Ancestors

Casper Hemker

Casper Hemker was born in Germany on September 29, 1846, son of Casper Hemker Sr. and a mother whose name the St. Louis clerk of 1917 wrote as Louisa, with a surname that reads Kaustane and defies confident reading. The 1900 census sets his immigration at 1866, when he would have been about twenty; the 1910 census says 1872; his death certificate credits him thirty-seven years at his last neighborhood. However the years are counted, he was in St. Louis with a family by 1876, when his first son was born there, and on October 24 of that year a St. Louis court made him a citizen.

He married Maria Schulte, called Mary, born in Germany in early 1852. The 1880 census records his trade: roller in a rolling mill, one of the ironworks jobs that drew German labor to the city's riverfront. Four children are known: Frank, Henry, Conrad and Marie. In later life he worked as a day laborer.

A stroke left him with a hemiplegia about ten months before the end. He died at the St. Louis City Hospital on September 7, 1917, three weeks short of seventy-one, of bronchopneumonia on top of the old paralysis, and was buried at Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery. The death notice named his widow and all four children; within eight years the same paper would print notices for three of them. Henry, a city police officer, died in the influenza of October 1918; Marie Starnes died in 1920; and Mary herself died across the river at Belleville in June 1925 and was laid beside him.

If Casper Hemker is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Casper Hemker (1846-1917)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/casper-hemker-1846-1917-3c82c3.