What Happened to Carl Falk?
When I started the family research on the Falk side in 2018, there was a question that kept coming up. What happened to Carl Falk? The story was told that when the Falks’ immigrated from Germany in 1870 there was a ‘brother’ by the name of Carl who traveled with them until reaching a river. He went one way and the rest of my family went the other.
There are a lot of holes in this story; whose brother?, which river?, which direction did he go?, etc. To start to figure out what happened to Carl, I made some assumptions. He must have been the brother of my 2nd Great Grandfather August, he must have immigrated at the same time as August and the family, and he must not be in the same general vicinity as where my family settled.
For nearly three years I’ve been trying to piece the puzzle together of these ‘brothers who parted ways at the river’. My searches on Ancestry.com would hit on Carl Falk’s here and there and one particular Carl Falk, born 1857 in Germany I would find interesting tidbits about where he was in the same general vicinity where my family was, but that didn’t match the assumptions from the story. Still I was trying to connect dots, but I could not match parents, siblings, immigration timelines and felt as if I was hitting the wall.
January 2022 while attending my grandmothers funeral I was standing with my mother and Paster Grimm at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Alma. The subject of this ‘lost Carl Falk’ had come up as we had been sharing our family research project and findings with Paster and he asked if he could be part of this other Falk family he had familiarity of. We also started talking about the various cemeteries around Alma and that I had book at home (“New Branches From Old Trees”) that listed who was buried in what cemetery in Wabaunsee County, Kansas.
When I returned home from spending time with the family, I started thumbing through the book, remembering the conversation about these ‘other Falks’ may have been in the Templin area. Carefully scanning each page, looking for any reference of a Carl Falk, I found the section for Templin West Cemetery, deeded to the Lutheran church. I flipped to page 40 and there lay before my eyes a list of Falks; three generations of Carl Falk to be specific. I recognized the birth year for one of the Carls (1857), the one I had been finding various tidbits about with no connection to my family, or so I thought. When I scanned back up and noticed there was an elder Carl F.W. whose birthdate was closer to my 3rd Great Grandfather Friedrich Daniel Falk, this Carl I had never come across before.
Did I find the connection, finally? Will I be able to answer my families question of ‘What Happened to Carl Falk’?
Read more about the Falk Brothers