Eckers back to 1695 and beyond.
William in Civil War.
William's Brothers in USA.
After a period of making only small advances in my research on the Ecker family, I finally made what I think you will agree are some major breakthroughs. There were two pieces of information that made this possible. The first was the name of the village in Germany where William Ecker came from. The second was the knowledge that he was a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War. The first led me to request the Church of Latter-day Saints microfilm of church records from the town of Unterreichenbach Germany. The second led me yesterday to a visit to the National Archives Building in Washington, DC where I copied the entire military record and application for military pension for William Ecker, and his brother Friedrich. These documents are available on this website.
To jump ahead a little, we can now trace the Ecker family back directly to the late 1600s. We also know that Abraham Wilhelm Ecker (William) came to America with at least three of his brothers, all of whom raised families in Newark. (It is probably fair to say that anyone related to the Eckers of Newark in the 1800s is related to us.) The application of Hannah Squire for a widow's pension contained much information about names and dates and confirmed the inter-relatedness of the Eckers of Newark.
At least I could read the information from Washington, DC. The church books are another matter. I was able to identify at least 15 Ecker family marriages. All are related. There are well over 100 Eckers for whom I have detailed birth, marriage, and death records. Unfortunately, it is written in German, and in the old German script. It will take a while to translate all of it. Nonetheless, I can identify many names and read the numbers. I prepared a streamlined family tree that shows the direct line back to Hans Georg Ecker who was born in 1694, and his wife Anna Barbara. The frustration is that much more information, including Anna Barbara's parentage is also available in the original German. After the mid-1800, I found no Eckers in Unterreichenbach. There are none living there today. Of course one of the reasons they have been that they went elsewhere!
I may have already told you that William Ecker was born Abraham Wilhelm Ecker in 1840. We now know that he married Hannah E. Squire in 1864 and that he died in Newark in 1892. William was apparently called "Will" by family and friends. He was one of at least nine children of Jacob Ecker and his wife. On his marriage certificate, William gave his mother's name as Regina. However, in the family registry from Germany and other documents, his mother's name is Juliana Rosina. William was the youngest of the surviving children. He had three older brothers spanning the years 1829 to 1840. Their names were Gottlieb Friedrich, Johan Jacob, and Christian Philipp. There is a sister, Regina Katharina born in 1835. Several siblings, both older and younger than William, have dates of death listed in the family registry. There is no date of death listed for the siblings above. For at least the brothers, the reason is clear: all came to America. Indeed, all lived in Newark. Gottlieb Friedrich was known as Frederick and married a woman named Barbara. They had several children: William, Carrie, John, and Lena. Lena's spectacular Confirmation Certificate is available here. Johan Jacob married a Mary from Würtenberg and had 6 children. Christian Jacob became known as Christopher. After Christopher's first wife died, he married Hannah Squire's sister; her second marriage as well. There were 6 children involved. At this point, I do not know what happened to William's sister Regina. William was 14 years old when he came to America. His father died in 1845, almost 10 years before William immigrated in 1854. Williams mother remarried in Germany and died there.
I have access to the entire Church Books of Unterreichenbach. Filling in the gaps of all the maternal lines is certainly possible. The first Eckers there were Hans Georg and his wife Anna Barbara. Hans Georg was born in 1694. Amazingly, we know the name of the town where he was born, and those of his parents: his father was Martin Eckher, also a miller. (We are a family of millers and malt-millers.) Going back another 100 years is my next challenge.
William and his brother Frederic both enlisted in the Union Army at the onset of the war in 1861. Williams served under an alias, John Hansen. Apparently it was commonplace that if you could afford it, you could pay someone else to enlist in your place. The brothers were in the Second New Jersey Volunteer Infantry. They trained in Trenton. As far as I can tell, their unit was in a very thick of the war. The Second New Jersey fought in Bull Run, and even fought in Gettysburg during the three-year period in which William was enlisted. Frederick was wounded twice, the second time with a mini-ball that lodged in his abdomen until it caused his death some years later. Both brothers were prisoners of war for an interval. The widows of both brothers received pensions and support for children under 16 years old.
There is a wealth of information in all the documentation that had to be presented to receive the pensions. The only disappointment, and it is a big one, is that there is no mention made of William and Hannah's early life together in Albany, New York. Nor is there any mention of my Great Grandfather Charles Edward Ecker. Some things do become more clear. William and Hannah had a son in Albany in 1871. We now know why the child was named Frederick Christian. This son would have been the older brother to Charles Edward. I do not know what happened to him and have always assumed that he died in childhood. It also appears that there were three other children born in NY: Henry and Julia. Julia survived, as did Charles Edward.
In any event, I am grateful for all the new clues. We know where the families lived. We know what church they went to. We know the churches they were married in. We have birth death and marriage certificates where before we had none. Surely these documents open other doors for us to enter. For example, Frederick Ecker was also buried in Fairmont Cemetery. I suspect when we examine the cemetery records, we will find that every Ecker there is one of our relatives.
You may already know that I have been placing some documents on my family website. This has made it convenient for me to share information with some other living Eckers that I have found. I have put many of these new documents there. The address is http://hasselbacher.us/ecker
Family Portrait Updated
I have been able to better understand the family sequence of births and relationships. Take another look at the portrait of 1905.