I can trace my wife's family back on the side I'm interested in to a Charles R(einhart) Schubert (1880-1934) and Emma Raeppel (lots of variations on her maiden name) (1885-1957). I want to follow up through Charles' ancestors but am stuck. The two clues I'm relatively confident on are his death, reported here:
and the fact that at the time of the 1910 census he was *adopted* by, and together with his wife Emma, living with, an Eva Schubert.
https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/7884/images/31111_4328142-00657?pId=4587465
Eva Schubert (nee Englehart) is very traceable and has a big family from her marriage to an Andreas Schubert - Andreas and Eva came to the US together very young in 1852 and married soon afterwards.
Circling back to Charles, his death report lists his parents as "Chas" (Presumably Charles or a German precursor like Karl) and Anna.
Assuming Chas and Anna are correct, I cannot find a link between that couple on the one hand, and Andreas and Eva on the other, and am stumped as to why Charles (biological son of the first couple) would end up being adopted by the second couple (or at least Eva), who happened to share his last name. In the unlikely event you're still with me(!), one of Andreas and Eva's biological children was called Charles and was just about old enough to be the father of my Charles so I was working on a "child-out-of-wedlock-adopted-by-Grandma" theory, but I can't make it work.
Finally, Ancestry is convinced it knows who Charles' father Chas is, and is pushing me lots of hints to the same person. Their Chas married an Anna, but that is the only alignment I can see - there's no mention of him having a son called Charles across any of the records (representative example below). I have flirted with the idea that Ancestry's Charles is Chas but apart from my clicking around in the past I've no idea why Ancestry is so convinced this is the path forward when my Charles just isn't in evidence.
Can anyone help? If someone is able to find a convincing breakthrough - and in a dream scenario to go back a generation or two further in Germany / Austria - I would be willing to reimburse them for their time.