The fluidity of names in the past is one of the distinct impressions a person gets from looking into ancestral history. This flexibility with nomenclature included the names of passenger ships as well as people.
For example, in 1867, Caird & Co. of Greenock, Scotland, built a ship for Norddeutscher Lloyd which was to be called the Rhein. However, before it ever floated, the ship was sold to the Royal Mail Steamship Company, which launched it in February, 1868, as the Neva (who knew that rapper language started so early!).
So, Caird & Co. of Greenock decided to take another ship it was building with the intention of calling it the Oder and deliver that vessel to Norddeutscher Lloyd with the name of Rhein on its hull. Thus, S.S. Rhein (1) came into existence. It is called S.S. Rhein (1) because after it was scrapped Norddeutscher Lloyd had another ship built which was called by the same name, S.S. Rhein.
The S.S. Rhein (1) was launched in August, 1868, and on October 3 embarked on its maiden voyage from Bremen to New York via Southampton. The ship was 349 feet long, 40 feet in breadth, and weighed 2,901 tons. It was a clipper bow with one funnel, two masts and screw propulsion able to provide a service speed of 12 knots. The ship was designed to accommodate 70 first-class passengers, 100 second-class guests and 600 steerage customers, along with a crew of 117.
Among the passengers who boarded the S.S. Rhein at Bremen, Germany, in April, 1873, was a farmer named Heinrich (Henry) Alfke, along with his wife Margarethe and their six children: Maria (16), Dorothea (9), Heinrich (9), Deidrich (7), Margie (3) and Wilhe (6 months).
The S.S. Rhein docked in New York on May 2, 1873, where the ship’s steward compiled the list of all passengers. For some reason, which we will probably never know, that steward wrote down Henry’s name as Johann Alfke. Nowhere else in the documents that we have is Johann listed as a given name for Henry, so the question is “Why did the steward list Henry as Johann? Was it because that was his real name, but he preferred Henry? Was it because Johann was his middle name? Was it because the steward had too many names rattling around in his brain after writing names down all day?” It is difficult to think that Henry’s German accent could be blamed for the steward thinking he heard Johann instead of Heinrich when Henry gave his name. Oh, well!
One thing we do know is that the family on record in the ship’s list is certainly Henry with his wife and children. We also know that another child was born to Henry and his wife Maggie, two years after they arrived in the States. Interestingly, they named him—John!
Sometime between their arrival in America and the 1880 census, their joy over John’s birth was tempered by the death of their second daughter, Dorothea. We don’t know much about her. The only place I can find a record of her name is on the ship’s list. However, her name is not on the family list of names in the records of the US Census of 1880, and in the 1900 Census the information is given that Maggie is the mother of seven children, six of whom were still living at the time.
The Alfke family located in Aplington, Iowa, for a time, after which they moved to Radcliffe, Iowa, where they established their permanent family residence. Henry and Maggie’s graves may be seen in the Radcliffe Cemetery, as he died in 1903 and she in 1905.
The fact that the family located in Radcliffe, north of Ames, makes one wonder how their daughter Maria came into contact with Boldewyn Odens from the Little Rock area of northwestern Iowa, whom she married on September 6, 1888, after his first wife, Wendelke Jansen Müller, died in 1884.
The answer to that probably lies in the 1880 Census, where we find that after Boldewyn and Wendelke migrated to the United States with their children in 1879 (see my post titled A Not-So-Bon Voyage), they lived near Aplington in Washington Township, Butler County, Iowa, for a while before moving to the Little Rock area. While the Odens family lived in Butler County, they were within 35-40 miles of the Alfke family. Somehow, acquaintance was probably made between the two families during that time.
The union of Boldewyn and Maria brought at least five children into the world: John, born August 7, 1889; Mabel Margaret, born March 15, 1892; Margaret Caroline, born December 2, 1893; and David B., born January 19, 1898. David died 20 days after his birth, on February 8, with the listed cause of death being croup. The fifth child, possibly born before the other four, is one about whom we have very little information—no name and only a hint of the date of birth and the date of death.
While her husband died in 1917, Maria lived until 1950. Opa remembered her as being a woman who genuinely trusted the Lord Jesus Christ. We have to assume that His care and her trust in Him were what sustained her through the challenges and sorrows she faced in this world. After all, consider what it must have been like for her as a 32-year-old woman to marry into a family of children who are already about 26, 24, 18, 16 and 7 years of age, and who have within the previous ten years experienced the deaths of five siblings, along with their own mother. Add to that a 21-year-old who had run away from home 3 years previously. Along with this, Maria had her own challenges of giving birth and raising three more children, as well as the sorrow of losing one child at birth and another 20 days after birth.
Maria spent most of the years of her widowhood in Pipestone, Minnesota, where she was a member of the Zion Evangelical United Brethren church. She died in her Pipestone home on May 21, 1950. She was buried with her husband and daughter in the Little Rock, Iowa, cemetery. Her son John, Opa’s father and my grandfather, died six years later.
