Conrad Petzinger Correction and The Early Petzinger Scandal

Back on February 14, I blogged about the Petzingers coming from Germany to America.  Frederick was the first in our direct line to come over and he brought over his father, Conrad.  In that post I realized that his Conrad's wife, Elizabeth Creter was 22 years younger than Conrad, which usually indicates that Conrad had been married before.  Soooo, I did a bunch more digging and spent lots of time before I realized that I had simply mis-typed his birthdate in the blog entry.  He was not born in 1803, but in 1830, making him one year older than his wife, Elizabeth.


But, then I looked again and realized that they were married in 1862, while the children (Frederick, Dad's grandfather, his sister Katharine Petzinger Creter, and Martin) were born between 1851 and 1859.  So, I was back where I started thinking that he probably had an earlier wife.  Except, a review of the transcriptions of the German birth records clearly show both the mother and father as Conrad and Elizabeth for all three children. 


So, I rechecked the marriage date of 1862 and that is what the extracted record shows.  So either the folks transcribing the marriage record misread or mistyped the date or (gasp!) they were married way after the fact.  I have seen lots of instances where marriages were after a first born child, but not after three.  Folks had to obtain permission to marry and sometimes when politics were exceptionally volatile, marriage requests were postponed by the applicants or simply not approved for extended periods by the politicians/clergymen, but apparently folks went ahead and acted as if they were married anyway.  There was much unrest and revolutions throughout Europe in 1848.  Following this in Darmstadt, the 1850's was a time of repression, so I guess it could have impacted marriage approvals. 


I could order the microfiche from Salt Lake City and go to a local LDS church to review it, but that won't happen anytime soon.  Those records are written in old German and extremely difficult to read, so we will leave the scandalous marriage date as is for now.