Destination: Family, Neighbors, or...?

Even though I found no evidence that the three orphaned Orth children (Magdelena-19, Jacob-12, and Georg-10) went to their Aunt Eve and Uncle Georg in Philadelphia, it's quite possible they did.  One might imagine that their father would have been headed to join his sister, and the children may have been set on following Plan A.  However, given that Eve Orth and Georg Bechtel (plus kids) emigrated 10 years earlier, only Magdalena would have had a memory of them (at age 9).  Jacob and Georg would have been too young to remember. Or perhaps the stronger pull for these three children was to connect with neighbors from the small village of Retschwiller who had recently emigrated to America, whom they would have known, and perhaps even journeyed with when they crossed the Atlantic.

This led me to search the emigration records to find others from Alsace that emigrated around 1849.  The two books entitled, the Alsace Emigration Book, Volume I (1989) and Volume II (1991), compiled by Cornelia Schrader-Muggenthaler provide a source of tens of thousands of names of Alsatian emigrants.  In the ten years before 1849, there is a record of 13 registered emigrants from "Retschwiller," "Retzwiller," "Ratzwiller," and "Richwiller." I searched each one of these individuals to look for obvious connections or at least patterns of destination.  New York seems to be the initial common destination for many of these Alsatian individuals, as the standard point of entry.  There were no obvious New Jersey connections from what I was able to find, however these two Schrader-Muggenthaler books are not comprehensive.  I also checked the Orth family's ship's passenger manifest to see if there were other Alsatians on board. Perhaps they were invited to accompany fellow Alsatians, who witnessed the death of their father, and subsequent illness and death of their mother.

The question is still unanswered: where did those three kids go once they landed in New York?

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.