Wowie - huge brickwall breakthrough!
Grandma Maas' mother's maiden name was Werner - Mary Charlotta Louisa Werner. She married Louis Schütz (Schultz) with whom all her children were fathered. When he died, she went on to marry twice more - Buchner and Bunce.
Family lore from Grandma Maas was that her grandmother (Mary's mother) had married an Englishman and was a Lady-in-Waiting, but when she was childless for some period of time, her husband divorced her. That was all I remembered. Then I was reviewing Shirle Gordon's autobiography and she tells the story similarly, but further said that Mary's mother was sent to Australia in disgrace. She met Mr. Werner aboard the ship, married him and returned to Germany.
Then I was reviewing some notes I had taken from Grandma's family bible that I had copied down: "Great Grandma - Schnoekel." I did not know if this name was associated with her father's side of the family (Schutz) or her mother's. So I did a simple search on FamilySearch with Werner and Schnoekel and a death record came up for Wilhelmine Louise Charlotte Schnöckel with her husband, Cornelius Heinrich Werner reporting her death. This was looking really promising as the woman's name shared both Charlotte and Louise in the name and I had notes that Mary Werner had brothers named John and Charles (Charles would be Americanized form of Cornelius). They were living in Hamburg where Mary was reported to be born.
Included in the death information were the names of her parents -- Johann Christian Schnöckel and Sophia Dorothea Christiana Tollsdorf.
Then I searched on Cornelius and found his death record showing he had been married to Wilhelmine Louise Charlotte Schnöckel, previously married to a Mr. Mönckeberg. And his parents are Carl Christian Werner and Maria Elisabeth Steinfurth. Another search found Wilhelmine's marriage to Cornelius, in Hull, England!
A search of Mr. Mönckeberg brought up a divorce reference in Hamburg for George August Carl Mönckeberg and Wilhelmine in Germany. She married Cornelius Werner within one year of her divorce.
Ooh, ooh, now we really were getting somewhere close to the family story, BUT......looks like things got a little confused. She was divorced in Germany, not England and she remarried in England, not in Australia or Germany! Sounds like the English Lady-in-Waiting story was a fiction promoted to cover an embarrassing divorce?
So I am confident that these folks are our ancestors and a chance search uncovered not one, but two more generations in the Werner family. A few brief searches of these new names turned up nothing - unfortunately, there are not many records from Hamburg online - yet.
Geeky family historian that I am allows me to proclaim, "Exciting Stuff!!!"
