Caspar Hercules
Caspar Hercules was born at Warstein, a hill town of the old Duchy of Westphalia in the Sauerland, on August 19, 1800, and baptized Johann Caspar Wilhelm at the parish church of St. Pankratius, the legitimate son of Franz Heinrich Hercules and Elisabeth Hense. The clerk wrote the family's name Hergeles; a later hand corrected it to Hercules. Prussia took Westphalia in his youth and governed it from Arnsberg, the district seat, which is what he told a St. Louis census taker sixty years later: born Arnsberg, Westphal.
On October 17, 1826 he married Maria Theresia Antonetta Hoppe at Warstein, act 13 of the year's register. He was twenty-six; she had turned twenty-three six days before, Warstein-born herself, a daughter of Johann Hoppe and Elisabeth Muller. Four children came in the town: Johannes Ludwig Conrad in 1827, the twins Anton Joseph and Franz Jacob in May 1830, of whom Franz Jacob died at fourteen months, and Maria Anna Francisca in October 1832. After her baptism the family vanishes from the Warstein books.
They had gone to America. Caspar was in St. Louis by the early 1840s: his son Albert was born in the city in July 1843, which sets the family's arrival ahead of the mass German immigration of 1848 and among the city's founding German generation. Theresia does not appear in the American censuses beside him, and may have died before 1860. The census of that year shows Caspar, about fifty-nine, heading a second ward household with sixteen-year-old Albert in it; the census of 1870 shows the arrangement reversed, Caspar at seventy living in Albert's house. He died after 1870, in the years before Missouri kept death certificates, and his grave is not known; his son and grandchildren lie at Sts. Peter and Paul, the German Catholic cemetery of the south side, and he probably does too.
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Cite: Heirology, "Caspar Hercules (b. 1800)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/caspar-hercules-1800-962a47.