Based on a talk presented to the Boone-Duden Historical Society, Defiance, MO, 4/28/2024
Walter D. Kamphoefner
I’m not sure how many of you know who Taylor Swift is, or in any case know much about her, so perhaps I should give a brief introduction.
She is a self-made billionaire, certainly the most successful singer-songwriter of the 21st century, who recently surpassed Elvis’s record for solo artist with the most weeks spent atop the Billboard top 200 music chart. Moreover, she wrote or co-wrote practically all of her songs, whereas Elvis never wrote any of his. In 2022 she captured the entire Top 10 positions on Billboard’s Hot 100 weekly survey, an historic first, and now captured the top 14 hits from her brand-new Tortured Poets album. She is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards with 40 and the Billboard Music Awards with 39, and earlier this year she won her record fourth Album of the Year award at the Grammys. She now holds 7 out of the Top 10 biggest female album debuts in Spotify history, including the top 6. Her Tortured Poets album was the first to ever get 200 million streams on Spotify in its first day; in fact, it broke 300 million in a day, and a billion streams in less than a week. For the record, I was not one of them. I’m so 20th century, I’m not even on Spotify.
Taylor was somewhat on my radar screen all along because our daughter was a Swiftie in her teens. But until recently, when they became mutually reinforcing, I was neither a big Swift fan nor a big Kansas City Chiefs football fan. But if your home metro area team moves away, not once but twice, you have to go with your home state team instead, especially if they’re exciting winners. I still haven’t listened to that much of Taylor’s music, but I’m highly impressed by the lyrics she writes.
Taylor Swift was a child prodigy whose parents moved from their Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm to a Nashville suburb when she was 13 to promote her music career. Her first hit, which she reportedly wrote in a freshman High School math class, is an illustration of her genius, a song titled Tim McGraw:
He said the way my blue eyes shined
Put those Georgia stars to shame that night
I said, “That’s a lie”
Just a boy in a Chevy truck
That had a tendency of gettin’ stuck
On backroads at night.
(“Tim McGraw,” Liz Rose/Taylor Swift, 2006)
I especially like the line, “That’s a lie.” Even at that tender age she wasn’t falling for flattery. Although she’s drop-dead beautiful, she could imagine herself in the shoes, literally the tennis shoes, of a high school outsider. It seems she was something of an outsider at that age herself; new to the town and school, and so smart and talented that she aroused a lot of jealousy:
She wears high heels
I wear sneakers
She’s Cheer Captain, and I’m on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find
That what you’re looking for has been here the whole time
If you could see that I’m the one
Who understands you
Been here all along
So, why can’t you see?
“You Belong With Me”
(Taylor Swift/Liz Rose, 2008)
Well, she finally got her quarterback, although he was switched to tight end sometime in college. For more detail, see “So High School” on her Tortured Poets album she just released. Since last summer when she started dating KC Chiefs star Travis Kelce, she attended 13 of his games, even flying back trans-Pacific to attend the Super Bowl. She’s brought literally millions of her fans to the Chiefs TV audience. But of course, some dads and Brads and Chads are resentful of the roughly 25 seconds per game she’s shown on Chiefs’ telecasts. Amazingly, Taylor anticipated them way back in 2010:
And I can see you years from now in a bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big mouth opinion
But nobody is listening
Washed up and ranting about
The same old bitter things
Drunk and grumbling on about
How I can’t sing
But all you are is “Mean”
(Taylor Swift, 2010)
So, that gives you non-Swifties an idea of what Taylor is about. But what I’m here to talk about today is Swift’s St. Charles County German roots, which I was totally unaware of until someone posted it on the County Historical Society Facebook page a few months ago. I had just assumed Taylor was a run-of-the-mill ordinary Anglo American. But it turns out that her maternal grandmother, nee Moehlenkamp, to whom she was very close and about whom she wrote the song “Marjorie,” grew up in St. Charles, and even attended the same church, Immanuel Lutheran, with her parents as my dad and his parents attended. I doubt whether they knew each other; Dad was fourteen years older and the son of a village blacksmith now reduced to working at the American Car and Foundry “Car Shops,” whereas Marjorie’s parents could afford to send her as a day student to Lindenwood College, then an elite girls finishing school rather than a Division One sports competitor. (It became a very different institution after going coeducational in 1969, and particularly after 1989 when president Dennis Spellman rescued it from bankruptcy.)
In my first book, one of my main contributions was to document chain migration, people from the same German communities clustering together in the same American localities. Immanuel Lutheran in St. Charles is a good example of this. Of its 18 founders, among them Taylor’s Moellenkamp ancestor and two of his brothers, every single one had roots in the Kingdom of Hannover, and most of them were clustered in and around the village of Menslage, about 30 to 50 miles north of Westerkappeln or Osnabrueck or Melle where the founders of Femme Osage and New Melle originated [slide 2]. It’s less than 40 miles from the Dutch border, and only 60 miles to the port city of Bremen in northwest Germany.
In the conclusion to my book The Westfalians I write, “it was security rather than mobility that transplanted villagers such as the Westfalians had sought in America in the first place. Those of their children or grandchildren who felt differently could emerge from the ethnic cocoon at their own pace and without any great handicap, and it is clear that some erosion did take place at the edges of the ethnic community. For the most part, however, it was the community itself, though still tightly knit and homogeneous, that gradually, almost imperceptibly, lost its distinctive ethnic character.”
So which of the two held true for Taylor’s ancestors? A little bit of both, I would argue. The Moellenkamps remained in the ethnic cocoon for most of three generations, or to put it chronologically, into the early 20th century. The fourth generation, Taylor’s great grandfather, headed south for a decade and met his bride there, but brought her back to Missouri by 1930. The fifth generation, Taylor’s grandmother, whom I’ll refer to as Marjorie from here on, was the first to move permanently out of this community and make her way, quite spectacularly, in the wider world, becoming an opera singer and a hostess on Spanish-language TV. For non-Swifties, the family is exemplary of many larger patterns: of geographic and occupational stability or mobility, of ethnic and religious homogeneity and how it gradually broke down over time, and how these various processes were interrelated with one another.
Here are all seven generations of Taylor Swift’s Moehlenkamp ancestors in America:
Johann Hermann Möhlenkamp, 1806-1880
Johann Wilhelm Möhlenkamp, 1831-1876
Henry John Moehlenkamp, 1858-1937
Elmer Henry Moehlenkamp, 1897-1972
Marjorie Moehlenkamp Finlay, 1928-2003
Andrea Finlay Swift, 1958-
Taylor Swift, 1989-
The first two names are written with an umlaut because they were both immigrants, Johann Wilhelm being what social scientists sometime call the 1.5 generation: immigrants who arrived young enough, in his case age 5, that he might as well have been born here. His father outlived him; he died at the young age of 45, which seems to have burdened the next generation. The first three generations appear to have remained within the ethnic community, German speaking farmers keeping mostly to themselves.
I was aided in this project by Robert Sandfort, who generously sent me a copy of his 740 page book subtitled “500 Years of Sandfort Family History,” published in the year 2000, when Taylor Swift was still in grade school. He didn’t know it at the time, but they shared a common ancestor in the immigrant generation, Hermann Heinrich Sandfort. Sandford and Taylor’s 4x great Grandfather Johann Hermann Moehlenkamp immigrated on the same ship in 1836, and both were later among the founding members of Immanuel Lutheran Church in St. Charles, which Taylor’s ancestors continued to attend down to her grandmother Marjorie.
The ship Oelbers on which they sailed included a number of other families whose names stand out as St. Charles Lutherans [slide 3]. Letters have survived from one of the passengers, and he wrote that “Sandford, Moehlenkamp, Beckebrede, Stumborg, Pieper and Moehlmann likewise went to a plantation for a few months and are earning a lot of money.” That indicates that they may not have had enough money to catch a steamboat directly to St. Louis, as another of their traveling companions did. Most of them, including Moehlenkamps, had been tenant farmers, so-called “Heuerlinge,” in Germany. Johann Hermann and his wife did not marry until their first child was three months on the way, not unusual for that society, where the tenant class was subjected to marriage restrictions.
In Missouri, the family started attending Friedens Evangelical Church, which appears to have started as a mixture of Lutheran and Reformed. Many of the people from the county of Tecklenburg in Prussian Westfalia were among the founders, and had no objections to the Prussian Union Church. But the Lutherans from Hannover did not like the mixture and broke off and formed their own congregation in the town of St. Charles in 1848 [slide 4]. That year marks the last appearance of Moehlenkamps in Friedens church records. Up till then there were nine baptisms, children of all three immigrant brothers, and four burials. With three brothers immigrating, it is rather challenging to unravel all the Moellenkamps; including maiden names, there are not less than 44 of them buried in St. Charles County on Find-A-Grave.com, 34 of them on Immanuel Lutheran cemetery alone.
All three Moehlenkamp brothers are listed successively in the 1850 census, each a farmer with real estate valued at $800 [slide 5]. In 1860, the census taker transformed Moehlenkamp into Middlecamp, but otherwise portrays them accurately [slide 6]. They were again living in successive households in the census, preceded by William or Wilhelm, who had immigrated with his parents at age 5 and was married by the Immanuel Lutheran pastor Rudolph Lange in 1854 [slide 7]. His father’s $800 in real estate had shrunk to $700, and his widowed aunt Catherine’s to $750, but his property was valued at $1900, close to the $2000 of his uncle Diedrich’s. As before, all the Moehlenkamps were farmers by occupation. There was one other Moellenkamp in the 1860 census, Bernhardine, working as a servant near Femme Osage, but she turned out be unrelated, with roots nearer to Westerkappeln where most of the other Germans in that area were from.
In 1870, two of the brothers and John W., aka William, were still clustered together in the census [slide 8]. All were still farmers, but their real estate values had gone up considerably, (in part because of wartime inflation and development of the county), ranging from $3000 to $5000. Sister-in-law or aunt Catherine is now listed as an Ehlmann, along with three of her Moehlenkamp children and their 7-year-old Ehlmann half-brother [slide 9]. During the decade, Catherine had remarried in 1862 and become widowed again two years later. Her property value equaled that of her wealthiest brother-in-law, and her eldest son at 22 was listed as a farm laborer.
The 1875 County Plat Book shows the three 36-acre plots in Survey 308 originally owned by the three Moehlenkamp brothers in 1850, each valued at $800 back then [slide 10]. J.W. Moehlenkamp, Taylor’s ancestor of the second generation, owned an adjacent 85 acres. By 1875, Johann Hermann and Dietrich still owned their parcels, though by then brother Henry had died and his wife Catherine had remarried and was widowed again to an Ehlmann. They were only about 4 miles from Friedens Evangelical Church, which is only a mile or two outside the St, Charles city limits. The road to the left of their plots is Jungs Station Road. By the 1905 Plat Book, all this land was in other hands, but one American born family member, George, owned a blacksmith shop and 3 acres in Harvester.
In 1880, Marjorie’s grandfather Henry J. was a farm laborer living in the household of his widowed mother [slide 11]. The fact that his father had died four years earlier when he was eighteen may have made it difficult for him to get a start, and he probably helped support three younger siblings who were attending school and their four-year-old sister. In general, other branches of the Moehlenkamp family appear to have moved up more quickly. One had become a county judge, and another had established a prosperous grocery business at the intersection of 5th and Clay streets in St, Charles that lasted for two generations.
Unfortunately, there is a 20-year gap in census coverage just at a point when many interesting developments were taking place, because the 1890 census forms were destroyed in a fire before they could be microfilmed. But city directories fill the gap for the City of St. Charles, and in 1891-2 there is one that also covers the county, indicating that Henry may have worked in the city as early as then.
By 1900, the census shows Elmer’s father Henry as a farmer on the outskirts of St. Charles, but a renter rather than an owner [slide 12]. His brother-in-law George Bruns was also living in the household with his wife and infant son, a further indication of economic straits. Both of Elmer’s paternal grandparents were born in Germany, as was his maternal grandfather, and his maternal grandmother was born in Missouri of two German parents. In fact, there was not a single person on that census page who did not have roots in Germany.
The St. Charles city directories are again helpful because the 1910 census seems to have missed Elmer and his parents. They also indicate that Henry could not support his family from agriculture alone. The turning point was reported in the Banner News on August 13, 1903: Mr. and Mrs. Hy. J. Moehlenkamp had moved to St. Charles that week. By 1906, Henry is listed as working at a “Car Co,” almost certainly the “car shops” of American Car and Foundry, where he also shows up in 1910. Later he worked as a teamster for Hackman Lumber Co. His 1906 address is 562 Jefferson, where the family still lived in 1920, next door to a Presbyterian minister and by then owned mortgage free.
Marjorie’s father Elmer shows up as a student in the 1916-17 directory, and the next year as a stenographer. In contrast to his father he had moved up to the white-collar class, helped by the fact that he was a high school graduate according to the 1940 census. The move to town had definitely made that easier. When he registered for the World War I draft [slide 13], he worked at and probably commuted to the International Shoe Company headquarters at 15th and Washington in St. Louis, but as an office worker rather than a factory laborer [slide 14]. Elmer was still living with his parents in 1920, working as a stenographer for a grocery store in St. Charles, or maybe not. He showed up twice in that census, the second time in DeWitt, Arkansas, near Pine Bluff a bit over 100 miles southwest of Memphis, working, as in St. Charles, as a bookkeeper for a grocery store.
Just before Christmas of the next year, Elmer married Cora Lee Morrow in the town of DeWitt, with a Methodist minister officiating [slide 15]. She was also living in DeWitt with her widowed mother, siblings, and one nephew of her widowed sister, who was a music teacher. Her father, who died in 1913, had been the owner of a dry goods store in LaGrue, Arkansas, a dozen miles from DeWitt. Like her husband, Cora was a high school graduate, more middle-class than her current economic situation might suggest. Her mother was a Faulkner born in Mississippi, a distant cousin, three and four generations back, of Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner. But don’t for a minute think Taylor got her writing talent from there; she’s much better at it. I always found Faulkner stilted, pretentions and practically unreadable. Faulkner criticized that Ernest Hemingway “had never been known to use a word that might send his reader to the dictionary.” But Hemingway retorted, “Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words.”
Here one sees for the first time one of Taylor’s Swift’s German ancestors venturing outside St. Charles County and the Lutheran denomination and marrying an Anglo-American. What brought Elmer to this area remains unclear, as was the way the couple met, but Cora lived on North Adams Street and he lived on South Adams, only 5 pages or 50 houses apart in the census. They remained in Arkansas or Memphis Tennessee until at least 1928, when Marjorie was born.
In 1930, Elmer was living with his wife and two daughters in his parents’ household in St. Louis, along with an older married brother and his wife and child. You could tell there was a depression going on. Their rented house at 4742 Hammett Place had just over 1600 square feet, situated just off Kingshighway near Sherman Park, about 2 miles north of Forest Park. Elmer was working as a salesman for a brick company, while his father was a packer in a box factory and his brother a refrigerator salesman. His father was still living there in St. Louis when he died in 1936, his occupation listed as a retired meat packer. Although I could not determine if Elmer served overseas, but both the 1930 and 1940 censuses show him as a World War I veteran. Since his draft registration is only dated June 1918, he probably remained stateside, rather than being a case of “How you gonna keep ‘ em down of the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” in the words of a contemporary song.
The 1940 census shows that Elmer and his family had moved to St. Charles by 1935; by 1934 according to the city directories. A couple of things stand out in the 1940 census entry [slide 16]. Marjorie and her family are living on Elm Point Road, obviously a fashionable neighborhood, living right between car dealership owner Fred Boschert, and Theodore Bruere, from a dynasty of lawyers of that name going back before the Civil War to well into my lifetime (in fact, his son John T. Bruere is still practicing law in the next county over). The census lists the value of their house at $5750; slightly lower than that of their neighbors, but still equivalent to $130,000 in today’s purchasing power. Before that they were living in a pleasant bungalow at 801 Washington Street. Also living in the household in 1940 was a 20-year-old young women who was apparently their domestic servant, another indicator of their comfortable circumstances. Marjorie and her sister older Virginia were both born in Tennessee (Memphis according to other records) in 1928 and 1924 respectively. Both daughters attended Lindenwood College, although they probably did not overlap and require their father to pay two tuitions at once. Living at home as day students cut the cost roughly in half, but tuition and fees for a day student at Lindenwood in 1948 still came to about $775 per year, somewhat over $10,000 in 2024 purchasing power.
It’s also interesting to note how both family size and naming patterns changed. Elmer and Cora had only two children; the same was true of the next generation, and Taylor has only one brother. But Elmer’s parents had nine children, although only five survived until 1900. In the previous generation, Henry was one of seven, and there might have been more had his father not died young. The immigrant generation had six children, the first two of them born in Germany. Elmer is the first one in Taylor’s lineage with a non-Germanic name; before then the Moehlenkamps were crawling with Hermanns and Dietrichs and Heinrichs and Johanns, although the latter two were anglicized, at least in the census, to Henry and John. Elmer’s daughters also had mainstream names; Marjorie and Virginia. Like her sister, Virginia married someone with an Anglo name, Humphrey, who in 1950 was living in Alton, IL, working as a brick salesman like his father-in-law. But unlike Marjorie, who according to Wikipedia converted to Catholicism, Virginia apparently remained Lutheran all her life and is buried on Immanuel cemetery, although she was married Presbyterian in 1946 and one daughter was baptized Methodist in 1970. By Taylor Swift’s generation, names were derived from pop culture; the name Taylor was derived from musician James Taylor, whom her parents admired. But her mother, thinking entrepreneurially, also wanted a unisex name so that if her daughter went into business, her gender wouldn’t be apparent on her calling cards and invite discriminated.
By the 1950 census, Marjorie was still living with her parents, but had already joined the labor force, singing on the radio [slide 17]. Grandma Emma Moellenkamp is living with the family, so Marjorie may have picked up some German from her. Her father’s occupation is spelled out a bit more clearly than the last census: Sales Manager of a Retail and Wholesale Brickyard. The 1948 city directory identifies his employer: Alton Brick Company. Moehlenkamps’ two neighbors are still the same: car dealer Boschert and lawyer Breure, and just above him was a physician, Dr. Canty.
Marjorie Moehlenkamp was a voice music major and Girl-of-the-Year at Lindenwood College, and even before she graduated was standing out as a soloist in the Lindenwood Vesper Choir. Not yet a full-time performer, she worked as a receptionist at the Boatman’s National Bank, but was also a singer with the St. Louis Orchestra pops concert, appearing at Keil Auditorium. In 1950 Marjorie was selected as the winner of an ABC radio program called “Music With The Girls.” and went on to tour with the radio show for 15 months. In the summer of 1951 she received further training at the Berkshire Music Center in New England and performed both operatic and popular songs in New York.
It was there that she met her future husband, Robert Bruce Finlay, president of the Raymond Construction Company. They married on March 22, 1952, in Palm Beach, Florida. Finlay’s business took them abroad first to Havana, Cuba, then to Puerto Rico, then to Caracas, and back to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where they lived in the fashionable neighborhood of Santurce.
Long after she moved out of the community, Marjorie’s career was touted in the St. Charles area press. A 1959 article reported on her concert performance at the Statler Hotel while on a visit from Venezuela en route to her next home in Puerto Rico. In October 1961, she returned to Lindenwood to receive a citation as one of the school’s outstanding graduates. In early 1962, local papers again reported on her concert appearance with the St. Louis Symphony. By then she had her own daily TV show, as a headline in the Globe Democrat proclaimed: “She’s a star in Puerto Rico.” She was hired when she answered an ad for an American girl who spoke broken Spanish for a bilingual TV program, “El Show Pan Americano.” As she put it, “I certainly qualified. My Spanish was bad enough to be funny and the audience loved it. I became a sort of straight man for the show’s M.C.” Marjorie was always in demand for singing events, including a two-week stint at the Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan, which claims to be the birthplace of the Pina colada. She was even named an honorary captain in the Puerto Rican Air National Guard. Later her husband’s work brought them to Singapore in the late sixties.
Her daughter Andrea, Taylor’s mother, was born in Pennsylvania in 1958, but lived abroad with her parents and sister in her youth. She studied at the University of Houston. Exactly when the Finlays returned to the continental U.S. is unclear, but they were living in Houston in 1993 and moved to Reading PA the next year. In their later years Robert and Marjorie Finlay moved in with the Swift household in West Reading Pennsylvania’s Wyomissing area. It was here that Swift spent her early years on a 15-acre Christmas tree farm. Brother Austin came along a little later. Both her parents were in the financial industry. Her father was a vice president at Merrill-Lynch. Her mother was a marketing manager at an advertising agency.
Together with her operatic grandmother, Taylor had an opportunity to show off her singing skills as a young girl in church. “I can remember [my grandmother] singing, the thrill of it. She was one of my first inspirations,” Taylor recalled. Two of her songs were inspired to a large part by her grandmother Marjorie, who along with her husband features prominently in the video to “Timeless.” As the title indicates, Taylor’s song “Marjorie,” which Rolling Stone called a “heart shredding masterpiece,” is devoted entirely to her grandmother [slide 18]. It must be seen and heard with the video, featuring images of Marjorie throughout her life as well as a sampling of her voice, to be fully appreciated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6QpMeSG6s
Marjorie and her husband Robert both died within two months of each other in 2003. Shortly thereafter, when Taylor was thirteen, the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee on the outskirts of Nashville to be close to the country music industry. So Marjorie never experienced anything of Taylor’s music career. But she may well have helped to inspire it.
SOURCES:
Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (1987).
Robert M. Sandfort, Hermann Heinrich Sandfort: Farmer and Furniture-maker from Hahlen, Germany: 500 Years of Sandfort Family History (2000)
