Research Update: Week of June 4, 2026

A concentrated week in the research files — the kind where pulling one thread pulls three others. The Menger family genealogy occupied the most time and produced the most resolved questions, but there were also significant moves on the Hoffmann side of the family, a first-ever look at William A. Menger’s full biography, and a batch of new collection items that filled the machinery documentation gap we’d been carrying since 2014. Here’s the accounting.

Genealogy — the two Menger families

The project has long carried a soft uncertainty about the exact relationship between the Menger Hotel founders and the Menger siblings who ran Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee. This week that resolved cleanly.

The key was Tim Draves’s annotated correction to our William Menger page (delivered June 1 by email), confirmed by a second source — an entry on William Achatius Menger in the American Historical Association’s Immigrant Entrepreneurship series. Both agree: Catherine Barbara Menger (1860–1947) was William A. and Mary Menger’s daughter, not their granddaughter. That makes the H&H Menger generation — Gus P., Minnie, R.W., T.J., L.B. — William and Mary’s grandchildren, one generation closer to the Menger Hotel than the KB had recorded.

Tim’s corrections also filled out William A.’s biography substantially. His full name was William Achatius Menger, born March 15, 1827 in Windecken, Hesse; he died at the hotel on March 18, 1871 at age 45, “suddenly of natural causes.” He founded Texas’s first commercial brewery (~1855) before the hotel, and his father-in-law J.H. Kampmann (who held a mortgage on the hotel) bought the property in 1881 after Mary’s retirement. The full ownership chain from 1859 to the present is now on file: Menger family (1859–1881) → Kampmann (1881–1943) → Moody family (1943–2025) → State of Texas (2025–present).

We also added an unexpected family member: Sister M. Gonzaga, described in the Sons of DeWitt Colony archive as “born in the hotel” and serving as secretary-general of the Sisters of Divine Providence at Our Lady of the Lake College. She isn’t in the Immigrant Entrepreneurship four-child roster, so her relationship remains open — possible fifth child, possible misattribution.

The Menger family genealogy chain is now documented in a new Genealogy section in menger-family.md, including an ASCII chain from William A. × Mary → Catherine Barbara → Dr. Rudolph Menger → all eight H&H siblings.

On the genealogy document front: Tim and Nancy Draves shared a printed family sheet — “Children of Rudolph and Catherine Barbara Menger” — that confirmed several vital dates not previously on file: August Menger (1884?–1982), married Gertrude Schultz; Clara Marie Margaret “Tutz” Menger (1898–1980), the youngest sibling, previously known to us only as “Margaret”; Charlotte Belcher (1927–2011) and William Belcher (1928–2014), Nancy’s parents. The document also surfaced a name discrepancy on Gus’s wives — his first wife is listed as “Rowalie Crowther” (the KB had “Rose Lee née Crowther”) and his second as “Catherine” (the KB has “Adele” from the 1974 obituary). The obituary takes precedence; the discrepancy is flagged for follow-up.

William R. Hoffmann — cause of death confirmed

A smaller but clean resolution: we had carried “after a brief illness” as the cause of death for William R. Hoffmann (died January 10, 1912). The January 13, 1912 San Antonio Express-News burial permit listing — already in the collection as HH-CLIP-1912-0010 — gives the cause as “stomach trouble”. The KB now records this as the primary cause-of-death source. (An earlier session confusion between the two Williams — Hoffmann 1912 and Menger 1871 — is resolved; the “stomach issues” detail belongs to Hoffmann, not Menger.)

Helen Hoffmann — cause of death, new lead

Nancy Draves added a detail to the Helen Hoffmann cause-of-death thread that hadn’t surfaced before: a rat ran over Helen’s foot and bit her. Rabies was incurable in 1945 without post-exposure prophylaxis, so a rat bite leading to rabies is medically plausible for a January death. This joins the earlier fragmented oral-history lead (Helen “went in the garage” and “ran her [motor]”) as the two competing family-lore accounts of her death. Both are now in the KB as research leads pointing toward the Bexar County 1945 death certificate, which remains the resolution target.

New to the collection

A batch of purchases arrived and were ingested this week — ten new accession records across three purchase dates:

H&H artifact:

• HH-BOTTLE-2026-0001 — H and H Coffee three-pound square glass jar with original red painted metal lid and partial paper label. The first labeled three-pound Crystalvac example in the collection; all prior Crystalvac jars have been one-pound.

American Can Company:

• HH-AD-2026-0001 — 1934 American Can Company full-page trade print ad, “Getting things off on the right foot,” showing a Canco closing machine on the factory floor. Acquired three years before H&H installed its own vacuum-can closing machine at 601 Delaware (June 1937).

Monitor/Huntley machinery library (5 catalogs):

• HH-BOOK-2026-0017 through HH-BOOK-2026-0021 — five Huntley Manufacturing Company Monitor brand catalogs covering coffee roasting, cooling and stoning (supplementary to Cat. 64), coffee machinery (Cat. 66), coffee grinding and blending, peanut cleaning (Cat. 69), and a peanut spare-part catalog. Together these document the full Monitor equipment sequence H&H ran across both the 331 Burnett Street and 601 Delaware Street plants — roast, grind, blend — in both the Silver Creek (earlier) and Brocton (later) production eras.

Books:

• HH-BOOK-2026-0022 — Antique Arms Annual, 1st Edition (TGCA, 1971). Published by S.P. Stevens — see below.
• HH-BOOK-2026-0023 — The Canning Clan: A Pageant of Pioneering Americans, Earl Chapin May (Macmillan, 1937). Published the same year H&H adopted vacuum-can packaging and the Three Rivers Glass Company dissolved.
• HH-BOOK-2026-0024 — The Tin Can Book: The Can as Collectible Art, Advertising Art & High Art, Hyla M. Clark. Collector reference for the lithographed coffee-tin collection.

S.P. Stevens — publisher confirmed

The physical copy of the Antique Arms Annual resolved a question the R.L. Wilson correspondence had left open. The cover reads: “Edited by R.L. Wilson / S.P. Stevens / Publisher.” We had Wilson’s letters identifying Stevens as the photographer of the 20-page Fowler Winchester Collection section and as Wilson’s host during the typesetting push, but “publisher” was new. Stevens — the San Antonio sign painter and billboard operator documented as the probable H&H Coffee billboard artist — was the controlling production figure for the TGCA’s 1971 flagship firearms annual. A San Antonio outdoor-advertising man who also published a 3,000-copy reference annual for a statewide collectors’ association: that is the fuller picture of the man whose name the family-lore record connects to Hoffmann-Hayman.

New places, companies, and synthesis

Grace Armantrout Museum (George West, TX) — a community museum in Live Oak County (same county as Three Rivers) that organized the 2017 Three Rivers Glass bottle show. The museum actively collects Three Rivers Glass pieces, including a “Yola’s Dream” brilliantine bottle (marked “3 Rivers” and “15”) not previously in the Smith Texas Glass inventory. A 2024 The Progress article documents a $170K expansion, funded in part by Grace Armantrout’s own Cactus Park Trust Fund — she endowed the institution before she died.

Lone Star Brewery — registered as a new company entry. The connection: Kearney Joseph Kivlin worked at Lone Star Brewery before joining H&H Coffee as accountant. The brewery’s founding in 1884 by Adolphus Busch traces its lineage directly to William A. Menger’s Western Brewery (1855) — the same brewery that funded the Menger Hotel’s construction.

Company Organization synthesis — a new synthesis page at synthesis/company-organization.md documents the full departmental structure: Packing, Roasting, Office/Admin, Credit, Advertising, Traffic/Shipping, Sales (field and restaurant/institutional), Demonstrators, Spice & Extracts, Vacuum Packing, and Canning. Workforce headcount by year (23 → 48 → 60+ → ~70) and the Houston satellite plant as a second full facility.

What’s next

The William A. Menger cause-of-death question remains open — the primary SA newspaper obituary (c. March 18–20, 1871) is the resolution target, accessible via Newspapers.com but not yet retrieved. The Menger Family Papers at the UIW Library (possibly the same collection as the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word archive) are the deeper archive; Tim Draves has direct working access and is the obvious path in. On the collection side, ten posts published from the intake batch — all now live.