Karl Kensing Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Karl Kensing Cemetery, out in Gillespie County. Now, every family has a place where the story begins, and for the Kensings, that beginning was an ocean away. Heinrich Friedrich Karl Kensing was born in Germany in 1828, and in 1845, he crossed an ocean with his parents and four siblings, bound for Texas.

That is not a small thing. That is a family betting everything on a new world. Not all of them made it through those early years.

Of the five Kensing children, only three survived to see what Texas could become. Karl, Henry, and Christine, the ones who endured, settled in Fredericksburg in 1850. And Karl, he didn't waste any time putting down roots.

That same year, 1850, he married Margaretha Friedricke Reeh, born in 1825. The Kensings prepared a small family cemetery on their property. Karl himself is the first known burial there.

And the generations followed. Friedricke, who was born in 1825 and passed in 1903, rests there. So does their son Henry, Henry's wife Katharina, and their grandsons Frank and Otto.

Now here's the thing that makes this little cemetery something more than a family plot. Read the stones, and you can watch a world changing right there in the ground. The older markers carry traditional German inscriptions, the language of the people who crossed that ocean, who built Fredericksburg out of Hill Country rock and stubbornness.

Then, as you move forward in time, the inscriptions shift, plain, simple English. The grandchildren speaking a different tongue than the grandparents. That's what this cemetery holds.

Not just Karl Kensing, born 1828, gone 1902, and the family he left behind. It holds the whole arc of a people arriving as German pioneers and becoming something new, generation by generation, right there in the soil of the Texas Hill Country.

What the marker says

Heinrich Friedrich Karl Kensing (1828-1902) was born in Germany and immigrated to Texas with his parents and four siblings in 1845. The surviving three Kensing children, Karl, Henry and Christine, settled in Fredericksburg in 1850. Karl married Margaretha Friedricke Reeh (1825-1903) in 1850. The Kensings prepared a small family cemetery on their property. Karl is the first known burial, along with Friedricke, their son, Henry, his wife, Katharina, and grandsons, Frank and Otto. From traditional German inscriptions to simple English inscriptions, this historic cemetery represents the transition from early Hill Country German pioneers to their English-speaking descendants. Historic Texas Cemetery – 2011