Hein/Hine – My German Roots

When I was growing up I always thought my mom’s side of the the family was German and English.  For some reason I always assumed that the German came from the Bucklin line of the family.  When I was in high school, I took on the task of reading (and recording on cassette tape) my great grandfather Louis Charles Bucklin’s journal from 1893.  This was for the benefit of my grandfather Fred Bucklin because he had vision problems.  (Note from Sept. 21, 2019: For the first time I’m thinking this might have also been a way my grandfather tried to get me interested in his own family history.  The journal was his father’s and it had been around all of his life.)

I remember coming across an entry where he talks about a man from Ohio (with two of the “finest daughters“) who asks him if he was German.  Lou tells him “No, I am an Irishman.”  When I read that, I thought that he was lying to the man from Ohio to put him off because he was not interested.  I just knew that he was German and not Irish.  But I was wrong.  His mother was a full blooded Irish woman with the last name of McGrath and the Bucklins are of English descent.

But Lou’s wife Addie Hine’s family line (my Grandpa Fred’s mother Addie Hine), on the other hand, is German.  I’ve come across some information recently that makes me much more certain of the line that goes back to Germany.  Since I don’t have a photo of the Hein family that immigrated from Germany to the US (it was in 1753 after all), I am posting a photo of the Hine family just before they immigrated to Louisiana in 1894.

This is the George Henry Hine family in Boone County, Indiana, in 1892.  As you can see, it is a very rustic existence with a log cabin.  All of the family was born in Indiana.  But they were born in Noblesville, Indiana, which is in the neighboring county of Hamilton.  I know that George’s wife Susan Stanbrough Hine’s family was from the Noblesville area.  But I just recently found that George had some family members living in Boone County.

In a previous post I talked about how I discovered that George’s mom Malina’s maiden name was Cox.  Now I’ve discovered that Malina’s father’s name was Benjamin Cox.  I found a will for him that is from Boone County at his death in 1877.  It lists a daughter by the name of Maline Cox Hines.  Don’t be concerned with the spelling, like I said before, they did not have the Myrtle Phenice spelling gene!  His history shows him as being from North Carolina, which is where Malina was born.  It all fits together nicely.  It also might explain why the family moved from Hamilton County to Boone County.

George was born in Hamilton county in 1846 (and died in 1919) and showed up with the family there through the 1870 census.  Then the family shows up in Boone County in the 1880 census.  They stayed there until they moved to Louisiana in 1894.  In the meantime the kids were going to school, as can be evidenced by this certificate that Addie received for attendance that was dated June 4, 1892.

So let me take you back to Germany along the Hine line.  George’s father was John Peter Hine (1819-1900).  He was the first in this line to use the more English spelling of Hine rather than the German spelling of Hein.  It looks like the extended family did likewise.  Some of the later generations also changed the spelling to Hines, but our family line stuck with Hine.  John Peter was born in Bethabara, North Carolina, and moved to Indiana in 1841.

John Peter’s father was Peter Hein.  He was born in 1794 in Bethabara, North Carolina, and lived his whole life in Forsyth County, North Carolina.  He died a few months after the birth of John Peter.  (Actually he died before the birth of John Peter.  I should pay a little closer attention to the dates! For more information, read Becoming a Father Posthumously) This explains why John Peter was his only child.  All of the other generations had at least five children.

Peter’s father was Johannes or John Hein (1749-1806). He immigrated with his father Johann Jacob Hein (1713-1795) in October of 1753 from Germany.  They were both born in Dillenburg, Germany, and when they immigrated, they originally settled in Broad Bay, Maine.  Then in 1770 they moved with a group of 300 people to a Moravian settlement in what is now Forsyth County, North Carolina.

John Hein was the son of Jacob’s first wife who died in Germany.  Jacob remarried in 1752 and immigrated with his new wife and his children in 1753.  They were part of the Moravian church.  The church had many missions and settlements in the New World.  One of those settlements was Bethabara, which is where the Hein family settled in 1770.  Johann Jacob Hein died in 1795 and is buried in the Friedland Moravian God’s Acre.  His legacy carries on.