Non-Mennonite Ancestors: Schaefer, Randall, and Brox

The parents of my paternal grand-mother, Annie Brox, were not descendants of Swiss Mennonites, as all of my other great-grandparents were. Her father, Louis Brox, was descended from German Lutherans, and her mother, Caroline Randall, was descended from English Anglicans and German Lutherans. The story, which begins in the early years of Woolwich Township, is sort of interesting, I think.

In the 1840s, two young couples were married in Waterloo County: Thomas Randall married Rhoda (or Rosina) Thomas,¹ and James Cain (or Kaine or Kane) married Margaret Schaefer. In the late 1840s, Jacob and Katharina (Ziegler) Brox arrived in Waterloo County from Germany, via Buffalo NY, and soon settled on a farm north of Elmira. By 1862, both James Cain and Rosina Thomas had died, and Margaret married Thomas Randall in 1863.

These families would be connected in the 1880s, when the daughter of Margaret Schaefer Cain and Thomas Randall married the son of Jacob and Katharina Brox.

Thomas Randall and Rosina Thomas

Thomas Randall was born in Shipley, Sussex, England in Jan 1809 to George and Sarah (Meare) Randall.² It is unclear when he immigrated to Canada. There is some evidence that Rhoda Thomas was born in Kirdford, Sussex, England, about 1821, and emigrated to Canada with her parents Thomas and Elizabeth Thomas in 1832 as part of the Petworth Emigration Scheme.³ It is also unclear exactly when or where Thomas and Rhoda married, but the 1851 census has them living in Woolwich township (their names are listed as Thomas and Roady Randol) with their 4 older children; Thomas is listed as a farmer, and their religion is Church of England. They had 6 children in total:

• David 1843
• Sarah 1845
• Thomas 1847
• George 1849
• John 1852
• Emma (or Emily) 1854

Rhoda died sometime before her 40th birthday in 1861, since Thomas is listed as a widower in the census that year, living alone. His children, aged 7 to 18, must have been living with other families.

Although Thomas and Rhoda identified themselves as Church of England, daughter Sarah married a Mennonite man, Jacob Frey, but it isn’t clear whether they remained in the Mennonite church. John married a Mennonite woman, Leah Clemmer, and many of their descendents have been Mennonites. Emma, who married Mennonite William Spaeth, also has Mennonite descendants, at least through her daughter Emma, who married Amos Shantz.

James Cain and Eva Margaret Schaefer

Records show that Eva Margaretha (commonly known as Margaret) was born to Michael Schaefer and Marie Baetz (or Beitz) in 1820 in Ehenga Baden Germany. It appears that she immigrated to Canada with family, as the witnesses at her wedding were Henry and Frederick Schaefer. According to census records, her husband, James Cain (or Kane or Konig), was born in 1818 in the USA. His occupation is listed as “labourer,” and his religion as “Lutheran.” James and Margaret were married on September 17, 1848, at Greenbush (south Kitchener), and they had 7 children (at least the first one before they were married:

• Wilhelmina 1844
• Mary 1848
• Catherine 1850
• John 1852
• Barbara 1854
• Henry 1856
• Benjamin 1857

Daughter Barbara is not listed in the Waterloo Region Generations database, but family records (including letters from her daughter) say that she lived most of her life with another family.

In 1861 or 1862, James was bitten by a rabid dog and died a few days later, after a horrible illness during which he “foamed at the mouth” and had to be tied down in his bed. Still in her early 40s, Margaret was left with children aged about 3 to 17. It seems none of them were ever Mennonites.

Thomas Randall and Margaret (Schaefer) Cain

Thomas Randall, widower, married Margaret (Schaefer) Cain, widow, on January 4, 1863, in an Evangelical Lutheran church, probably in Elmira. There were 13 children in the blended family, but it isn’t clear how many of them lived with the couple.

On July 10, 1866, when Margaret was about 46 and Thomas 57, they had another child, Caroline.

Margaret died in 1868, leaving Thomas once again a widower, this time with a 2-year-old toddler. The 1871 census lists only the following children living with Thomas: David (28), Thomas (24), John (21), Emma (17), and Caroline (5).

Thomas died in 1873. A childless young Mennonite couple, Henry and Leah Martin, took 7-year-old Caroline in and raised her until she married Louis Brox when she was 19.

Thomas and one of his wives were originally buried in an old cemetery where St James Lutheran church now stands in Elmira, but at some later date the remains were moved to the Elmira Mennonite cemetery and new markers were installed by the Jacob Randall family.⁴ It is unknown where Thomas’ other wife or James Cain were buried, but my uncle surmises that it might have been in the old cemetery in Elmira, as well.

Jakob Brox and Katharina Ziegler

Jacob Brox (or Brooks) married Katharina Ziegler in Buffalo, New York, in 1849. They were both recent immigrants from Germany, and they moved to Waterloo County immediately after their wedding. In 1851, they settled on a farm in North Woolwich. They had 14 children.⁵

The Broxes were Lutherans, but at least three of their children, including their eighth child Louis, married Mennonites. Katharina died in 1897 and Jakob died in 1900; they are both buried in the St James Lutheran Cemetery just east of Elmira.

Louis Brox and Caroline Randall

Louis Brox married Caroline Randall on October 4, 1885. They eventually settled on Tilman Road, north of Elmira. They had 12 children, the third of whom was my grandmother Annie.

Caroline raised the children in the Mennonite church, although the family is listed as Lutheran in at least one census. All of the girls and one of the boys married Mennonites and are buried in Mennonite cemeteries. The rest of the boys married non-Mennonites. Louis and Caroline are buried in the Elmira Mennonite cemetery.

Annie married Elias Martin in 1915. They were Old Order Mennonites until the 1930s, when they switched to the Conference Mennonite church. All of their daughters remained Mennonites, while their sons all left the Mennonite church. Annie and Elias are buried in the Hawkesville Cemetery.

Annie and Elias’ third youngest child, Christian, is my father. He left the Mennonites not long before he married my mother in 1948. Her family had left the Mennonites 10 years earlier, when she was 8 years old.

Conclusion

This line of my ancestors is a sort of microcosm of Woolwich in the mid-1800s. The majority of residents were Mennonites, especially in the southern part of the township. But there were quite a large number of German and a smaller number of English immigrants, mostly in Elmira and to the north. As time went by, there was a fair bit of inter-marriage, with conversions in both directions. Mennonites taking in non-Mennonite children (or vice versa) was also not uncommon.

Notes:

¹ In the first version of this piece, I wrote that Thomas Randall’s first wife was Catherine Schaefer (perhaps a sister of Margaret, who married James Cain), as reported by my uncle Amos.

² I discovered this information about Thomas Randall’s parents and birthplace through a distant Randall relative, Claire Wickens of New Forest, England, who found me after I had my DNA tested at ancestry.com. The fact that George and Sarah (Meare) Randall’s son Thomas does not appear in any census in England after he would have come to Canada strongly corroborates the conclusion that these details are correct.

³ Again, this information about Rhoda Thomas is thanks to Claire Wickens, who discovered the name for me in lists of Petworth emigrants on the Petworth Emigration Project website. We also searched for Thomas Randall as a possible Petworth emigrant, but the only Randalls listed did not come from Shipley. For a more recent post on Thomas Randall and Rhoda Thomas, see Finding Thomas Randall.

⁴ These new grave markers, as displayed in findagrave.com, read “In memory of Thomas Randall / who died Jan 10, 1873 / age 63 years” and “Catharine Schaefer Randall / wife of Thomas Randall / died 1875.” This is probably where my uncle Amos got his information about the name of Thomas’ first wife, or maybe it came from the Jacob Randall family directly. Whatever the case, the death date makes no sense for either of Thomas’ wives, and the name doesn’t align with the mothers’ names listed on the marriage records for the children of Thomas and his first wife. I am guessing that it is Margaret Schaefer Randall who is buried here, and that Jacob Randall’s family, descendants of Rhoda Thomas, just didn’t have the correct name and death date.

⁵ For more and (newer) insight into Louis Brox’s ancestors, see The Zapf-Ziegler-Foerster-Brox Family Web.

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See Also:

• Finding Thomas Randall
• Early Martin Ancestors Revisited
• The Weber Ancestors
• The Bauman Ancestors
• Oh, My Guth-ness!
• The Mosser Grandmothers (Revised)

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Sources:

Amos B Martin, Tracing our Randall Connection. Unpublished typescript, February 1996. Amos is my father’s brother, youngest son of Elias Martin and Annie Brox.

The Petworth Emigration Project (https://www.petworthemigrations.com/index.html)

“Thomas Randall,” Waterloo Region Generations (https://generations.regionofwaterloo.ca/getperson.php?personID=I171164&tree=generations).

“Thomas Randall” and “Catherine Schaefer Randall,” Find A Grave (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/62875788/thomas-randall and https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/62875829/catherine-randall).

Faye West, “Thomas Randall,” My Genealogy Pages (https://fayewest.ca/colemanjones/p1112.htm: viewed Dec 27, 2020).