My second cousin Daniel Travers has recently added some of our German Hönigsberger relatives to the tree. Basically, if you are following our family, they are variously connected to the Engelmanns, Tuchmanns, and Steinhardts of Floss.
However, when i was a child, my mother (born Lilo Erlanger) made a great point of repeatedly visiting the then-remote ghost town of Copperopolis in Calaveras County, California. We went there at least five, maybe six or seven, times. There were only four surviving buildings in this town, dating from the brief California Copper Rush (an offshoot of the Gold Rush and the Silver Rush) of the Civil War era. We would stay in nearby Angel's Camp and drive out to abandoned Copperopolis and dig around (quite illegally) for pot sherds and other things. We spent several summers along Highway 49 visiting Gold Rush towns, but we always stopped out at Copperopolis, which was then entirely in shambles and not restored as it is now.
So .... when Daniel added the Honigsbergers to the tree, something sparked in my memory and i did a brief Google search and found the L. Honigsberger store in Copperopolis. His first name unrecorded, L. Honisgsberger, born in Germany, had built the store in 1861, then rebuilt it in 1867. WHO WAS HE?
My mother had a copy of our family stammbaum and knew all the surnames on it. She also was a research librarian at UC-Berkeley and often used the old Crocker-Langley City Directories of San Francisco to research authors and business people of the 19th century; in fact, she taught me how to do this and i helped her with her research projects. Following the research path i suspected that she had followed, i looked up the Honigsbergers in San Francisco a generation later (they would have left Calaveras County and moved back to civilization if they were typical of the family) and, sure enough, there were several Honigsbergers in San Francisco in 1899, 1917, and so forth, and they worked for or owned retail stores.
Why has the first name of the German-born retail store owner "L. Honigsberger" of Copperopolis, California, not been found? If he was true to family naming conventions, he was likely named Löb, Loew, Louis, or some variation thereof. If he built the first store in 1861, his birth date should be around 1820 - 1840, most likely 1825 - 1835.
I cannot find him on Geni ... or anywhere. I find no grave for him in America. Did he return to Germany prior to his death? Did he vanish without a trace?
Was my mother digging around Copperopolis trying to find out who these Honigsbergers were and if they were relatives? Dang, i wish she were still alive so i could ask her! Why didn't i pay more attention when she went on and on about the history of Copperopolis? It was hot, dusty, and barren.... I tuned her voice out. I sat down in the shade and waited for her to stop her endless flow of information so we could go back to Angel's Camp and i could buy a canned chocolate milk drink. DAMN.
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