Karoline Hafner (née Merz)

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Birth: 20 February 1865, Stetten, Germany

Death: 16 August 1936, Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: None

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: None

Karoline Hafner was born Karoline Rosine Merz on February 20, 1865, in Stetten, Germany. She was the daughter of Johann Philipp Merz and Barbara Wahler and was baptized and later confirmed in the Lutheran Church.

On October 31, 1891, she married Johann Wilhelm Hafner in Stuttgart, Germany. Johann Wilhelm was a porcelain painter. Karoline had two known children: Pauline Rose (born 1887) and Hans Heinrich Richard (born 1904). Pauline was born in Switzerland several years before her parents married.

Both of Karoline’s children immigrated to Washington State before she did, at different times. Pauline arrived in the United States in 1910, married in 1913, and settled in Seabeck. Richard followed in 1925, settling in Seattle, where he worked as a baker.

In 1928, Karoline’s husband passed away. Approximately eight years later, in 1936, Karoline emigrated alone from Hamburg, Germany, to the United States at the age of seventy-one. According to the ship’s manifest, she arrived in Oakland, California, on April 11, 1936, where she transferred to another vessel bound for Seattle. She sailed aboard the SS Seattle, stopping first in Vancouver, British Columbia, on April 17, 1936, before arriving in Seattle on April 19. She passed the required medical inspection and was formally admitted into the United States on April 20, 1936.

Karoline died on August 16, 1936, from angina pectoris, a condition involving chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart. She had reportedly suffered from this condition for approximately two years.

There are some discrepancies surrounding the details of her death. Her death certificate states that she had lived in the United States for only one month prior to her death, although immigration records show she had been admitted six months earlier. Family accounts indicate that Karoline died in Seabeck at her daughter’s home in Stavis Bay while making tea, a version that seems more plausible than the account recorded by historian Fred Just, who wrote that “she was coming to Seabeck from Germany to join her family, but she died on the train before she arrived.” Just cited Rudy Hintz as his source, though how this version of events originated remains unclear.