Klipfel Family Sketch - An American Adventure

Family chart of Joseph Klipfel, his wife Margaret Schlembach, and their four immigrant children

Hausen near Schonungen, Bavaria - The ancestral village of this family is Hausen near Schonungen in Bavaria. Parish records for Hausen have been preserved in the Catholic Diocesan Archives in Würzburg and trace family events from the 1739 marriage of Michael Kluepfel to Anna Maria Schmitt. Their grandson Joseph Klipfel was born and raised his family in that same village of Hausen near Schonungen in Bavaria. For reasons that we have yet to learn, at age 56 Joseph Klipfel, along with his wife Margaret Schlembach and three adult children, left the village of Hausen to begin a new life in America. The family boarded the ship Averick Heineken in Bremen and arrived in the Port of Baltimore on 30 July 1834.

Daughter Catherine Klipfel married John Brunn in Hausen in 1835 and the couple immigrated ten years later in 1844, along with their daughter Barbara Brunn, who was born in Bavaria in 1839.

Auglaize County, Ohio - Going directly to Pusheta Township, Auglaize County, Ohio in the late summer of 1834, Joseph Klipfel and Margaret Schlembach and their three adult children established themselves as part of the fabric of community life for generations to come. The adult children who accompanied them in 1834 were:

Daughter Margaret Klipfel married Joseph Wehner on 8 June 1835 and raised a family of eight children.
Son Augustin Klipfel married Franziska Miller. Augustin died an untimely death at age 41 in 1851. Franziska remarried to John Rammelmeyer, who removed the family to Dayton for a time. Franziska died in the decade of the 1860s, the exact date unknown. Augustin and Franziska's son Augustus William Klipfel and wife Mary Delilah Bitler owned and operated Klipfel's Grocery in Wapakoneta until his death in 1919.
Son Francis Klipfel married Elizabeth Miller and relocated to Dayton, Montgomery County. Francis later served in an artillery regiment during the Civil War, at the age of 45.

Alongside the Klipfel family, the Brunn family and the Wehner family remained in the area for several generations.

Pueblo County, Colorado - Establishing the Rocky Mountain branch of the Klipfel family, August Klipfel, son of Francis, along with his wife Leah Thomas, moved their family of nine children to Beulah, Pueblo County, Colorado, from Worth County, Missouri about 1879. Augustus served in the Ohio 106th during the Civil War, enlisting in his hometown of Dayton. In Beulah, he operated a sawmill and served on the school board. Augustus died in 1918; Leah died just two weeks later.