottmanns had five children.

In the 1950s five more family members emigrated from Germany and settled in Chicago, Boston and other cities. The five Meyers brothers are grandsons of Catherina Elisabeth Wittrock (1867-1947) and Hienrich Diekmann.

 

Contact: webmaster

This website was last updated on December 26, 2009

  Visitors to this website since December 15, 2002

karendennis@mac.com


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