Napolione Clara Hubertina Cüppers, my great-great grandmother, was born Apr. 26, 1826 in Euskirchen, Germany, between Bonn and the border of France. According to family lore she had some French ancestors and was somehow related to the "lesser nobility." It is also said her family was Jewish, her father was a jeweler and the family employed servants.
She married Theodor Hubert Hoss, a Catholic, in a civil ceremony in her town in 1853 and in the following year the couple, with an infant daughter, set off for Wisconsin. As the family worked their way across the frontier heading West I was told she liked to remind her husband about the life she gave up. The Hoss family arrived in Washington Territory in the mid-1870s.
Clara died in Centralia, Washington Dec. 14, 1896 and is buried in Centralia's Pioneer Cemetery.
