Ellen's maternal grandmother, Doris Elizabeth KAIPER, was born in Cincinnati in 1904. Her family tradition was that her father (who abandoned her family when she was small) was one of several children in a feuding family: one part moved across the river to Kentucky, the other stayed in Cincinnati. City directories and census records bear this out; the first KAPERs (without the 'i') appeared in Cincinnati in 1856, and by 1860 one of Doris's great-uncles had moved across the river to Covington. (One of Ellen's research goals is to find out whether the feud was directly related to the Civil War.)
Doris KAIPER Glover Quinn believed that her family name was German, but that her father was of Danish descent and had originally spelled the name "KAPER" in Danish fashion; she claimed the family had spent a generation or two in northern Germany and changed the spelling there. She was most definitely of northern German ancestry on her mother's side (the BOTTENUSes were from a little village in the northern Rheinland, and the MEUTTMANNs probably from Hamburg), and held a lifelong disdain for Bavarians, including the entire SEEBACHER family of Ellen's father. Yet her grandparents Jacob KAPER and Mary MEYER Kaper listed as their birthplace in the 1880 census -- yes -- Bavaria.
Ellen has extensive research materials on the KAIPERs and KAPERs of Cincinnati and neighboring Kentucky towns. If you know of KA(I)PER families with a possible Cincinnati connection she'd love to hear from you; tracking this family back across the water has been an elusive goal for many years.
