Alles Kaput!!

Heilbronn, Wuerttemburg, Germany. It's about 60 km north of Stuttgart on the Neckar River. Not a town one has heard very much of as an American, but it has a very interesting history. I went to visit because great-grandmother moved there when she was 13, I surmise. At that time, in 1883, it was already an old town. It was one of those walled cities, like I had maps of on my wall as an undergrad. It was built up in the 1400's and the Evangelische Kirche that Great-Grandma Hagner would have attended was very impressive, with the first Rennaisance tower north of the Alps, and a carved altar by a guy named Speyer that was VERY impressive. I went to a 15 minute mid-day prayer service in that church just so I could enjoy that altar.

After the prayer service, I went to the museum, and when they figured out I was asking about Heilbronn history, they sent me to the City Archives. They were in a temporary home while their building was renovated. An enthusiastic guide with poor English showed me an English language film about Heilbronn, then took me around to see the displays with pictures of the city. There were a lot of photographs of Heilbronn at the turn of the 20th century, then a section about the bombing by the Allies on December 4, 1944, when the whole city center was totally destroyed. All she could say was 'Alles Kaput', as we went around and saw those sobering pictures. The church, the Rathaus with its exceptional clocks and everything else was basically rubble. They have spent a lot of time and money reconstructing the earlier buildings, including the church. It's amazing that it looks so authentic.

One other fact about Heilbronn, it's the only town square I have seen with a statue to a physicist, Robert Mayer, a native son of Heilbronn who around 1815 came up with the conservation of energy.

Looking to the future, not the past

In Ireland, when I asked distant relatives about where someone was buried a hundred years ago, they could take me right to the site, even if it were an unmarked grave. In Germany, I found a cemetery in Neckargartach, but all the graves were from within the last 40-50 years, so I asked at the church office if there were an 'alte' cemetery. Once they understood what I was looking for, they laughed. They said that a grave would only last as long as there were someone to take care of it, unless it were someone famous. It's a lot easier to do geneaological research in Ireland!

I don't know if looking forward and not living in the past has always been a trait of the Germans, or if it entered their psyche as a result of losing two major wars in the last century. That certainly has to have an impact. At the church in Neckargartach, there was a memorial to soldiers who died in World War I that included some Hagners. It struck me that it must have been extremely hard on Gramma Norris living in Connecticut, with her husband off in France fighting, possibly against her own cousins.

Famalien Buchen

German efficiency goes a long way back, at least in the Kingdom of Wuerttemburg. For part of the 17th, the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, church parishes were required to record everything that happened in the life of a family in the 'family book'. Intended to make it easier to track young males that might need to be conscripted into the army, these family books are a great boon for geneaologists. The family book lists the head of household and their spouse, complete with birth dates, marriage dates, death dates if applicable, occupation, names of parents, and names, birthdays, confirmation dates, death dates, etc. for all children. As you scan through them you can see who left for America, who moved, etc (once you decipher the old German script!). I found microfilm copies of the family books as well as baptism, marriage and death records for Wuerttemberg at the Staatsarchive in Stuttgart.

Reading the family books are very moving because you can see how hard life was back then. Our great-great-great grandfather, born in 1795 and a farmer (burger), was married twice. With his first wife they had five children and two died in infancy. When he remarried, they had nine children and only three survived to adulthood.

Assuming I have found the correct Pauline C. Hagner - and since I have her birth date, it is pretty firm, her father (also a farmer) died when she was ten. A couple of years later, the mother (a Schmid from Heilbronn) moved with her son and four daughters back to their home town, and the family book was no longer updated in the original parish of Neckargartach. Unfortunately, the government took over vital records after 1880, so the family books will not help show her journey from Heilbronn to Connecticut. The next step will require digging into the bureaucratic records.

Bad Urach: The Hot Springs of the Schwabes Alb

I didn't do a lot of research in advance on where I would be venturing; in fact, this part of Germany is largely ignored in the American guidebooks. I knew I needed to start in Stuttgart, at the archives for the Kingdom of Wuerttemberg, but I didn't really want to stay in the city. Thanks to hotels.com, searching in the vicinity of Stuttgart, I ended up with a hotel in a village called Bad Urach. I imagined a peaceful farm village out in the middle of nowhere - that is how it looked on the map; instead I got a bustling resort town in the Schwabes Alb, a mountain range that is to the Alps like the Black Hills are to the Rockies. They even have hot springs and decades old thermal baths that gives Bad Urach very much the feel of South Dakota's town of Hot Springs.

A few differences, the most noticeable being the town square, MarketPlatz, which is surrounded by medevial half-timber houses. The town even has the ruins of a castle, up on the top of a hill above a waterfall. The traffic is much worse here as well, being only 40 km from the city of Stuttgart. Another difference is the history; medevial houses are only the beginning, there are Roman roads crossing the range, and artifacts found in the area dating back 35,000 years. The food is very good and typically German. I will enjoy!

Background: The Hines in Connecticut

After the death of my father in 1992, I first started exploring geneaology. My father had some family documents and photos in his safe deposit box that we hadn't ever seen. I spent some time in Connecticut where my grandparents and great-grandparents had lived. It bothered me that we didn't even know where they were buried, or who were the people in those early family photos we found. My parents were the ones who had left early, moving to Kansas and Texas after their marriage in 1950. My mother came from an Irish Catholic family in Waterbury; my father from a German mother and Lithuanian father in neighboring Naugatuck. He was raised an Episcopalian but his father was Catholic. Her sisters helped her hide letters that came from my father at Yale, as dating a non-Catholic, non-Irishman was forbidden by her father.

So if this was a problem in 1948, how much more of a problem it must have been in 1920, when my German grandmother from Bridgeport, Anna Pauline Hine, ran off to New York to marry a handsome, young, but Lithuanian-Catholic World War I veteran, Michael J. Norris? How did they meet? Did her sisters help her? Did she even have sisters? For me, geneaology brings personal, national and world history to life. Someone who has long been forgotten - most likely in an unmarked grave - will at least have the care and respect of one person who can tell their stories to my own children.

That first serious venture into geneaological research took me to the Connecticut State Library, township records in Naugatuck, Waterbury and Bridgeport, and several cemeteries. I discovered that my grandmother had two brothers (no sisters to help out!), both of whom had died relatively young. One brother, however, had a family, revealing cousins that we didn't know existed. Later I contacted one of my father's cousins, and he had stories of going to Naugatuck by street car to visit my great-grandmother, Pauline Christine Hine, when she was living with her daughter and son-in-law in Naugatuck.

My German great-grandparents, Peter Hohn (later Hine) and Pauline Hagner, emigrated in 1882 and 1890, respectively, and married in Bridgeport. How did they end up in Connecticut? Did they know each other in Germany? What family members came with them? What was their journey like? There are some of the stories I hope to reveal in the next chapters of my research, here in Germany.

10/9/2011: High Hopes and Low Expectations

High Hopes: I arrived in Germany yesterday to trace the family roots for my paternal grandmother's family. I've been working on geneaology for years, but only recently has enough German church records been digitized and put online that I think I might have a clue where to look. Last year, I found evidence of my great-grandmother's Pauline Christine Hagner's birth in Neckargartach, Wurttemburg; at least the birthdate was correct. Could there possibly be two people with the same name born on the same day in Germany in 1870? That was my worry; but I added the information to my family tree on ancestry.com anyway. Lo and behold, a few months later, I was contacted by a fellow researcher named Evelyne. She also has Pauline on her family tree and goes several generations beyond that. It seemed worth it to come over and try to confirm the relationship and to meet with Evelyne. After all, the strategy worked in Ireland, why not Germany?

Low Expectations: Of course I had planned to do a lot of preparation before my trip, including more research, studying German, etc., but the real world (job, family, other activities) intervened. This makes the chances that I will actually learn anything useful much less likely. My mother remembers that my grandmother talked about her Mom's family coming from around Frankfurt. That's not where I am looking. So far, I have found the general German populace very unfriendly; hopefully the same won't be true of the archivists and librarians, and hopefully they will speak English.

First stop tomorrow, the archives in Stuttgart, then up to Heilbronn to look for the Evangelische church records! More later.