Jauer Family Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, the way I read it on a Guadalupe County roadside. Johann Carl Ludwig Jauer came to Texas the hard way, through a contract signed in 1847 with the German Emigration and Railroad Company, part of that great Fisher and Miller Colony push into the Texas Hill Country. He and Anna Caroline Alemeier married in 1851 and settled right here on this land, building something from what must have felt like the edge of the known world.

But the land doesn't let you settle easy, and this family learned that early. The burial ground was likely set aside in 1853, with the death of an infant daughter whose name was never recorded. Think on that a moment.

No name on the stone, no name in the telling, just a child given back to the earth before anyone thought to write her down. And she wasn't the last. It is believed that one of their twin daughters, Maria Dorothea, born in 1854 and gone by 1855, was laid here too.

Two little girls in ground that was barely broken. Anna Caroline herself would follow in 1868. A single stone, one stone, carries the names of Ludwig, Anna, and their daughter Karoline, who was born in 1862 and died in 1873.

One marker for three souls. Ludwig outlasted them all. He remarried in 1880, had two more children, and kept workin his Clear Springs land until, at last, in 1901, he was laid to rest on it.

Born in 1812, buried on his own ground, a prominent landowner to the end. That single stone out there is doing a lot of heavy lifting, friend. It holds more than names.

It holds a whole family's cost of calling Texas home.

What the marker says

Jauer Family Cemetery Johann Carl Ludwig Jauer (1812-1901) and Anna Caroline Alemeier (1824-1868) married in 1851 and settled on this Fisher and Miller Colony land acquired through an 1847 contract with the German Emigration and Railroad Company. The burial ground was likely set aside with the 1853 death of an unnamed infant daughter. It is believed that one of their twin daughters, Maria Dorothea (1854-1855), is also buried here. A single stone marks the burials of Ludwig, Anna and daughter Karoline (1862-1873). Ludwig Jauer, a prominent landowner, remarried in 1880 and had two more children before being laid to rest on his Clear Springs land. Historic Texas Cemetery-2002