Katharina was the third child of Ulrich Gebert and his wife Magdalena Herbstreit. Her father was listed as a citizen of Rammerswecher[sic]. According to the Taufin [Baptismal] Register of the Katholische Kirche Bürgel [Catholic Church] in Offenbach, Hessen, Germany, Katharina was born on February 24, 1875 and baptised on March 7, 1875. Directly under Ulrich Gebert's signature at the bottom of the Baptism register shown below, you can see her godparent's signature, Katharina Oberheim, who was a single woman.d.5
The following German script is the entry in the Taufin Register for Katharina's Baptism:
Although Katharina was listed as Katchen on the passenger manifesti.2 traveling to American with her mother, and Alma Gebert'sk.3 family tree shows a Kat with at least two boys and three girls, it was some task to find her in the United States. Originally, I searched for her in the Brooklyn and Manhattan marriages during the 1890's. This was a difficult task as the marriage index is on the groom, not the bride, and the certificates themselves are not in any order and number in many, many thousands per year.
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In a telephone conversation in February of 2000, George's daughter Violet Anderson said, “There were other Gebert cousins in Canarsie [now a section of Brooklyn] that were separated from the family.a.2 Where do they fit in unless William and Peter had children or Vi’s cousins were actually her father’s cousins? Both known brothers Henry and Charles had moved to CT with all their children more than 10 years before Vi was born.
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Vi also stated that, “The Herbstruth family lived in Brooklyn. We used to visit with themb." These would have to be her father’s maternal cousins from Germany. Maybe Kat Gebert married a Herbstruth!!! [Just kidding—I think]a.4 Vi's brother George thinks it wasn't Herbstruths in Canarsie, it was Strups.a.3 He specifically remembers a time during WWI that he stayed with a cousin Katherine Strup who lived with her sister or cousin Lilly who married a Fisher. There was another cousin there, an Elsie who married Jimmy Biggs. These cousins were about 15-20 years older than George who was born in 1919. The cousins couldn't have been from Charles or Henry as they were already living in Connecticut before George was born. Yet, they were age parallel to Charles' and Henry's elder children leading to a solid suspicion that they could be Kat's family.
Jeanne Gebert, Vi and George's sister-in-law, also was firm in her belief that Kat and her husband lived in Brooklyn and even had attended George Sr.'s funeral in Brooklyn in 1958. Alas, she didn't know anything else about the family.
My first break in the case came when I finally found her mother Magda's family in the 1900 census. Katcha had apparently Americanized her name to Katie. She was single and had no occupation listed. But, immediately after her name was the name of an unmarried boarder living with the family - Philip Streaf or Streap! She was 25; he 26. Then I knew that the Canarsie Stroups were Kat and her family. But, without having any validation on his real last name [surely I wasn't going to accept the census enumerator's spelling!], there wasn't too much I could do until I found the marriage certificate.
I found marriage certificate No. 2469 for a Philip Strüb and Katie Gebert who were married on April 14, 1901 at Evangelical Lutheran St. Matthews Church, 197 North 5th St., in Brooklyn by a G [or S] Sommer. Her address at the time was 85 N 4th St and she had not been married before. Carl Gebert was listed as a witness. Carl is German for Charles which is the name of a brother.
It was only when I went to visit the Danbury Geberts in the summer of 2001 that the fog began to lift. Pat Gebert McGuire was not only familiar with the family, she knew the children's names and actually was in contact with one of them still living in Florida! And, Kat's husband's first name was Philip and their last name was definitely STRÜB!
Pat described the Strüb children as:
So now armed with the children's names from two sources, I started searching the 1910 census index for a Philip born in Germany in the mid 1870s, living in Kings County, NY, and a last name that was probably one syllable and probably starting with S. One person matched that: Phillip Strut, born in Germany about 1873. Armed with the information from that listing, I went to that census page and found the following family:j.13
The Queensborough Library located a record in the 1933-34 Polk's Brooklyn directory that showed a Philip Strub and his wife May were living at 419 Jerome Street in East New York. That could be them as directories and censuses are notorious for mistakes.
To date, information about Katie Gebert Strüb's death and burial are yet to be found. Since Katie and Philip attended her brother George's funeral in 1958, that data will remain hard to find until enough years have passed for indexes to be available, or if contact with the family is made and date of deaths are known.