Thank you George VanRiper for telling me about the research at the iron mines.
This email was from Sue Maier and she gave permission to forward it.
Hi, Ms. Ullman --
Thanks very much for your note to the Friends of Long Pond Ironworks,
which has been forwarded to me. I have been researching the German
ironworkers at Ringwood, Long Pond and Charlotteburg for some time now
and am excited to hear from a (possible) descendant of the Coboles.
In your original note, you wrote: "It must have been a community of
German Catholics working the mines in Ringwood, Long Pond,
Charlottesburg..." As I'm sure you saw, the Friends of Long Pond
Ironworks' Web site (
www.users.nac.net/folpi) provides a history of the
ironworks. But very briefly, in 1764, a German ironmaster named Peter
Hasenclever came to the American Colonies, with British financial
backing, in order to build ironworks and other profit-generating
concerns. He purchased an existing ironworks at Ringwood, NJ, as well as
tracts of land along the Long Pond River near Ringwood; on the
Pequannock River (Charlottenburg); and across the Hudson River in
Cortlandt, NY. He built new forges and furnaces at all of the sites and
imported 535 German and English workers to the Colonies to staff the
enterprises. It is believed that the Coboles and many other families who
appear in the Catholic Church records at Ringwood, Long Pond and
Charlottenburg came with this group.
The best source of information about the Cobole family so far is an
article titled "Early Catholic Immigrants to New Jersey Iron Mills," by
the German genealogist Walter Petto. It was published (in English) in
the Spring 1991 edition (vol. 16, no. 1) of "The Palatine Immigrant,"
the quarterly journal of Palatines to America, Capital Univ. Box 101,
Columbus, OH 43209-2394. According to Mr. Petto, the history of the
Coboles extends back to 1700, when a workman named Jean Gobelet, who was
originally from Charneux (in the section of Belgium known as Wallonia),
was hired to work at an ironworks in Germany's Rhine River region.
In 1710, Jean Coble married Anna Elisabeth Koeffer; the couple had seven
children baptized in the Weitersbach area. The oldest was Gerard Phillip
(bapt. 1710), who married three times and had 15 children in total.
Gerard Phillip and his first wife, Anna Barbara Graeff, married in 1737.
They had 10 children, among them three sons who went to New Jersey to
work at Peter Hasenclever's ironworks. The sons were:
1) Johannes (Johann Peter) COBOLE (bapt. 1738), who married Anna Maria
(Catharina) KAUFMANN in 1763. Five of their six children (John, John
James, Ann Elizabeth, Catherine and David) are listed in the NJ Catholic
Church baptismal records; the oldest, Johann Bartholomeus, is not
because he was born and baptized in Germany in 1764.
2) Johann Bartholomeus (Bartholomew) COBOLE (bapt. 1743), who married
Mary Ann WALTER at Long Pond, NJ, in 1774. Two of their children (Anna
Catherine, Henry) were baptized at Long Pond.
3) Johann Daniel COBOLE (bapt. 1745, who married Mary Ann WELCKER at
Charlotteburg in 1768. Four of their children (Anna Barbara, Anna Eva,
Mary Ann, and Catherine) appear in the NJ Catholic Church baptismal
records.
Finally, Mr. Petto has found evidence that both Bartholomew and Daniel
COBOLE left New Jersey for Pennsylvania in the late 1770s with a small
group led by William and Christian Butz. There, Mr. Petto says, some
members of the family changed the name to COVELY.
I recommend contacting Palatines to America and purchasing a copy of Mr.
Petto's article. I don't think they charge very much, and the article
provides far more detail than I can in this synopsis.
In addition, I published an article titled "Whatever Happened to Peter
Hasenclever's Germans?" in the 1998 edition of "The Highlander," the
annual magazine of the North Jersey Highlands Historical Society (PO Box
248, Ringwood, NJ 07456). By coincidence, that issue also contains an
autobiography written by the late Albert William Ullmann -- would he by
any chance be related to you?
Hope this helps. Please feel free to contact me if you have any
questions. Also, I would be very interested in hearing about your family
history.
Best,
Sue Maier
Friends of Long Pond Ironworks