This “Uncovering Our Roots” section for each family explains how my father (Leonard H. Hellmers, Sr.) and I discovered the home community of each immigrant ancestor in the Hellmers-Neff family.
Norman D. Hellmers
On 25 September 1979—during the three-week visit Dad and I made to Germany—we visited the Hessiche Familiengeschichtliche Vereinigung in Darmstadt seeking information on Philipp Neff. No record could be found of him. They suggested Max Steinbaur as a researcher, but he said he could not research Philipp Neff without a specific place of origin.
As part of Dad’s research, he interviewed various family members. On Saturday, 23 January 1982, he visited with Dorothy Acker Schoeny in Algiers (that part of New Orleans across the Mississippi River). She was Philipp Neff's granddaughter. Dorothy gave Dad details about her branch of the Neff family, a family reunion photograph, and information on several Neff tombs. Most importantly, however, she gave Dad four old envelopes addressed to Philipp Neff in New Orleans that had been mailed from Germany.
That Saturday evening, Dad telephoned me (I was then living in southern Indiana) to tell about the envelopes. When he said that the postmark was “Höchst im O.W.,” I knew immediately that the “O.W.” stood for Odenwald, and that we would surely find Philipp among the Neffs in that part of Germany.
In one letter, I asked the church if they might know of any living relatives. They sent me the name of Heinrich Mohr, a great-grandson of Anna Neff Mohr, Philipp Neff’s sister. In April 1983 I sent Heinrich a letter asking about his family. In response, I heard from Heinrich, Heinrich’s younger brother Wilhelm, and Wilhelm’s daughter, Kerstin. They provided what information they could about their ancestry and about their own families. Best of all, however, we learned from Kerstin, then a college student, that she would soon be visiting the United States. In September of 1983, Kerstin visited us in our home at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Spencer County, Indiana.
While studying in Germany, my daughter Jennifer visited with Kerstin, her parents (Wilhelm and Trudl Mohr), and her uncle and aunt (Heinrich and Hanna Mohr) who still lived in Dusenbach and owned the house in which Philipp Neff was born, Philipp Neff’s “Geburtshaus.”
In March of 2006, with my wife Pat and son Jeffrey, I was able to visit Dusenbach, Höchst im Oldenwald, and several other towns in which the Neff ancestors lived. Sadly both Mohr brothers, Heinrich and Wilhelm, had passed away before I was able to visit them, but we did spend time with their widows, Hanna Boll Mohr in Dusenbach and Trudl Panhans Mohr in Gonsenheim (near Mainz). Also in Gonsenheim we visited with Kerstin Mohr, her husband Thomas Becker and their daughters, Anabel and Simone. A few pictures from this trip can be found here.
In recent years, the records of the Jackson Avenue Evangelical Congregation have been made available on microfilm at the Historic New Orleans Collection. After a page by page search of the un-indexed records, I found the record of Philipp Neff’s marriage to Caroline Oser.
