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Early history of the
family
The Ullinger family of London began with Jakob Ullinger (b.
1833), a musician from Morbach in Bavaria, Germany, who came to London
as a young man in the 1850s. During the late 1840s and 1850s, much of
Germany was disputed territory and half of continental Europe was at
war. Men and boys were being conscripted into the Prussian army, land
was being confiscated, and many people were struggling to make a
living. So there was a mass exodus of young people from Germany to new
countries where they could start afresh. Hordes of Germans took ship at
Hamburg for the New World on a promise of jobs and land. Often they
spent all their savings on a passage to America and were cheated, and
wound up arriving in England instead.
The story is that Jakob left home with two other musicians: his younger sister Elisabetha Ullinger, and her sweetheart, Jakob Stass or Strass, who came from the next village, Einoellen. Jakob Ullinger was definitely in England by 1859, so if the younger two did leave with him they'd have been just teenagers, aged around 14. They married in 1870 in Liverpool, so perhaps they left London to try their luck elsewhere when Jakob married.
There was a large German
community in London at the time, mostly concentrated
around the East End in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green
and Stepney. The community had their own churches, schools and
hospital, which must have been comforting in a place
where everything was strange, including the language.
Jacob settled in Whitechapel and began making his living
as a musician, and in 1859 he married 18-year-old
Elizabeth Godfrey, the daughter of a Whitechapel gunmaker. They
had a total of eleven children, eight of
whom survived to adulthood:
- Jacob Henry John
Ullinger, b 1860 (m Timkey: no issue)
- Henry Daniel
Ullinger, b 1862 (m Matthews: descendants in Australia)
- Daniel Thomas Ullinger, b
1864 (d 1900, unmarried as far as I know)
- John Peter Ullinger, b
1865 (m Curtis)
- Emily Ann Ullinger, b
1867 (m Turner)
- Elizabeth Caroline Ullinger, b 1869 (died as a baby)
- Helena Sophia Ullinger, b
1870 (m Gibson)
- Alfred Poole Ullinger, b
1872 (died as a child)
- Philip Ullinger, b 1873 (m Matthews)
- Elizabeth Sophia Ullinger, b 1875 (died as a baby)
- Mary Ullinger, b 1877 (m Hagon)
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