Generation II1818to 1915

Butchers, a brewer and the first Buffalo-born Weppner

Anna Maria, the eldest, was born at Zell in 1818. In 1840 she married Philip Born at St. Louis Church. He was the son of Augustus's sister Eva Magdalena, so the couple were first cousins, and he owned a brewery on Genesee Street. Philip died suddenly in January 1849, leaving her with three young daughters. She lived until 1889, “well known in German-American circles,” as her obituary put it.

Jacob, the eldest son, was born in Zell on 29 October 1820 and was not quite fourteen when the family left. In 1848 he married Born's niece, Emma Lambert, at St. Louis Church; his obituary calls her his first cousin. He worked in his father's meat business until Philip Born died in 1849, then ran Born's brewery for his widowed sister until 1865, when it passed to Gerhard Lang, who had married Philip's daughter Barbara. It grew into the Gerhard Lang Brewery. Jacob later worked as a maltster, and when he died in 1902 he had lived in Buffalo for nearly 68 years.

Arnold, born in Zell in 1825, stayed with meat. In 1852 he married Blandina Doll at St. Boniface Church. Born at Önsbach in Baden, she had reached Buffalo with her parents, Friedrich Doll and Maria Anna Steffan, in July 1834, a few weeks before the Weppners landed in New York. The couple set up house at 582 Main Street. A city directory lists A. Weppner & Co., butchers, at 422 Main Street, with Arnold living next door at 421. They had fifteen children, and he was a member of the Buffalo Historical Society.

John, born at Zell in 1828, married Susanna Germain in 1853 and had three children. In 1861 he volunteered for Company I of the 64th New York Infantry. He was wounded at Fair Oaks, Virginia, in 1862, taken prisoner at Reams Station in August 1864, and never came home: by March 1865 he had died, either a prisoner at Salisbury, North Carolina, or in a Washington hospital after his release. Barbara, born at Pfeddersheim in 1831, married Joseph Fougeron in 1849 and lived at the Fougeron grocery, 127 Niagara Street, until her death in 1906. Francis was born in Buffalo in June 1835, the year after the family arrived, and christened at St. Louis Church with his brother Jacob and sister Anna Maria as godparents. He was the only one of Augustus's children born in America. In 1858 he married Catherine Dantzer, who had come from Altkirch in Alsace as a girl. Her father, Pierre Morand Dantzer, ran a butcher shop near the New York Central yards on Exchange Street, and Francis worked with him. In 1866 Francis, listed as Frank, sat on the first board of the German Catholic Young Men's Association, a club with its own library and reading rooms that later became the Buffalo Catholic Institute.

“Mrs. Weppner told many stories of the time when Indians in the vicinity of Buffalo sold cattle to her father.”
Catherine Weppner's obituary, The Buffalo Commercial, 28 December 1915