Hockemeyer families -- some detailed histories of selected Hockmeyer families and descendants

HOCKEMEYER Descendant Families

A look at selected families and their histories

By: Charles Young
From a book by: George Randolph Hockmeyer
A link below each family takes you to the parents' place in the big descendants list. That list serves as an index to families and their stories. If you came from an external search, and do not find your individual or family, please look in my Big Hockmeyer list. Your family has probably been moved to their own page with photos.

In 1990, George Hockmeyer wrote this about the family;
Anna Catharina Hussmeyer was the daughter of Johan Henrich Hussmeyer and Anna Engel Specht. The name Engel crops up a number of times in the Hockemeyer family history. Herr Falk Liebezeit, another German genealogist I have contacted, lives about 60 miles north of Osnabrueck at Diepholz and he has made several trips to the church at Achelnede to examine what records were available. He has recently been able to examine the Hockemeyer family records at the Evangelical-Lutheran church there and has learned that Christoph Henrich Hokemeyer, my great, great, great grandfather, was sometimes called Gerhard and had even once been known as Kunke. Herr Liebezeit explained that it was once common practice for people living and working on farms to assume the name of the farm. It is possible that Christoph Henrich, or Gerhard, worked on a Hokemeyer (or Hockemeyer) farm and eventually took that name for himself. The small villages scattered around Osnabrueck and Minden were farming communities and these farms were often named after their owners or original owners. Sometimes, if the farm was large and successful, even the community took the name.

Records of births, christenings, weddings and deaths were kept by the church and variations in the spellings of names were common clerical errors. But regardless of how Christoph Henrich's name was recorded, the names of his four children were all entered as Hockemeyer.

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Johan and his first 4 children were born in Bissendorf near Osnabrueck in the area that is now Germany. George Hockmeyer wrote this about Johan Henrich;
When he was 22, he married Catharina Maria Wienhorst. She died of consumption 19 years later, leaving him with four children, three girls and one boy, Johann Henrich, Jr.

Less than three months after Catharina Maria's death, Johann Henrich married Catharina Elisabeth Lanvermeyer in the church at Achelnede. He was 40 and she was 27. Her parents were Johann Hermann Lanvermeyer and Catherine Engel Böken (Boeken), both of the neighboring village of Holte.

There were six children by Johan Henrich's second marriage. The first was a son, my great grandfather, Hermann Heinrich, who was followed by five girls.

Thanks to Willem Lanfermeijer for correcting a mistake in this section. Email w.lanfermeyer at chello dot nl | Email help

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Johann Heinrich changed his name to John Henry after he came to America. In 1858 John Henry married Wilhelmina Hoener, who had been brought from Germany to Franklin County by her parents some four years earlier. Miena was 18 and he was just four days shy of 24. Two girls were born to John Henry and Miena. Catharina Maria, later known to the family as Mary, was born in 1859. A little over two years later, Maria Juliana arrived. She was later known as Julia.

John Henry and Miena's children attended the Bucklick school. In 1892, John Henry and Miena sold their farm near Campbellton and moved to Washington and it was here that Miena died in 1898.

John Henry lived with his daughter, Anna, until his death in 1918. All of his children but two daughters survived him. John Henry is buried at St. Peter's Cemetery in Washington, Missouri. You can read his autobiography.

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When Carrie, died in 1896, her husband, William Hollman, married her older sister, Anna Mathilde (Tillie). Tillie and William raised Carrie's four children.

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Charlotte Emilie, died in 1899, leaving her husband and two children. She was known to the family as Lottie. Perhaps she had been named after her cousin, her Uncle Fritz's oldest child, Emma Charlotte. Lottie was buried at Ballwin, Missouri, a town situated between St. Louis and Washington. After Lottie's death, her husband, Peter Schlueter, took the children back to live with him at his parents' home in Ballwin, MO. Or, perhaps, they had been living with his parents at the time of Lottie's death.

In his book, George Hockmeyer tells how he found information about his Aunt Lottie.

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Paul and family lived in Enid, Oklahoma mostly. Dad, Mom, and I visited them in the early 1990's, They were living in a split level house across the street from a small city park.

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John Vernon Twelker, Jr. passed away on July 7, 2014 at the age of 77. He died peacefully of complications from Alzheimer's Disease. A resident of Hawaii for over 20 years, he was born in 1937 to John Vernon Twelker, Sr. and Ardath B. Mohler. In 1961 he was married to Berniel Jamieson in Westwood, California and they had three children, Dan, Dave and Darla. John is survived by his twin brother Paul A. Twelker, three children including daughter-in-law Hazel, five grandchildren Sky, Sarah Beth, Ethan, Mia, Andrew, and great-grandchild Oliver. A memorial service was held at Pohai Nani in Kaneohe, Hawaii on Saturday, August 2, 2014.

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Thanks to Paul Twelker for additions and corrections to some of my data. In the fall of 2014, Paul wrote:

I so much appreciated the information you have compiled. I especially appreciated the story of John Henry Hockemeyer, your great grandfather. I often used this information in my teaching career in the Psychology Department of Trinity International University (Deerfield, Illinois).

I was born in San Diego, California in 1937, along with my identical twin brother, John. We lived in the same house for almost eighteen years, next door to our maternal grandparents. We were blessed with a close-knit family with abundant contact with aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I attended San Diego State College (B.A. in Experimental Psychology, 1958) and the University of California, Los Angeles (M.A. and Ed.D. in Educational Psychology (1963-1964). During my years at UCLA, I met Kathleen, a young, wonderful, vibrant, fun and warm-hearted woman who would become my wife in 1964. We recently celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary.

I count the years at UCLA as vintage years. I worked most semesters as a research assistant in both the School of Psychology and the School of Education, where I received an outstanding education and valuable hands-on experience in research. I was an active member of Alpha Gamma Omega, a Christ-centered fraternity, and active in the college departments at both First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and Bel-Air Presbyterian Church. I recall many wonderful times at Forest Home College Briefing Conferences, where I had an opportunity to stretch my faith and sit at the feet of gifted Bible teachers and Christian leaders. It was during those years that the Christian faith I had grown up with became very real and meaningful, and it remains so to this day.

After graduation in 1964, Kathleen and I moved to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where I directed research and development projects at Teaching Research, a Division of the Oregon State System of Higher Education, and later, the Instructional Development Division of United States International University. During those years, I had the pleasure of doing some pioneering work in the area of instructional simulation and gaming. When USIU closed the offices in Corvallis, my wife and I made the decision to strike out on a faith venture. We moved to our cabin at Black Butte Ranch, a golf and family resort in the Ponderosa pine forests on the eastern slopes of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains of Central Oregon. I continued with consulting work while Kathleen and I began several small tourist-oriented businesses in Sisters. I began making stained glass windows and soon found myself doing commissioned works. We raised our two sons, Steve and Eric in this most beautiful, close-knit community for eight years. We enjoyed long walks in the woods, fishing, hiking, biking, and ice-skating and skiing in the wintertime. We had an opportunity to make some wonderful friends during those years. Above all, we learned to place our trust in Almighty God to provide for our needs and lead us through the ups and downs of small business ownership.

In 1982, I joined the faculty of Judson Baptist College at The Dalles, where I headed up their Teacher Education Program. Although the college was experiencing severe financial strains, which resulted in our not receiving paychecks for the majority of the months there, we look back on those years with heartfelt fondness. Once again, we made a number of wonderful friends who helped us through the rough times with laughter and charity. And I met and came to deeply respect Dr. Herbert Anderson, who taught me more than he will ever imagine. When closure of the college became an increasing reality, in God's providence, I was offered a position as chairman of the Psychology Department at Trinity College (now Trinity International University) in Deerfield, Illinois. Leaving our home and our friends in Oregon was certainly one of the most unsettling things we ever went through. But when we returned to Sisters each summer, people would yell out of their cars, "Welcome back!"...and we knew we were back home! However, the twenty years I taught at Trinity allowed me to stretch and grow in untold ways, as well as affect the lives of countless students, some of whom I maintain contact with to this day.

As we began visioning our future years in semi-retirement, we became increasingly interested in Maui, which offered a pleasant year–round climate and tax advantages over Oregon. We traded our mountain home for a Kihei condominium, across from one of Maui's best beaches. Upon retirement from Trinity as Profession Emeritus of Psychology, we moved to Maui and began The Last Resort, Maui's original all-cotton apparel store.

Our sons stayed in the Pacific Northwest. Stephen lives in Portland where he is the Human Resources/Office Manager for River Network (an environmental group devoted to protecting water resources), and teaches piano and guitar. He is married to Erica Peirson, who is executive director at Down Syndrome Options, and Physician/Owner at Down Syndrome Treatment Center of Oregon. They have one son, Miles. Eric lives in Seattle, where he is Vice-President of Content Strategy for r2interactive. His wife, Debbie, is Senior Partner Delivery Manager at T-Mobile. They have one daughter, Julia Marie.

After ten years, we packed up the Maui store with our personal belongings, and returned to Sisters, Oregon where we opened our retail store and e-commerce web page catalog operation in the heart of Sister's vibrant shopping area. God has truly blessed us: we are back home! We are closer to our families and life-long friends, and enjoying a thriving business.

Keep on keeping on, and looking up. Aloha
Paul, The Last Resort

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George Hockmeyer writes;
In 1958 I happened to see the name Milford F. Hockemeyer in the Denver phone book and wrote to him. He replied and informed me that he was the grandson of Fritz, my grandfather's brother. Milford gave me the names of most of his grandfather's descendants, along with the addresses of many of them.

This breakthrough enabled me to contact other sources of family information and help fill out many barren branches of the Hockemeyer tree I had been trying to construct. Among the material I received from Milford was a photocopy of the travel pass used by Hermann Heinrich Hockemeyer and his family when they emigrated from Germany.


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