The Deckers are the least known of my ancestor families. Franz Christian Decker was born in Auerstedt in Saxony in 1760. All we know is that he died in 1838 having married Catherina Sophie. His son, Karl August was born in 1800.
Karl August became a tailor. He married twice, first in 1825 to Anna Luise Kriegerin who bore him 8 children and then to Christiane Marie Thann in 1849. Christiane had two children, the younger was Gustav Manilius Decker.
Gustav was an assistant fireman on the railway. Like his father, he was married twice, first to Bertha Sauer, daughter of Adam Sauer and Kunigunde Hagedorn, in 1879 and, following her death, to Catharina Schuster.
Gustav and Bertha had six children, five boys, (somewhat unimaginatively, three of them named Karl) and one girl, my Grandmother Amanda Katherina.
The oldest child, Carl August, Amanda and the second youngest Richard Hugo, all died within four years of each other, from 1931 to 1935. The middle two boys, Karl Justus and Karl Willhelm, I have only birth records for. The youngest, Otto Willhelm, died at birth in 1895, the same year as his mother.
One of Gustav Manilius' half-brothers was a member of the British German Legion, German soldiers recruited to fight for the British in the Crimean War. After the war, members of the legion were billeted at Barrack field in Colchester Garrison, where many married local women. One of these was Friedrich August Decker who, in1856, married Mary Nevard Morton and embarked for Cape Colony where decendants of the Decker family still live in and around King Willam's Town.
On 26 December 1905 Amanda Decker was received in to the Jewish faith and married Siegfried Schönwald in Breslau, East Prussia, modern day Wrocław, in Poland. It appears that all ties with her family were cut at this point.
In 1908 she gave birth to her first child, Kurt.
Following a divorce from her first husband, Amanda married Max Ellenbogen in 1923.