Hoffmann | Homestead Genealogy

Little is known about Michael Noehl and Magdalena Hoffman, a couple who spent their married life in the village of Holsthum, Eifelkreis Bitburg-Prüm, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Holsthum was described by one of their sons as “situated in a lovely valley of rich agricultural land, crowned with fruit trees, and further off, with magnificent forests, between nurseries and rose plantations.” Even now it remains a quaint, pastoral village.

Michael Noehl, one of at least eight children of Johannes Noehl and Elisabeth Gierens, was born in Niederstedem, Eifelkreis Bitburg-Prüm, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany on 22 June 1828. Nothing is known of his childhood, but as a young man, he entered the military. According to the memoirs of his son, Michael served as a Prussian soldier in Koblenz between the years 1847-1851; during the Baden Revolution in 1848, he stood sentry at the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress.

After his service, Michael married Magdalena Hoffman, who was born on 21 Jul 1833 in Holsthum, one of at least four children of Mathias Hoffman and Magdalena Ehr. Michael and Magdalena were married on 12 February 1857; Michael was twenty-eight and Magdalena twenty-three at the time of their marriage, which was recorded at Schankweiler. The Schankweiler Klaus is an eighteenth-century chapel and hermitage tucked into the forest approximately two miles from the village of Holsthum, and still stands today.

Schankweiler, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany photograph, 2009; privately held by Melanie Frick, 2013.

Together, the couple had seven sons: Mathias (1858), Michael (1860), Nikolaus (1864), Nikolaus (1866), Mathias (1868), Johann (1870), and Jakob (1873). Notably, despite name repetition among their sons, it is believed that all survived to adulthood. (This is not the first case of name repetition among children of this region that I have observed.)

Mathias Noehl (1868-1950), second from right, with brothers, perhaps Nikolaus, Johan, and Jakob Noehl, Holsthum, Germany, 1938; digital image 2009, privately held by Roland Noehl, Holsthum, Germany, 2009.

A great-grandson of Michael and Magdalena remembered being told that Michael was a forester, and Magdalena certainly had her hands full raising seven sons, but few details are known of their adult lives. One of their sons recalled completing school at the age of fourteen and going to work herding sheep to help his parents pay off a debt on their property; later this same son was apprenticed to a rose grower, so it may be assumed that their other sons were similarly established with apprenticeships.

Michael saw several of his siblings immigrate to America in the nineteenth century; his sister Susanna and his brothers Matthias and Johann all settled in Minnesota. Likewise, Magdalena saw a paternal aunt and a paternal uncle immigrate to Minnesota and Iowa. Later, Michael and Magdalena bade farewell to two of their own children who left their homeland to try their luck on American soil: Michael in 1881 and Mathias (1868) in 1886. From these two sons then came fifteen American grandchildren whom Michael and Magdalena never had the opportunity to meet.

Michael and Magdalena lived out their lives in Holsthum, surviving at least to their sixties, as it is known that their son Mathias came from America to visit in 1894 and found them in good health at that time. To the best of my knowledge, however, their graves, according to German custom, have long since been recycled and are no longer marked.

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Mathias Noehl attempted to settle in Canada on at least two occasions after emigrating from Germany to the Midwest as a young man in 1886. After a stint living among relatives in Minnesota, he married fellow immigrant Elisabeth Hoffmann in North Washington, Chickasaw County, Iowa, in 1896. The couple had a son in 1897 and a daughter in 1898, and in 1899, as Mathias later wrote in his memoir, “The desire for migratory life befell us again.” He continued:

“We loaded all that we possessed into a railway car, and traveled to the plains of Alberta, Canada, to meet another stroke of ill fortune, which we had not expected. The climate and the foodstuffs of that country did not agree with us, so we took sick and the doctor advised us to return to the U.S. We went back to the forests of Minnesota, where between 1886 and 1894 I had built my air castles, with which I comforted my wife. My wife felt disappointed when we arrived there, and all I possessed consisted in nothing else but air castles. Besides, we had the terrible cold weather in winter 1899. We stayed there until spring; when the birds flew northward, we remembered the fleshpots of Iowa, and this drove us back to where in 1896 I had found my Waterloo. There, the death of two old people had pity on us, which made a dwelling available for our children and us […]. In 1900 we returned in bitter disappointment to North Washington, with all our savings lost, and one more child. That child is all we gained with our adventures in Canada.”

It is unknown where exactly in “the plains of Alberta” the Noehl family lived in 1899, but it is possible that they were in Pincher Creek, a settlement that attracted German-American Catholics around this time.

Despite finding failure in Alberta, Mathias remained convinced that Canada was in his future. In the spring of 1903, now thirty-four years old and the father of four children, he applied for a homestead in Saskatchewan. The homestead was located eighty-five miles east of Saskatoon near the village of Muenster, in an area known as St. Peter’s Colony. This colony, founded in 1902, was the brainchild of the Benedictine order, the German American Land Company, and the Catholic Settlement Society of St. Paul, Minnesota; land was set aside specifically for German Catholics, who responded to advertisements for the colony and flocked north from the Midwestern states. Here there was to be ample farmland, a colony of like-minded people who shared their language and faith, and a new monastery at the helm, to boot.

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The Noehl family was the target audience for this venture, but ultimately did not remain long enough to prove the homestead. A grandson recalled being told that the family found the water in Saskatchewan to be too alkaline, and apparently many settlers were displeased with the brush-covered land. As the Noehl family’s fourth child was born in Iowa in the spring of 1904, it seems that their time spent in Saskatchewan amounted to less than one year.

Mathias, ever filled with wanderlust, attempted once more to relocate from the Midwest, although he no longer had his sights set on Canada. As the story goes, he visited Oregon several years later and, finding a welcoming German community (perhaps Mt. Angel) and stunning forests that reminded him of his homeland, began to make plans for his family to move once again. However, as his wife was at that point expecting their seventh or eighth child, she put her foot down—and in Iowa they remained for good.

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