My Genealogy Hound

WILLIAM GRABNER, farmer, post office Negley, was born in the Kingdom of Hanover, Germany, in 1819, a son of Charles Godfrey and Caroline (Rachel) Grabner, both deceased. His father was a surgeon, and served under the Prussian government, at the time of Napoleon’s invasion, at the battles of Austerlitz, Leipsic and Waterloo. He received two balls in the left leg, a saber-wound in the right thigh and a scalp wound. After the close of the war he held a position under the government. William’s maternal grandfather, George Otto (Rachel), was a German school teacher and organist of a church for fifty years. Our subject had the good fortune to be highly educated in his native country, studying German, Latin and French at the Osnabruck Seminary, from which he graduated in 1834. He then worked four years in a chemical laboratory, where he became a skilled druggist, but, his health failing, he was obliged to cross the ocean, and arrived in Baltimore in 1842. There he engaged with Judge George Smith, judge of the orphans’ court, and for two years labored on his plantation in Frederick county, Md., and for the next five years he was foreman or manager. He also acted as private tutor to the judge’s son. In 1849, seeing the evils of slavery, he left Maryland, and, coming to East Liberty, worked four years for Robert Bailey, whose daughter Hannah he married. Mrs. Grabner was born in Belfast, Ireland, and died in September, 1884. Mrs. Minnie Winkler, a niece of Mr. Grabner, and her two children, William and Mary, reside with him. In 1859 he moved to his present farm in Plum township, where he has been four years school director and fourteen years trustee of the Unity U. P. Church. In politics he is a republican, and having received a liberal education himself is ever interested in the good work of educating the young.