Think You’re Related to Josef Jakobs?

In November 2019, I received an email from a woman, Jordan Jakobs, in New York who thought that her family might be related to Josef Jakobs. Their family had long told a story that one of their grand-uncles was a German spy. Intrigued by this thought of having some long-lost Jakobs relatives running around the world, I dove into Ancestry and started to build their family tree from the ground up.

Jordan didn’t know a lot about her family history, just the names of her grandparents. That was enough for me to run with and I quickly managed to flesh out the lower branches of their tree. There was one Herman Frederick Jakobs who was born 1876 and came to the USA in the early 1890s. Tracking down his origins was the key. Did he come from Trier where the Josef Jakobs family had deep roots? I ordered his marriage certificate from the early 1890s in New York and… No. He came from a place called Wefelzin. I have searched German gazeteers and the only likely candidate is a tiny village easy of Hückeswagen called Wefelsen. Given that anglophones routinely massacre German words, one can understand how Wefelsen could be transcribed as Wefelzin. 

I’ve drawn up a comparison of the Jakobs lineages for our two lines with myself and Jordan’s father as the starting points (us both being born in the same decade).

As noted in my earlier blog post, a link between the Josef Jakobs lineage and the Hermann Frederick lineage is unlikely for the following reasons:

• Herman’s branch is Protestant… my Jakobs branch is Catholic – and while there have been people who have crossed the centre aisle from one side to the other… it isn’t likely
• My Jakobs branch has no Herman’s or Frederick’s in it… and given how children were often named after previous ancestors… this makes a connection doubtful
• DNA – I had Ancestry DNA done a few years ago and… so did Jordan’s father… at this point, Ancestry says we have zero DNA in common

Close relations of the Josef Jakobs tree area unlikely given that my father’s siblings all died without issue. Josef had one sister who survived into adulthood and had an illegitimate son named Balthazar Jakobs, born in the mid-1920s. He apparently died during, or after, the Second World War without issue. If we go as high as Kaspar Jakobs, we find two half-brothers who survived into adulthood and had children, all in Germany. I am actually in contact with some of the German Jakobs relations, so I do know that they exist.

While there may be other, distant Josef Jakobs relations out there, someone would have to provide some fairly convincing family history research to convince me. While I spent quite a number of hours building the tree of Jordan Jakobs, I won’t be providing free family tree research in the future. If you think that you might be related to Josef Jakobs, do your family research first.

Jordan had made the mistake of contacting a British news site, MyLondon.co.uk, and shared her family story that she “might” be related to Josef Jakobs. Despite not receiving any further communication from Jordan, including the information I shared that we were not related, the news site took the “might be related’ and ran with it – “Woman Discovers her Long-Lost Relative was Executed at the Tower of London”. Sensational headline based on inaccurate and incomplete information. I have contacted the editors several times to correct their inaccurate information and received no reply.

Image by Wiesław Grąziowski from Pixabay, cropped to fit.