This is a brief summary of family history research I've done the past few years. I've traced my mother's line (Kinsey) back to Swiss immigrants named Sarah and Christen Kuntzi (with an umlaut over the "u"; pronounced - and sometimes spelled - "Kintzi"), who came to Oley, Berks County, Pennsylvania from the German speaking part of Switzerland (near Thun) seeking religious freedom in 1734. They were Dunkards, or German Baptists, literal Bible readers who were severely persecuted in Europe for their rejection of infant baptism and their unwillingness to swear allegiance to civil governments or to bear arms. Over the years, their descendants (variously called Kintzi, Kinzey, Kinsie or Kinsey, as their last name became Anglicized) gradually migrated westward, to Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, and other midwestern states as they sought new land for their sons to farm. One of Sarah and Christen's younger sons, Henry (or Henrich) Kintzi, moved his wife and family to Frederick Co., Maryland in 1795, where Kinseys lived until about 1880. In 1849, Henry's grandson George M. Kinsey and family moved on to northwestern Ohio, then being settled, seeking new opportunities.
After spending three years in Mt. Victory, Ohio, located some 40 miles northwest of Columbus, where other Kinseys had previously settled, in 1852 George and family moved another 20 miles north to the site of Dunkirk, Ohio, where he found work cutting timber for a railroad then being built from Pittsburgh to Fort Wayne, Indiana. (George also farmed part time, and as an older man ran a grocery store in Dunkirk.) My grandfather James Monroe Kinsey, born to George and wife Margaret Jane in 1854, was the seventh of their eight children who lived to adulthood, and reportedly was the second white boy born in Hardin County, Ohio. There his family built a log house - perhaps more properly called a "cabin" as originally constructed - and the first house built in town according to a Dunkirk history. James was raised in the Dunkard church - the predecessor of today's Church of the Brethren - but became a Methodist when he married.
When James was a boy, his family was so poor that he and his brothers didn't wear shoes in the summertime, and since they couldn't afford to buy apples, had to wait to eat apple cores thrown away by other children. Grandpa said that when he was growing up, there were no fruits or vegetables available in winter, so that people craved fresh vegetables, and as early as possible in spring the children avidly collected dandelion leaves in the woods, which their mother cooked like spinach. And although he always enjoyed apples, Grandpa said that his favorite fruit was the pawpaw, which grew on a shrub or small tree of the same name, native to the Midwest. (According to the book An Introduction to Nature by John Kiernan (1955), the pawpaw fruit is shaped something like a banana with rounded ends, which ripens in cool weather and "contains scattered dark seeds about 1 inch long surrounded by a custard like-sweetish pulp that many persons find delicious." I was reminded of this in the spring of 2001 when I heard on Public Radio that some entrepreneurs in Ohio are trying to develop a commercial market for the pawpaw.)
After starting work full time in a drugstore at age 12, Grandpa Kinsey was in the hardware business in Dunkirk and Kenton, Ohio, for many years before moving west in 1911. His maternal grandfather, named Jesse McCaffrey (or McCavery), was probably an Irish Catholic immigrant from County Tyrone, though I'm forced to speculate about how Jesse might have met Grandpa's grandmother, a German Moravian girl named Margaret Shuff. It's quite possible they were actually never married, since their child - my grandfather's mother, Margaret Jane - was raised within her mother's family, and given Shuff as her last name. (And a distant cousin wrote my grandfather in 1929 and included a story about his great grandmother having walked 10 miles once to see a McCavery hung!) That's a mystery I'd love to unravel. In any event, Margaret Jane evidently thought enough of her father's memory to name her oldest son, Jesse, after him. Jesse and George, my grandfather's two oldest brothers, were in the Civil War with General William Sherman's army as it marched and fought through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864-5.
My mother's mother (Minnie Reed Kinsey) was of German extraction on her mother's side and English on her father's, though I've not traced them back more than one generation. She was born in Kenton, Ohio, in 1863. Her mother Maria's family (Nicewander) had lived near Columbus, Ohio (Reynoldsburg) before her marriage. According to family notes left by my Aunt Florence Crider, the Nicewander family was originally from Pennsylvania, so would have been called "Pennsylvania Dutch," in the vernacular of the times. Grandma Kinsey's father James Kennard Reed met her mother after moving to Ohio from Missouri. He was a cooper (or barrel maker) by trade. My grandmother was forced to quit school and work as clerk in a millinery store when her father suddenly died in her sophomore year of high school. Her mother subsequently supported herself as a seamstress, and like others in her situation, must have had quite limited resources.
My own mother Esther (born in 1891) was the second of five children born to James and Minnie in Kenton, Ohio, where my grandfather moved after the death of his first wife Florence Tanner Kinsey in Dunkirk. The family moved to Idaho in 1911 after Grandpa Kinsey's hardware business suffered a reverse due to embezzlement by their bookkeeper, giving him an excuse to do what he'd apparently always longed to do - move West! There he worked on a fruit ranch in Fruitland, Idaho, had various jobs in the Boise area, worked on two major irrigation dams built by the Department of Reclamation (Arrowrock and Lake Lowell), finally bought a small fruit ranch in Fruitland before retiring in 1924. My mother, Esther, an accomplished pianist, played for the silent movies in Boise for several years around the time of World War I and moved to the little town of Mountain Home in about 1920 to play piano in the movie theatre operated there by my future uncle, Chris Hendricks, Jr. My father Otto met her there, they fell in love and were married in 1921, when he was 42 and she was 29. My Kinsey grandparents also retired to Mountain Home after my grandfather sold his fruit ranch at age 70 (1924). The Kinseys relocated again to New Plymouth, Idaho, in 1941, where they lived next to my Aunt Marian and Uncle Clyde Makinson and daughters Mary and Ruth till their deaths in 1949. For more on the Kinseys and my mother, see the "People" and "Family Album" sections.
My father Otto Hendricks was born in the ancient city of Quedlinburg, Germany, in 1879 from families (Heidenreich and Hoffmeister) who had lived in that region for generations. (Quedlinburg was founded in the 10th century, and was the first capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, often considered the earliest German nation ("The First Reich"), under Henry the First, who also played a role in repulsing Magyar invaders of central Europe. It has an old castle, historic churches and well-preserved medieval houses today.) My grandfather Christian Heidenreich left Germany by himself for America in 1881, after first serving a compulsory three year term in the German army (and marrying my grandmother Luise ("Louisa"), vowing that his sons would never have to endure that brutality. After working as cook in a lumber camp and saving enough money, he sent for his wife and children. Although my father was christened "Wilhelm Otto Heidenreich," probably after his paternal grandfather Wilhelm, my grandfather Americanized the family name to "Hendricks" (actually, a traditional Dutch surname) a dozen years after coming here, when Americans proved unable - or unwilling - to pronounce and spell the German "Heidenreich." And probably because the family apparently had always called him Otto, Dad reversed the order of his first two names when he was naturalized in 1914.
Otto was only four when he arrived in this country with his mother and sister Hattie (1883), and lived in Michigan and Indiana, where his father worked as a butcher, for the next ten years. In 1893 the family moved to Mountain Home, Idaho, a crude little town which had been founded on the sagebrush plains ten years earlier when a railroad was completed between Ogden and Portland - a second instance where the location of a new railroad influenced where members of my family settled. (This railroad replaced a stage route across southern Idaho which followed the route of the old Oregon Trail, running several miles northeast of present day Mountain Home, along the base of foothills where grass and water could usually be found. The original Mountain Home stage station was located on that line, where a second stage line took off into the mountains to the mining communities of Atlanta and Rocky Bar.) My Aunt Hattie later told how the four Hendricks children - ranging then from six to seventeen years - sat on the tracks and cried as the train pulled out. They had never seen anything as barren and uninviting as the treeless, dusty, essentially one street frontier town.
To see how barren Mountain Home's main street looked as viewed from the railroad depot in 1890, click here, then use your browser to get back to the text. The first street trees were not planted until 1895, so this view must have been about what the familiy saw in 1893.
But the Hendricks family, parents and children, nevertheless ended up spending most of the rest of their lives in Mountain Home, which grew to about 1300 people when I lived there in the 1930s. My grandfather apparently had come to Mountain Home to take a job as butcher (the family trade) in a shop owned by a prominent rancher. In the German tradition, my dad, as the oldest son, was immediately sent to the ranch - having completed the eighth grade - to learn the butchering trade. He never forgave his father for that, since he wanted very much to attend high school. But the rancher's family, the Frank Akes, treated him almost like a son, and he later worked with my grandfather in the shop, eventually becoming its proprietor. For more on my dad's life and his influence on me, see the "People" section. There also are several photographs of the Hendricks family in the "Family Album section.
To return to the top of this page, click here.
To read a biographical note about my ancestor, Henry Kintzi (1742-1829), and to learn more about the Kinsey family in America, click here.
To read an account of the Civil War service of my grandfather James Kinsey's two older brothers, click here.
To view a selection of early family photos, click here.
To return to my home page, click here.
(Last rev. 10/13/03)
