Background: The Hines in Connecticut

After the death of my father in 1992, I first started exploring geneaology. My father had some family documents and photos in his safe deposit box that we hadn't ever seen. I spent some time in Connecticut where my grandparents and great-grandparents had lived. It bothered me that we didn't even know where they were buried, or who were the people in those early family photos we found. My parents were the ones who had left early, moving to Kansas and Texas after their marriage in 1950. My mother came from an Irish Catholic family in Waterbury; my father from a German mother and Lithuanian father in neighboring Naugatuck. He was raised an Episcopalian but his father was Catholic. Her sisters helped her hide letters that came from my father at Yale, as dating a non-Catholic, non-Irishman was forbidden by her father.

So if this was a problem in 1948, how much more of a problem it must have been in 1920, when my German grandmother from Bridgeport, Anna Pauline Hine, ran off to New York to marry a handsome, young, but Lithuanian-Catholic World War I veteran, Michael J. Norris? How did they meet? Did her sisters help her? Did she even have sisters? For me, geneaology brings personal, national and world history to life. Someone who has long been forgotten - most likely in an unmarked grave - will at least have the care and respect of one person who can tell their stories to my own children.

That first serious venture into geneaological research took me to the Connecticut State Library, township records in Naugatuck, Waterbury and Bridgeport, and several cemeteries. I discovered that my grandmother had two brothers (no sisters to help out!), both of whom had died relatively young. One brother, however, had a family, revealing cousins that we didn't know existed. Later I contacted one of my father's cousins, and he had stories of going to Naugatuck by street car to visit my great-grandmother, Pauline Christine Hine, when she was living with her daughter and son-in-law in Naugatuck.

My German great-grandparents, Peter Hohn (later Hine) and Pauline Hagner, emigrated in 1882 and 1890, respectively, and married in Bridgeport. How did they end up in Connecticut? Did they know each other in Germany? What family members came with them? What was their journey like? There are some of the stories I hope to reveal in the next chapters of my research, here in Germany.