On September 5, 2018 my wife Patti and I joined a small pre-talk reception for a book talk by Steven Pinker hosted by the Commonwealth Club at Marines' Memorial Theatre in San Francisco. We grabbed a glass of wine, and I engaged a gray-haired lady who was standing a bit off by herself; seeing her name "Fran Dependahl" on her name tag, I asked if "Dependahl" was German – oddly the first thing that came to my mind, but not surprising given my genealogy obsession. She responded in German, saying that she actually had Swiss ancestry. Taking that in stride, I responded, also in German. As I remember it, our conversation went something like this (translated from German):
Me: Where in Switzerland?
Fran: Canton Bern.
Me: Which town?
Fran: A small town that you've probably never heard of, Koppigen.
Me: Koppigen! I have ancestry from that town. What was their surname?
Fran: Baumberger.
Me: I also have Baumberger ancestry from Koppigen. Where did they settle?
Fran: Greenville, Illinois.
Me: Oh, the Illinois Baumbergers!
My 4th great-grandmother Elizabeth Baumberger Affolter is the first entry in the 735-page book Colorado Families: A Territorial Heritage:
Elizabeth Affolter was born Elizabeth Baumberger 27 Jun 1794 in Koppigen, Canton of Bern, Switzerland... [she] came to New Orleans, La in 1852; the ocean voyage took forty days. She, with her daughter, Elisabeth, son-in-law, Rudolph Greub and two granddaughter, went up the river to Illinois where her relatives, the Baumbergers, lived. From there Elizabeth and the Greubs stopped in Easton, Buchanan Co, Mo, before making one more move in 1864 to Colo to join her sons Jacob and Frederick who had arrived earlier. Once there, she kept house for them at their cabin by Haystack Mtn at what was known as Left Hand Cr. [See "Should be a Movie" for a photo of the cabin as it stands today in Old Mill Park in Longmont, and more about Elizabeth's trip.]
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| Elizabeth Baumberger Affolter 1794-1867, Burlington Cemetery, Longmont |
Entry 4 in Colorado Families, for Elizabeth's son Frederick Affolter, mentions the relatives in Illinois again:
Frederick purchased 80 acres near the village of Burlington from Clayborne Adams 1 Dec 1865 for $1,100. He then started to Switz to learn cheese-making, but in Greenville, Ill while visiting a cousin he met his bride-to-be; they tied the knot and took the train back to Julesburg.
I had read these paragraphs multiple times, and mentally noted that some Baumberger relatives had lived in Greenville back then, but never made the exact connection. We switched to our native English, and Fran seemed skeptical at first, but a bit more conversation persuaded her that I was in fact a relative. We exchanged emails, and she put me in touch with a couple relatives who had worked on their genealogy.
When I got back home I did figure out the exact connection, and determined we were 5th cousins, sharing 4th-great-grandparents Niklaus Baumberger, born 1770, and Elisabeth Knuchel, born 1767, who married and raised a family in Koppigen (for more on Koppigen, see "This ancestor went to market").
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| Relationship chart: Kenyon to Dependahl |
The coincidence of running into a 5th cousin is partly due to the large families descendants of these ancient Baumbergers; Eliza Greub, halfway down the relationship chart and my great-grandmother, probably has over a thousand descendants living today. Exponentially ratcheting that estimate up for the three generations ahead of her, there may be a hundred-thousand descendants of Niklaus and Elizabeth Baumberger. Nonetheless, being able to make that connection with a random stranger in five minutes was a bit of magic.
I saw Frances one more time, at another Commonwealth Club event, before the pandemic put a hold on our trips to the Commonwealth Club. Writing this story, I wondered about this cousin again, and Googled her name. Sadly, I found an obituary for Frances Dependahl, who passed away just a few months ago in San Francisco (the San Francisco Chronicle has her name misspelled "Francis" rather than "Frances" as it is in the 1950 Census and her LinkedIn profile). She was a patron of the arts, and apparently an all around good person, but left no children or descendants herself. Rest in peace cousin.
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| Frances Dependahl obituary, Legacy.com |
Sources
Colorado Families: A Territorial Heritage. 1981. Denver, Colorado: The Colorado Genealogical Society.
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