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German Roots Trip 2003 - Contents

SEEKING OUR GERMAN ROOTS

Chapter II    
May 15, 2003

Schoenberg

For dinner, we chose the local pizza parlor, mostly because it was built on the site of the house where Magdalena’s nephew, Heinrich Schoel once lived. Heinrich was a carpenter. The creamery mentioned in Anna’s letters was next door to Heinrich’s house and through some arrangement I never fathomed, the Schoel’s got their electricity from the creamery. (Anna alluded to this too.)

At 7 p.m., the Goettsch genealogy group assembled at a large table in Ruser’s hotel dining room and we met Brigitte and Herbert Boeckel, Glenn’s (distant) relatives. Brigitte is a great-granddaughter of Margareta (Gretchen) Goettsch. Margareta's sister, Magdalena, was Glenn's great- grandmother. That's a fairly close relationship, genealogy-wise.

The two docents from the museum also joined us--their English is quite good, while the Boeckels speak mostly German. The docents and Karen made it possible for us to communicate all the complicated information about family trees.

Our little group drank tea, juice and beer for a couple hours, while sharing information. Besides the Goettsch genealogy chart, I brought along pictures of our family and scenes of Oregon. We soon learned that their knowledge of "Amerika" was pretty much limited to the eastern seaboard--and Iowa. Earlier, at the museum, when we identified ourselves as being from the US, the docents immediately said, "Ah, you are from Iowa?" Apparently 99 per cent of the people who left Schoenberg settled in Iowa. They said they were quite accustomed to meeting Americans from Iowa, seeking their roots in Schoenberg. Glenn’s great-grandmother, Magdalena Goettsch, was in that 100th percentile--since she emigrated not to Iowa, but to San Francisco in 1861, following her two brothers who had been attracted by the California Gold Rush in the 1850’s. Family lore says that her brothers paid for Magdalena’s passage and she worked as an indentured servant in San Francisco.

Brigitte brought along pictures of her family and interesting newspaper articles detailing Anna Goettsch’s death and the search for her heirs, since she left no valid will. In Anna’s defense, her letters indicate that she DID draw up a will many years before her death, leaving her estate to her closest relative, a nephew named "Eddie" who apparently went to Idaho to make his fortune in the mines there. Unfortunately, Eddie died many years before Anna. Perhaps she never thought of making another will. [It’s interesting that Eddie lived in Idaho and worked as a miner--two of Mary Halliday’s brothers had a gold mine at Rocky Bar, a mining area in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Was there a connection between Eddie Goettsch and the Hinst brothers? Another genealogy mystery to explore.]

Our packet of letters from Anna Goettsch hint that Eddie came to the USA with his cousins--the two brothers of Magdalena Goettsch. They also hint that Magdalena’s brothers knew Frederick Hinst in California--her future husband. All I know about Frederick Hinst is that he was from Kiel.

One of our first questions for the Boeckels and the docents was: why would Magdalena and her brothers have wanted to leave pretty Schönberg? Their answer (and one we would hear everywhere in Germany): There were too many people, due to a high birthrate and a rising survival rate for children. There was not enough land for all of them to make a living.

Later, when we reached our next major destination, Prestin, in the state of Mecklenburg, we would learn that people from Mecklenburg went to the USA even earlier because life was much worse there for the recently-freed serfs. But overpopulation was a serious problem in Schoenberg in the 1830's and 1840's--the largest population in all of Schleswig-Holstein was in the Schoenberg area. The little town had been a commercial center for the surrounding area for many centuries, with 18 villages surrounding the town. When news arrived in Schleswig-Holstein of the opportunities to be had in the USA, many decided to emigrate.

After visiting both this area and Mecklenburg, Karen and I both agreed there was a different "atmosphere" in Schoenberg--and the Communist occupation of Mecklenburg after World War II didn't seem to be the whole answer. The social order in Schleswig-Holstein was never the feudal system of Mecklenburg where the von Pressentins originated. In Schoenberg the people were always free--never serfs. They were also under the rule of the church, not the nobility. Their taxes were not burdensome--just a tenth of what they earned went to the "cloister" or church. If they had a bad year, they were allowed to give less. And, while technically they only leased their land, they could leave it to their heirs or sell their lease.

Our conversation brought out some contrasts and some similarities in the lives of Americans and these northern Germans. While in the US we often have a TV in every room in the house, there is seldom more than one TV in a Schoenberg home. One docent's daughter is a dentist in Aachen and has her own house. A son in Dusseldorf works for Canon, and lives in an apartment with his girlfriend. Things are definitely changing for the younger people. In this group's generation, most have been married for 30-35 years. Now, they start marriage very late, and often divorce.

We asked about the effects of World War II in Schoenberg:

Since nearby Kiel was a major naval center, with U-boat pens, shipyards, etc. it was heavily bombed by the Allies. While not the main target of the Allied bombers, the English did bomb Schoenberg in 1942-43, and a house near the church was hit. Its occupants--a woman and her children--were killed. The adjacent village, Krokau, suffered greater damage; in 1943 all of its big farmhouses were bombed and burned. Schoenberg ended up in the British zone after the war, and it housed refugees from Mecklenburg, fleeing the Russians. Many of the town's men served in the war, but they only knew of one who died, in Yugoslavia.

Talk of World War II led to a general agreement that all war is bad. And, that in turn, brought the conversation around to Bush and the Iraq War. And we got an earful about what these people think of our president and his actions in Iraq! Their television had shown very little of the anti-war protests in American cities, so they were surprised when we said these were some of the largest demonstrations in American history. Interestingly, they said they liked Clinton and didn't find his dalliances very serious. They concluded by saying that for many, many years people here always liked the Americans, but they are very disappointed with what Bush is doing.

We also learned about the family that Magdalena left behind in Schoenberg, but Brigitte Boeckel had no information about Magdalena herself. We never learned just how Anna’s will was settled, but Anna’s little cottage was torn down in 1960. Brigitte and her husband now live on the property in a handsome brick home. When they left the hotel, Brigitte and her husband promised to bring us copies of the newspaper articles dealing with "Anna Amerika’s" death and the search for her heirs.

Friday morning, May 16

We managed to "sleep in" until 5 a.m. today. Then we got up, dressed and took an early-morning drive down to the "Schoenberg Strand"--the Baltic Sea coast beach resort only about 2 miles from our hotel. Today the Baltic was calm under clear, sunny skies, but the air was COLD.

We walked out to the end of a long pier and enjoyed watching more swans and other assorted waterfowl. When I saw a lone figure on the beach, I trained the binoculars on it, and was astonished to see a young woman in her bathing suit, calmly walking out into what must have been VERY chilly seawater! At the time, my hands were stiff and numb from the chilly air.

The woman swam a bit, just as calmly walked out of the water and up to one of the little beach "cabanas" where she proceeded to remove her bathing suit, and towel down before donning her street clothes and jogging on down the path atop the beach dike. They make women tough up here! Viking blood, perhaps?

A group of local firemen soon showed up (too late for the strip tease act, though) and were busily engaged in erecting tents in a grassy area near the pier. We chatted with them later and learned that they were setting up registration areas for a couple hundred school kids, ages 8 to 17, who would soon descend on the "strand" and compete in in-line skating races along the paved dike paths.

Back at Ruser’s Hotel, we had another excellent breakfast, found an envelope from Brigitte Boeckel filled with her family’s genealogy charts and copies of the newspaper articles about Anna Amerika’s estate and the search for her heirs. This will all keep me busy for months back in "Amerika." We paid our hotel bill in cash, packed up the Peugeot and started to retrace our steps south through Schleswig-Holstein.

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