Story of Gartenweg 6

hannover-l
1

Greetings Hannover Listers,

I want to thank those of you who have given me feedback on my questions regarding the address of Gartenweg 6 in Hannover. I especially want thank Susanne, Barbara, Holger,and J�rgen. I appreciate your willingness to try and solve this riddle. I will continue to work on this project as I gather new information. I would like to share with you how I came about searching for an address in Germany.

William Dennett Thigpen was orphaned in 1911 at the age of 16, along with nine brothers and sisters. He joined the Navy and later worked as an assistant engineer on various freighter ships. I discovered a note leaving the Navy. No one in the family had any knowledge of her beyond stories that had been passed down since the 1920's. And what a story. William is believed to have been murdered on the way to visit his siblings in north Florida sometime between 1925 - 1930. Positive identification was not made and a grave cannot be located. I was not even sure the stories about his German wife were true until I found the immigration records using ancestry.com. I found three port entry records for Karoline Thigpen. In her first immigration record, she indicated that she had never been to the the US before and that she was married to William Thigpen. This was in 1925. In 1930, on her second entry, she is a widow--as she is on the 1930, Paterson, NJ census. Nine records can be found for William Thigpen as a crew member of various ships. The last entry is in the fall of 1925, several months after Karoline made her first entry.

Because William Thigpen was an orphan, and did not really have a home to go to in north Florida, I suspect that Karoline did not know enough about his brothers and sisters to try to contact them. She arrived in America and in a very short time was all alone.

I want to locate her family in Hannover. The last known residence of Karoline is in the Bronx, New York in 1937. I am currently waiting to hear back from sources that may give me a clue as to her life in Paterson, NJ and in NY. I have also ordered a roll of marriage records for the Limmer region of Hannover. Since she stated that she was married before her first port entry, it follows that she was married to William in Germany. She made two trips back to Germany after William died. The last trip was in 1937. It is possible that someone who was at her family's home in Germany at that time is still alive. That is why I want to locate the family that resided at Garteweg 6 in Hannover in 1925.

Best regards,
Allen Thigpen

2

Interesting story there. While you may make further headway with a little luck from the German side on the list, I would say it is imperative that you try to uncover what became of William Thigpen himself. The lack of specifics there creates an unfortunate void.

William is believed to have been murdered on the way to visit his
siblings in north Florida sometime between 1925 - 1930. Positive
identification was not made and a grave cannot be located.

Do you have any concrete evidence he was actually murdered, or was/is he simply a lost John Doe [MIA]. If not, perhaps he chose to conveniently disappear for reasons unknown to the family (just to muddy the waters a bit more). Due to the circumstances as presented (no specific date or location), there is a lot of ground to explore unfortunately. Your key to discovery may lie in the tracking down of present-day cousins who descend from William's various siblings (of course for all I know, you may be one of them). Someone in the extended family probably knows or has heard more. Always easier said than done, but still do-able if you're devoted enough.

You might want to pull the court records pertinent to the family dissolution, if they're accessible and if the siblings in question are not well known (not sure how far along here you've traveled). Make sure to explore the 1930 federal census records thoroughly too. Who knows who may be lurking within.

Best of luck. Jb

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PS. Forgot to mention that in many states, Coroner records, like Death records, are indexed and held at the state level (over and beyond the county, and occasionally, city level). Not sure where your William called home (New Jersey, Florida, elsewhere?), but if you have your suspicions where this may have been, certainly inquire along those line for any applicable areas. State archives / state libraries can help pinpoint these kinds of record sources; so too can state / county historical and genealogical societies. Most all have convenient websites that indicate their in-house holdings.

Now if he was traveling interstate when his disappearance occurred, and this covers more than say two states, your work is truly cut out for you when it comes to narrowing down his demise specifics. Jb