Greve traces family roots to 1595
A mural on Austin Greve's wall holds photographs of ancestors he's learned about by studying his family geneology. (Press photo by Molly Moser)
Greve has compiled seven volumes of history on the different branches of his family: Greve, Knudtson, Leliefeld, Hefel, Pelzer, Hingtgen and Jaeger. (Press photo by Molly Moser)
By Molly Moser
October is family history month. It’s an opportunity to research the branches and roots of our family trees, and a reminder that we are all connected. For one Guttenberg man, those family connections are rich in history.
Austin Greve, son of James and Peggy (Knudtson) Greve, has traced his family’s roots back to 1595. “Back in junior high, I wrote letters to great aunts and uncles to get all the birthdates and names to make family tree books,” he told The Press. Since then, he’s used obituaries, birth and marriage certificates from churches and libraries to fill in more of the blanks in the family tree.
Leliefeld, Hefel, Knudtson and Greve are family names many Guttenberg readers will recognize – but few may know their relationship to one another. Greve has tracked them all as branches of his own family tree, and added others like Jaeger, Hingtgen, and Pelzer.
Sebastian Hefel, Greve’s 10th great-grandfather, was born in Austria in 1595. The Hefels emigrated to the United States in the early 1870s, when Joseph, a dyer at the Dornbirn textile mill, and Mary, a weaver at the mill, traveled to the country separately.
“Because they were of different social classes they weren’t allowed to get married in Austria, so they came to Dubuque County and married in 1874,” said Greve. Joseph and Mary are his great-great-great-grandparents and the ancestors of all the North Buena Vista area Hefels. Greve’s great-great-grandmother, Anna (Hefel) Greve, was one of the original nine Hefel children from Buenie.
Greve can trace his paternal roots to his sixth-great grandfather, Hans Grewe, who was born in Germany in 1704. He has had more difficulty with the Leliefelds, the family of his maternal grandmother. “We can’t figure out how the Leliefeld family came into the country,” he said. “They don’t exist on record.” Greve thinks the Leliefelds came from the Netherlands. His third great-grandparents, John and Mary Leliefeld, died in the late 1880s, leaving their young children to live in an orphanage in Delaware County. Their oldest son, Ben, settled in Guttenberg, where he found work and was able to raise his siblings. In 1895, he married Lucy Pelzer, whose father was one of Guttenberg’s original settlers and served as mayor for most of the 1860s.
With a family history as well-documented as Greve’s, there were no surprises when he had his DNA tested for ancestry. He’s compiled seven books, each a different family branch, of the Jaegers, Greves, and Pelzers from Germany, the Leliefelds (possibly from the Netherlands), the Norwegian Knudtsons, the Austrian Hefels, and the Hingtgens of Luxemborg. Just a teaspoon of saliva sent by mail was all it took to unveil Greve’s genetic makeup: 25% Scandinavian, 54% Western European, 7% Great Britain and 6% Irish.
To others curious about their own family history, Greve advises starting at the local library. “The library has indices of obituaries, marriages and births. That’s how I started looking it up,” he explained. “Start with grandparents, and hopefully their obituaries have their parents names in them.” Guttenberg Public Library has area obituaries alphabetized through 1930, and has issues of The Guttenberg Press archived from 1903 to 2012.
Greve may have uncovered more of his roots than most, but he’s not done yet. “I would like to go to Germany and see where the Greves are from – near Kiel. I don’t know of any living relatives there but I’m sure there are some.” He has no immediate plans to travel to his family’s point of origination, listed as Neudorf, Nordfriesland, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, but Greve says he’ll continue to reach further back into history to learn more about his people.
