What You Find Isn't Always What You Expect

Researching the Beu side of the family has led to a lot of re-evaluating on my part, finally coming to terms with some things and having new issues come up. What I knew about Gustav was anything but good, the man who left his wife and two small children to fend for themselves while he moved down to Florida and got himself a new wife without bothering to divorce Emma, even if she would have given him a divorce. As a result, Oma and her brother grew up without a father and were raised by a mother who never really got over losing her husband, and Emma's doting on Rudi while ignoring Oma left scars that still haven't healed. Those patterns ended up repeating themselves down generations, though to a lesser extent, and the family is still suffering for Gustav's actions eighty years later. I've never seen a photo of him, though I've been told repeatedly that he was extremely good-looking and charming, but I also never had any respect for the man who would do that to his own wife and children. I couldn't understand that kind of selfishness, and if I'm being completely honest, I never really tried to. For me, it was enough that he'd hurt people I love and immediately pushed aside any curiosity about the man I'd never known.

Once I made the decision to trace Gustav's line, I knew I was going to have to get a good look at his life, and I had mixed feelings about it. I could finally satisfy the curiosity in a way that I could pass off as detached and for someone other than myself, but I didn't think I was going to like what I found. As I found more and more pieces of the puzzle that was Gustav Beu, they were mostly dates and places and that allowed me to be quite impersonal about it, and I was relieved that it was turning out to be easier than I had expected. As usual, it wasn't a good thing to say, even just in my own head.

Oma and Pop-pop had been going through their things and trying to seriously pare down the amount of stuff in their house, and in so doing, they found the death certificates for both Emma and Gustav and called me over as they knew I'd been trying to get copies through Ancestry.com. That was how I found Emma's parents and was able to go from there, but for Gustav, it was almost all information I had already known and just backed up the facts I had. It so happened that around the time I found out parish records had causes of deaths, I was curious enough to find out how Gustav had passed (we always knew Emma died of colon cancer), and that's when I got something akin to a slap in the face. Rather than a time of death on his certificate, it says that Gustav was 'found' in mid-afternoon at his house, which means that when he had his fatal heart attack, he was alone, and dead by the time his common-law wife Mary came home. For a reason I still can't explain, it hit me hard enough that without realising it right away, I had started crying. I think it may have been that he suddenly became a real person instead of an unpleasant abstract, and no matter what he did, he was still my great-grandfather and he died without having someone there with him, probably scared and hopefully regretting the pain he had caused. While I can't deny that he still wasn't a particularly likeable person for me, I don't know that he deserved being alone at the end, and Mary was the only family he had by then. Emma at least had Rudi there, and when the time comes, Oma will have all of us, so while I remain convinced that I won't ever really like him, I can finally look at him and feel sorry for him. In the end, Gustav ended up a lonely man, while Emma had her children and grandchildren around her, and that knowledge makes it easier to have compassion for him. He traded his family for 'freedom', and I can truthfully say now that I hope that choice made him happy.

Ha-Lihl-Lujah!

Neuhaus seems to have had ten or twelve large families who kept intermarrying, though each generation had more than enough children to safeguard against true inbreeding (just because it was Austria doesn't mean they were emulating the Hapsburgs), so when Emma's grandmother, Johanna Lorenz, came up, I assumed that as Lorenz was one of those key families, Johanna was from Neuhaus or Hirschenstand as well. That was my big mistake, and I like to think I've learned my lesson. Still, it was a wall I hadn't been able to break, and that meant of Oma's eight great-grandparents, I only had five that I could trace back and even those had their issues. Of the three remaining, two require getting in touch with the Ribnitz archive, and the last was Johanna Lorenz. I then figured that if I had images of the records from Ribnitz, I should do the same for Oma's Lihl relatives, and that's when the case broke open.

As I knew Johanna's husband, Simon Lihl, was from Neuhaus and had already obtained his dates, I started tracking down the exact entries to capture the images, and while I had their marriage date from his birth record, there was nothing in either Neuhaus or Hirschenstand for their actual marriage record. Looking at his birth record a bit closer, and I noticed that next to the notation for his marriage to Johanna was something that the priest had scrawled, and vaguely looked like it could be her place of birth. Earlier in the day, I'd checked back on Jelení 22, and I noticed a village on the archive database for a village right near Neuhaus and Hirschenstand, called Sauersack (now Rolava-Přebuz). Because that little tidbit had stuck in my head, being able to make out the first three letters of the village listed for Johanna made me able to guess that it was Sauersack, and upon inspecting the other letters closely and checking them against my Sütterlin charts, I knew I had a match. Off I then went to verify the current Czech name, see if it was online at Pilsen, and that's when I found his and Johanna's marriage record, written in beautiful Sütterlin that was actually legible (not something that can every be taken for granted). The entry also gave me Johanna's parents' names, Wenzl (it could also be Menzl, but it looks more like a W) Lorenz and Susanna Glöckner, which I could then trace back to their 1827 marriage in Sauersack, and I'm working on their lines as well.

There's one of Oma's great-great-grandmothers that I'm still trying to decipher, a Barbara Heidler, but once I have her place of birth, there's only one line left to break: Caroline Beu, Gustav's mother and Oma's grandmother. Sadly, while I'm on the verge of cracking the Barbara Heidler entries, the records for Caroline and her four children, Gustav and his three siblings, are in the city archives in Ribnitz. The problem with that is it will likely take a visit in-person to the archives, which will only happen in the foreseeable future if the hubby gets stationed in Germany after all, so in the meantime, I'm planning to write to the archive to see what they can/will manage for me. That would also be the way to solve the mystery of Gustav's rumoured other family that he would have left behind when he emigrated, but more on that later. As much as I'd love to get his military records, the German government had a tendency to keep all those records in Berlin, and you can probably guess what happened to them in 1945. If I can get the information for Caroline and her children, however, I can see if Oma has any cousins left from that line, and with Caroline's maiden name, I can trace her back, too.

All in all, this is getting better and better as the blanks in Oma's family chart start disappearing. Hopefully, I can solve those mysteries in Pop-pop's tree, too.

A Lihl Night Music

Can you tell from the title that not only do I like puns (at least the witty ones), but that I love classical music? No, I thought not. I don't know why I listen to it while doing genealogy research, but I do. Probably to keep me relaxed when a brick wall makes me want to beat my head against it.

It occurred to me that I've spent far more time on the Beu side of the family than the Lihl branch, and as the Lihl one was really the one that drew me into this whole project (my namesake, Great-Aunt Hannelore, was a Lihl), I figured it's time to rectify that.

The progress has been mixed. Jeleni 22 still isn't online, and as more details have been posted, it looks to have just Hirschenstand (the village right next to Neuhaus, now known as Jeleni) and not Neuhaus itself (now Chaloupky). While that would appear to not be of much use, it actually is: according to Oma, Hannelore lived in Hirschenstand, which means I should be able to find her marriage record and hopefully, those of her children. I know she had at least one through Oma, who remembers the child having some kind of developmental issues (possibly as extreme as Down's Syndrome, as she mentioned it showed physically) and she doesn't think the child lived long. I don't know about any others, but if I can find Hannelore's married name, I can work on tracking down any descendents. The other lovely thing about each individual record, be it birth, marriage, or death, is that the priest tended to jot down the names and dates for the other key events in the person's life, so if you find one, you find it all.

On the other hand, I've had a lot of luck tracing things further back in the records that are posted. I didn't realise for quite some time that occupations and causes of death were also in the parish records, so I'm going back in to see if I can decipher those as well for the names I already have in the tree. I'm sure my mother would call me a ghoul for thinking it's cool to have causes of death along with the other vital records, but it's one of those things that pulls them out of the obscure, distant past and makes them not only relatives, but relatable. Same with the occupations. Those are the things that make our ancestors come alive, and remind us that while so many things change over time, there are so many more that stay the same.

All in all, I'm going to trace this back as far as I can, and then try to wait patiently until the later books are online. Hmm, that DOES pose a problem, now, doesn't it? Well, it looks like I have one more reason to hope the hubby gets stationed in Germany...huzzah for in-person research!

Getting On The Farris Wheel

So I mentioned several months ago that I'd joined forces with my mother-in-law to help with her genealogy project, and that we'd ordered microfilms of Edinburgh parish records to see if we could back up what's been passed around as information gleaned from a family Bible that burned in a house fire decades ago. The results weren't as helpful as we'd hoped, but we have other avenues to try.

Nowhere in the marriage registers for Edinburgh could we find the 1661 marriage of Ian Esom Farris and Emily Jane Cameron that we were hoping to, but we're not giving up. Ian supposedly came from Rutherglen, so there are always those records to try, and that just might require a 'research' trip to Scotland. It's a rough job, but someone has to do it, right? Damned shame it has to be us. Yes, I know that didn't sound remotely convincing. It wasn't meant to.

What I was able to find for my MIL was copies of land grants, bills-of-sale for land, maps, and such for one of the Farris ancestors and surprised her with all of them on a CD. We may be temporarily stuck on Ian, but this is where my German-Celtic tenacity comes in. I WILL find the information, damn it!

To Beu Or Not To Beu: The Remix

This past Saturday, the new hubby and I were summoned to Oma and Pop-pop's house to de-leaf their front yard after the oak forest attacked. What does that have to do with genealogy, you may ask? The reason for the leaf-blower counter-attack was that my mother's cousin Barbara was coming to visit, Barbara being Oma's niece. Apparently, she's always wanted to find about her dad's side of the family, her dad being Oma's brother Rudi (more frequently known in the family as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named), and my mother eagerly passed on what of my research she remembered and summoned me to show her the rest. As Rudi was four years older than Oma and had the advantage of going back to Ribnitz while Oma stayed home, he had more memories of their dad's family and I figured we could pool resources. The sheer amount of information seemed to take her aback, and while it debunked a few pieces of family lore, it backed up much more of it, and the exchange of stories got more and more interesting...

Barbara told me that her dad remembered meeting his step-siblings, supposedly from a marriage that Gustav had made in Germany, which he then ended before coming to the States. I have the passenger list for Gustav and Rudi coming back from Germany in 1927, when they went over to settle Hermann's affairs (as the oldest son, Gustav had to approve selling the lumber mill and the house), and being eight or nine while they were in Ribnitz, that's most likely the meeting with his step-siblings he would recall. It was the first I'd heard of a possible third marriage for Gustav, though certainly not out-of-character for a man who failed to divorce my great-grandmother Emma and remarried in Florida, only to have his bigamy discovered when he died. 1876 began the switch of vital records from churches to the government, so it requires getting in touch with the Ribnitz civil records archive, but it means I can find out what exactly happened and if Gustav had another family still in Germany. My search for Old World cousins is taking on more and more unexpected twists and turns, but isn't that what makes the search so much fun? I certainly think so.

A Is For Apologies

It's not a good feeling to go back to your blog, see how long it's been since your last post, and cringe. I'm sure the poor folks at the FHL are convinced I've fallen off the face of the planet, so in the very near future, I need to go back, if nothing else to assure them I'm still alive. Oops...

So a lot has happened since my last post, and topping the list is getting married. Yes, that's right, according to the government and the Catholic Church, I'm a Ferrell now, and I'm rather all right with that. Okay, more than all right, just don't tell my husband. On the less happy side of the news is Oma's health taking another downward turn, and we think the dementia might be getting worse. She had to have her leg amputated well above the knee, but she's still feisty and raring to go, which is probably due in no small part to being 100% German. What can I say? We're tough cookies. It makes me really glad I started asking the questions when I did, however, and now that I'm back in touch with another source on that side of the family, I think my research is going to get interesting yet again...what? You want me to explain? Then read on to the next entry!