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Note: I believe Emma's real name is Ana Maria. I can only find this name to
coincide with the birth year. I will further investigate this matter. I will leave
the birth date that I have until I find out it is wrong.
Emma owned a hat shop in Avon for many years. I was told this by my Aunt Lenore Hepner. Emma was her aunt.
____________________________________ Recently I was contacted by Christine Sievers, from San Diego, California, she is the granddaughter of Emma Casper and Joseph H. Hinkel. She has furnished me with much needed information on the Casper side of the family.
She has sent me love letters to Emma from Fred Kramer, and an Albert, also stories that her mother Delores is telling her. Delores if now 89 and still remembers the old stories. Christine also has pictures of my grandfather, Peter Casper, and of Avon and French Creek at about the turn of the century.
Here are the stories as given to me by Christine:
The story of Christine's grandmother's marriage has always been a mystery. Shortly before Emma married, she had love letters written to her by someone named Fred Kramer & an Albert. When her sister Catherine died (who she was very close to) the story goes that she promised to take care of Richard. That, supposedly was the reason for her marriage to Joseph Hinkel. She raised Richard - who actually was very bright, but quiet. As the tree that I sent you shows, he married, had 2 sons, and died in 1980. He came to visit Christine and family in California, shortly before he died. She remembers him as being a delightful man.
On with the mystery! Now the Hinkels have been horribly hard for Chris to trace so far. She never met her grandfather Hinkel. he and her grandmother were divorced, somewhere around 1914. Her mother remembers he left when she was 5 years old. He left Emma for another woman. One day, about 15 years ago, Christine was going through a book that had belonged to her grandmother and a newspaper article fell out. It was about a woman who hung herself. This was the woman that my grandfather had left her grandmother for! The divorce was traumatic for Christine's mother's family. Her mother always felt that her father left because of something she had done. A typical psychological reaction for a 5 year old, who had adored her father. She remembers how they were shunned in the neighborhood because of the divorce. In the Catholic neighborhood, in 1914, divorce was a scandal. I think that is why all of her family were always so shy. Uncle Richard was the only one of the children who kept in contact with my grandfather. Joseph H. Hinkel died in a rest home in Cleveland, Ohio in 1965.
He was a very mysterious man to Christine. He worked for the railroad, and some secret branch of the government. My grandmother, as suspicious women everywhere, went through his wallet on night, and found an ID card of some sort. He was gone a lot, and every time he came home her grandmother would become pregnant. Her mother remembers a gun he kept in a dresser drawer when they were kids and used to peek at it.
Christine says she would love to find out if there are any other children from Joseph, because of his indiscretions.
In her later years Emma went to live with her youngest daughter Wanda and her husband Richard Kappenhagen. Chris was always close to her grandmother, but the stories he told her were always about her childhood. Her uncle, Richard Kappenhagen, was a close friend of her father even before they married sisters. They were her closest relatives, outside of her immediate family, and she thought of them as an extra set of parents at times. They never had any children. they and my family ended up in the San Diego county area of California. And that is where here grandmother died.
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