Welcome to the Johannes Hahn Family History site. In this location you will find much of what is known about Johannes Hahn and his descendants. (To get back to the index page, the first one into this site, click here.)

This site is based on information from "German Speaking People West of the Catawba River 1750-1800" by Lorena Shell Eaker. For those who are not familiar with the book, the Catawba River is in western North Carolina, its head somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains.

The Hahn/Hawn/Honn history in these pages is as accurate as I can make it. However I have not always personally documented all the information and verified the authenticity. Where I have, a source is named. Other sources might be named as an email from someone; that's because the person is usually a family member and has personal knowledge.

My interest in genealogy started late in life and it had its basis in an old, typed report commissioned by a Hawn elder, Abel Quincy Hawn (1873-1926) and carried out by Col. George Yoder (see the account here). Col. Yoder (1826-1920), who was a prominent historian in Hickory, NC in his day. He was a member of the Yoder family, which made quite an impact on this city and continues to do so. Excerpts from the biography written in The Catawba Soldier in the Civil War by Prof. George W. Hahn can be found here.

Unofficially, he has been called colorful, and his writings somewhat less than totally factual. But resources were scarce so it is supposed that he did as well as he could with what he had to work with. Of course there was no Internet and the telephone did not come into popular use until much later. He also did much work for the Yoder family. Walter A. Hawn spent many years writing letters to persons who knew about the Hawn history so his work has a considerable amount of credibility. Men like these are to be thanked for laying the groundwork for those of us to come later.

Things were a little better when my Aunt Allie (Hawn/Glenn) began updating the history. She and her teenage son Neil (middle name for his Bost ancestors) spent many long hours writing letters to ask for information, then recording that information by manual typewriter and appending the pages to the history. The complete history was then distributed to everyone in the family who wanted a copy. (Mind you, these were made by carbon copy in the late 1940s, as the copying of documents by machine, was still far away. Several versions of copy machines were in use in the late 1800s, but a long and tedious process was involved. In 1960 Xerox released the first plain-paper copier, which propelled today's rush to have a copy machine in every home and office.

Computers were but a dream then, long distance calls were almost prohibitively expensive and travel to courthouses and other souces of information was almost unheard of. Aunt Allie relied mostly on what's called "oral history" and family Bibles for information, more than likely.

It was the Yoder document which threw me into the world of Hahn genealogy. Some 50 or so years later, I was working as a newspaper reporter which suited my healthy curiosity. I started researching the family after talking to a woman who was a member of the Hawn family. I don't remember how but I acquired some photocopied pages from "Shoe Cobbler's Kin," written by Lorena Shell Eaker, also a distant cousin of ours. I had newly come to computers and the Internet and found a genealogy program for my Macintosh (I now use a Windows computer) from Gene Software. I began using "Shoe Cobbler's Kin" to fill in the information, having no idea that I was violating a number of protocols. From there I went to "German Speaking People West of the Catawba River 1750-1800," continuing to violate those same protocols. I posted web pages about the Hawns on a private site, then for free on Rootsweb.com.

But my results were seen and read by others in and out of the Hawn/Hahn/Honn family. You will see those results if you read letters starting farther into this website. Many have been lost to computer crashes but enough survived to help you see what an impact my "improper" writings had on my family.

In 2009 I intended to make that year's update my last; however, so much information came to my attention that I couldn't help but start on another update. It is still in progress and will be for some time. Meanwhile I will hope to find someone to carry on my work when my time is done. Anyone who wishes to take on the job is welcome to get in touch with me.

There have been a number of high points in my genealogical "career", not the least of which is the volume of responses from people about their own searches. I found a retired minister in Texas, with whom I became a frequent correspondent. David Hahn, may be rest in peace, died in 2003. I met him once and he was much impressed with the land Johannes chose for his family. I miss him.

Another young man wrote about the joy his grandfather discovered when he found his roots in my pages. He had lived 90-plus years never knowing where he came from and was very grateful for the information he found.

My sincere thanks to Mrs. Eaker for her permission to quote from "Shoe Cobbler's Kin" and "German Speaking People...," both published by SCK Publications, PO Box 2125, Church Hill, Tenn. 37642 and Genealogy Publishing Service, 448 Ruby Mine Road, Franklin, N. C. 28734. Both have abundant information on a great many families besides the Hahns and would be a treasure to own. Please write to her at [email protected] for information.

I invite you to enjoy your travels through the Johannes Hahn Family History. Please drop me a line to let me know if you found it useful. If you wonder about references to Missouri, I learned that about 1800 a number of families, Hahns included, traveled to the newly opened land of the Louisiana Purchase to start new lives. There's a note, I believe in "German Speaking People...," that describes the terrain in Missouri and the population that closely describes the family names from Catawba County, NC to be found there. Many Hahns also went to Indiana to begin anew. Many of the family there spell the surname as HAWN or HONN.