I have been working on my family history for over two
decades. This is going to sound a bit odd, but there are some ancestors who do
not want to be found. They want to hide away with their assorted secrets,
content to leave their descendants perpetually in the dark. From them, you must
wrestle every scrap of information. There are also the ancestors who, if you
prod them, whispering that if they want to be known, they need to give you a
helping hand. I am always astonished (and sometimes, frankly a little spooked)
when a brick wall will suddenly crumble after a “heart to heart” with these
ancestors. Then there are the ancestors, who you are not looking for, have no
knowledge of, and suddenly, there they are. Plop. Falling into your lap like
ripened fruit tumbling down from a tree. That is exactly what happened in the
case of my 7X Great Grandfather, Jeremias Schröder.
Each of us have 512 7X great grandparents. There may be some
family historians who know the names of all 512 of their ancestors, but I would
guess, if they exist, there are not many of them. Jeremias takes two spots of
the 512, as I descend from two of his great grandsons, Christian and Gottfried.
My Stolper family were, to be blunt, peasants. Hardy
peasants, as my existence will attest, but peasants, nonetheless. Some of them may
have been tied to the local landowners as serfs. As such, the records of their
existence are minimal, confined to tax and church records.
The earliest surviving German church records are from St.
Sebald in Nuremberg dating back to the year 1524. Lutheran churches began
requiring the records of baptisms, marriages and deaths be documented in about
the year 1540. The Catholic church started requiring the same record keeping in
1563 and by the year 1650, most Reformed Churches required the same.
For my family, most of whom belonged to the church in the
village of Budow, the records appear to have been kept beginning in the year 1643.
Until the very end of World War II, those records were intact. They encompassed three
hundred years of the lives of my family and their neighbors.
In many areas of Germany, the records, or sometimes their
duplicates, managed to survive the war. In the district of Stolp, however, it
has been reported that two-thirds of all records (not just church records) were
lost.
A series of maps will give you an idea of where the Stolp
region and the village of Budow were located.
Below is a German map of the Weimar Republic which represented
Germany from 1919 to 1937. The Baltic Sea (Ostee) is located along the coast of
Pomerania, and in fact, is located directly below where the Baltic Sea is
labeled.
A closer look at the area of Pomerania as of 1939 shows you
the exact location of the District of Stolp. Stolp is the second furthest
Eastern Kreis. There is an area in the southcentral portion of Stolp, that dips
a finger down along both the borders of Rummelsburg and Bütow.
It is within this area that some of the villages of the Budow Parish sit, with
Budow located Northeast of the area.
Here is a map of Stolp Kreis. The blue area marks the
location of Budow.
In 2010, during my long-extended blogging hiatus, a
genuinely nice German woman reached out to me. When I say reached out, I mean
she did a very credible search to track me down. Can I just say that my
experience has taught me that either a Schröder gene or a Quetschke gene must be where
we get our research chops from, because invariably, these are the people who
are particularly good at finding people and places.
It turned out that she and I were third cousins. She descended
from Great Grandfather Leo’s eldest sister, Bertha. We exchanged pictures and
information, and she sent me two genealogies. One represented the line of
Bertha’s father, Wilhelm Heinrich Schröder and the other was of Bertha’s
mother, Caroline Wilhelmine Quetschke.
I, of course, was overjoyed. I marveled that there had been a
genealogical interest in the family in earlier generations. It was at this
point my cousin told me that genealogy was required by the government. The
government in question was The National Socialist German Workers’ Party or more commonly
known as the Nazi Party. She told me
that the genealogy was completed in 1933, the year the Nazi Party came to
power. My cousin told me everyone needed a completed genealogy. I don’t think
that was strictly true in the beginning. However, a genealogy was, in fact, required
of all Party members, and for all public officials, which included teachers.
Bertha Schröder had two sons who were teachers. They would have
been required to prove their Aryan status by genealogical means. There was a
booming business for genealogical work while the Nazi’s were in power. Carrying
around a sheaf of genealogical papers that had to be produced on any kind of a
regular basis turned out to be a bit unwieldy. The Ahnenpaß came into being. It
was a small book, like a passport with all the relevant genealogical information,
the entries on each page stamped and signed by the appropriate entity.
Eventually, more people were required to have an Ahnenpaß. I don’t
know what percentage of the population carried genealogical passports, and I
don’t know how many survived the war, but for those of us whose ancestors’
records were wiped out during and in the aftermath of war, they provide
information that is no longer available.
In the information that I was given, Jeremias was not listed. The
genealogy only went back as far as Anthonius Schröder, whom I now know was the
son of Jeremias. There were no dates given for Anthonius, but his son, Johann
Schröder, had a birthdate of 5 March 1725 and his place of birth was listed as
Budow. This let me know that my family had been part of the Parish in Budow since
at least the early part of the 18th century. In a place where the surviving
birth records do not start until 1838, this was information I never expected to
receive.
Not quite a year ago, a friend on a German Forum that I belong to,
published a page of genealogy from a periodical that published family
genealogies. It was in German and I used a program to translate it into English.
Jeremias was in this genealogy, but for some reason I missed that Anthonius was
also there. I remarked that it was interesting, thinking that it was not my
family line. I have no explanation for why I didn’t realize the significance of
what I was reading, but let’s just be blunt. I blew it. If Jeremias was doing
any orchestrating of events, he was shaking his head at what a slow witted
descendent he had.
Then, about a month ago, I noticed a DNA match. It was only a twenty centimorgan match. Usually, a match that small I don’t spend much time on, but I did notice that the match was on my father’s maternal side, my German side. I cannot pinpoint the moment I decided to reach out with a message, or any real logic behind my reaching out, but I wrote a brief note. To my surprise, a truly kind man answered me back. It was his father that I matched.
We exchanged
family trees, and while we had similar family names, neither of our trees went
back far enough to figure out our common ancestor. However, on exchanging our
information, he realized in the process of his research, he had found a
genealogy that didn’t belong to his family line, but that a handful of the
earliest ancestors on that tree were also My Ancestors.
That is when the pieces started to fall into place, and I realized
what a wonderful gift I had received – from my distant cousin, my forum friend,
and the son of a DNA match. I received the gift of my family - German ancestors that
I might never had known except for the generosity of others.
In my next post, I will take a closer look at the information on
Jeremias, delve into the history of the time, and draw conclusions about my
rabbit hunting ancestor.
Until Next Time . . .
© 27 October 2023, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder
Map Attributions:
Weimar Map Attribution: By kgberger - own drawing/Source of
Information: Putzger – Historischer Weltatlas, 89. Auflage, 1965, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3414361
Von Hellerick - Eigenes Werk, based on a map from [1], CC
BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65077963
Hardow, Rudolf, Karte de Kreises Stolp mit Bildern aus der Erdgeschichte, Urgeschichte, Kulturgeschichte, Volkskunde, Naturkunde, der Industrie, des Erwerbs u. des Sports. 1932, https://bibliotekacyfrowa.eu/dlibra/publication/3530/edition/3717#description, Public Domain, accessed 16 Sept 2023.
Sources:
Pommerscher Verein Freistadt, Stadtkreis Stolp / Kreis
Stolp, https://www.pommerscher.org/cpage.php?pt=71. Accessed on 2 Sept. 2023.
Germany Church Records, https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Germany_Church_Records#Overview.
Accessed 5 Oct 2023.
Stolper Heimatkreise e.V, Kirchspiele – Budow, https://www.stolp.de/kirchspiele/articles/kirchspiel_budow.html,
Accessed on 2 Sept. 2023.
Genealogy created in 1933 for descendant of Bertha Tuschy
née Schroeder received by Terry Snyder, 2010.
Archiv ostdeutscher Familienforscher, “Schroeder,” 1998 5/6,
P 175.
© 27 October 2023, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder
