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.
No comments:
Post a Comment