Picking up the trail

A few months short of turning 29 years old, my great grandfather Jacob Orth married Margaret C. Lauffer on 4 May 1865, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But where had he been since July 1849, when he and his newly orphaned siblings arrived in New York?  And where did his sister and brother end up? Imagine a teenage girl (age 19) and her two brothers (ages 12 and 10) alone in New York city, after having just lost their parents. Where would they go? What would they do?

Information from John Newton Boucher's A century and a half of Pittsburgh and her people, Volume 3 (1908) indicates that the three siblings, Jacob, Georg, and Magdalena located somewhere in New Jersey, where Jacob and George became expert at glass-blowing. Why New Jersey? Were they headed to the home of a relative? To the home of someone from their village or its environs who had previously relocated to America? Or did they head for New Jersey, because it was one of the two key centers of the glass-blowing trade (in addition to Pittsburgh) and these Orth boys having come from a long line of blacksmiths followed what might have been their parents' plan—to transition from blacksmith to glass-blower?


This led me to a search for Orth relatives who had already emigrated to America.


My great grandfather Jacob Orth's father was:


Jacob Johann Orth
b: 2 Mar 1803
d: at sea taking his family to America 1849 


His parents were:
Johann Orth
b: 1764-1770 (in Rott, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France)
d: ??
and
Marie Elisabethe Erhardt
b: 27 Feb 1768 (in Retschwiller, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France)
d: 21 Jan 1839 (in Retschwiller, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France)


In addition to their son Jacob Johann, they had two other children:


Philipp Martin Orth
b: 26 Sep 1796 (in Retschwiller, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France)
d: ??
and
Eve Orth
b: Jan 1800 (in Retschwiller, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France)
d: 11 May 1857 (in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA)


Eve married a man named Georg Bechtel (b: 19 Oct 1803 in Leiterswiller, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France). They lived in Leiterswiller at the "Maison d'Ecole" (schoolhouse—Georg was the school teacher) between 1827 and 1835, where they had 5 children. In 1838, they left from Le Havre, France, on a ship called the Charlemagne, and arrived in New York on 11 Aug 1838 with several of their children (the survivors). The family can be traced to Philadelphia via the U.S. census, where they have an additional 5 children, though only a couple are survivors. What a hard life!


Thus, it's plausible that Jacob, Georg, and their big sister could have traveled from New York to Philadelphia, to join their aunt, uncle and cousins.  However, I find no record of this in the 1850 census (taken less than a year after the kids' arrival in New York).


There's more investigation to be done, but for now—dead-end.