onrad
Kirts was baptized in the Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church of York,
Pennsylvania as "John Conrad Kurtz". The same church record asserts that
he was born on February 17, 1767, but the ages listed in the various Federal
census records do not agree with this, being more consistent with 1773/1774.
Make of it what you will.
German Protestant naming practices of the time were to bestow a saint's name (sometimes one traditional to the family) and a second, common name by which the person was generally known. So it was with Conrad.
He likewise was subjected to the rude attempts of non-Germanic frontiersmen to spell his family name even on official records. Thus we find not only "Conrod" or even "Coonrod" for Conrad, but also "Kerts", "Kirts", "Kirtz", "Kirtze", "Curts", etc. for Kurtz. Probably functional illiterates themselves, the frontier Kurtz family adopted some of these variations: Conrad and his son James seem to have settled on "Kirts" and his sons George and Moses, on "Curts".
Conrad was the son of Johann Jorg Conrad Kurtz, who immigrated to America aboard the Phoenix in 1752. Johann was from the small town of Adelmansfelden in southern Germany, which was later incorporated into the Duchy of Wuertemberg (1803). German genealogists working for Nana Lou Curts Dudley have traced his ancestry to Peter Kurtz, a peasant (bauer) born in 1628.
Conrad's mother was named Elizabeth and she was his father's second wife.
The family left Pennsylvania and arrived in Salem, Jefferson County, Virginia by 1782. This later became Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky.
Conrad married Eleanor Jeffries on February 17, 1798 in Hardin County, Kentucky. They resided in Nelson County, Kentucky at least until 1812 or so, and most of his children were born there. But by 1819, we find that Conrad was in Harrison County, Indiana and that Eleanor had died, because on April 9 of that year he married Elizabeth Jones in that county. The census of 1820 confirms this move.
The census of 1830 finds him living in Bartholomew County, Indiana. In fact he was living in the area that became Brown County in 1836, where he is listed in the censuses of 1840 and 1850. He and his son James entered land in the area now reached by Hoover Road, north off Indiana 46, east of Gnawbone, in Hamblen Township.
On April 19, 1837, he married Jane Raridan, widow of Henry Raridan, in Brown County, Indiana.
He wrote a will dated December 21, 1855, which was probated on August 29, 1856. In this will he listed his surviving children (or their spouses) and also those of Jane Raridan.
This list of Conrad's heirs, in the order of the will, was as follows:
[Bracketed information added by this author. Raridan heirs omitted.]
Census records indicate there were probably other children who did not survive into adulthood.
I would surmise that Conrad was buried in the Taggart Cemetery, located in the vicinity of his home and where neighbors and relatives were buried, but I know of no tombstone.
Conrad Kirts was a pioneer of Harrison County and Brown County, Indiana, the son of a Kentucky pioneer, and a large part of the story of how a peasant family made their way from the hills of southern Germany to the hills of southern Indiana.
Sources:
By the middle of the twentieth century Conrad's descendants had largely forgotten him, but Conrad and his relatives had left a pretty clear trail in the Federal censuses, marriage records, and Probate Courts of Kentucky and Indiana.
Wonderful sources on the Kurtz (Kirts) family exist on the Web. A lot of solid data is presented in the Ancestry World Tree Project: Hopkins and Funk Family Genealogy. The premiere presence, however, is KY_KURTZ@yahoogroups.com , run by Keith Kurtz.
I have written two essays published on the latter addressing particular points of the above history: "A Study of the Will of Conrad Kirts (Brown Co., IN)" and "Of Kurtzes and Kings".
Submitted by Joseph M. Daniels
