to see where Ernest fits into the family tree click here
Ernest is the great-great-grandfather to the ‘generation X’ crowd out there.
Up until the 2000s, it seems his story was unknown to the Australian family. He was the first Meurer in our branch to arrive in Australia but anything earlier than his arrival here was a mystery.
It is interesting the timeline of the breakthroughs in finding the German Meurer ancestral line. Over the past 7 years, a lot has been learned ….
- Feb 2013 – A photo from Barbara Lynch of Ernest Meurer and Augusta
- Apr 2013 – A scrap of paper with unknown Meurer names written by Olive Meurer that started the quest
- Apr 2014 – Contact with a researcher (Dr. Synthia Moele) in Hessen Germany, provided further evidence of Meurer ancestors and the start of the Susanna Meurer story
- Ancestry.Com research that connected some names from a scrap of paper to individuals on the family tree
- Mar 2018 – Contact with a second researcher by John Cherry in Hessen Germany that provided substantial source information on the Meurer’s and in particular locked down the idea that Susanna was the Meurer not Christian
- Aug 2020 – Barabara Lynch found details of 17th-18th Century ancestors on the Meurer maternal line which expanded the tree significantly
- Sep 2020 – further contact with the Hessen researcher provided more detail of Ernest’s mother, Susanna, and her children and marital status. Also several more generations of Preacher Meurer’s
Olive Meurer’s scrap of paper –
This is what I wrote about that scrap of paper back in 2013, since that time the information has been confirmed to be correct.
A tantalizing old document was discovered in an old cookbook originally belonging to Olive (Oye) Meurer. The paper had a sketchy list of names, some known and easily linked to known information about those individuals. Other names are not so easy to identify.
The really curious information within this document is the group under the name Johann Conrad Meurer 1770/71, squeezed in on the bottom left diagonally. These appear to be the ‘missing’ generations prior to the Meurer’s who emigrated to Australia in the 1850s. And the generation that several researchers have been searching for without luck. What is a problem is that the dates do not match neatly with what is known already, although this information we had previously may have been incorrect?
Unfortunately, Oye’s handwriting is not the greatest, and deciphering the names and dates is not straightforward.
The best transcription I can manage is…
* Johann Conrad Meurer – born 1770/71, died 18/7/1815 (~ 45 years old),
married 20/12/1806
* Anna Gruneman, [Grunemar], age 31 (born. 1775?)Children
* Charlotte Willemena, born 1803
* Ernest Ludwig, born 2/8/1809
* Carl August Nap?, born 1810, died 1872
* Daniel Carl, born 1813, died 1813
* Chssd(t?) [Christian?] Andreas, born 1816
Notes written by Olive Meurer (in 1960s) detailing ancestors’ names and dates.
