Longtime readers will know that one of my passions is family history research. When I met Jack, the grandchild of immigrants, he knew little about his heritage except he was sure he was Austrian. Curiously, in each census record after his grandparents arrived in America they reported a different country of origin, first Austria-Hungary, then Hungary, then Romania. Well, that’s the tale of changing borders after World War I, and I was determined to find out exactly where they were from and how and why they went to America.
That deep dive led me to discover the story of a small ethnic German group called Donauschwaben, or Danube Swabians.
In the mid eighteenth century about 200,000 German peasants were encouraged to undertake a long journey down the Danube River to occupy an undeveloped region in Eastern Europe under a scheme to claim land for the Austro-Hungarian empire. Lured by the promise of free land, a house and livestock, and a five-year moratorium on taxes, they settled a thousand villages in the area where present-day Hungary, Serbia and Romania meet. For 250 years the Donauschwaben remained a mostly insular population, retaining their language and customs despite the changing borders and rulers.
Fortunately, the migrants and their descendants have been well documented by a dedicated group of historians who’ve combed through centuries of tightly-held church and civil records. Once I tapped into that motherlode I was able to follow Jack’s paternal grandfather’s lineage all the way back to the 17th century in Lorraine, France. Every time I found the birthplace of one of his ancestors I made a mark on Google maps. So the theme for the first part of our European road trip is to follow the trail of his forebears from their beginnings in France down the Danube River all the way to Romania. We’re curious to see where they started, where they ended up, and something about their life along the way.
By coincidence my brother-in-law’s paternal ancestors also hailed from Lorraine and I marked his villages on my map, too. So we have a lot of villages to visit.
We spent days driving from village to village, walking through the oldest churchyards we could find with little success. Each person I spoke to suggested another village, another cemetery.
The church below was in a village where I knew my brother-in-law’s ancestors lived. Jack was getting a little tired of cemeteries so he waited out front while I walked through the graveyard reading the names on the stones. Two women were weeding and watering the flowers, and one asked if she could help me find someone. When I told her I was looking for Familien Streiff, she and her colleague had a lively discussion in a dialect I couldn’t understand, then she directed us to another cemetery a few kilometers down the road. That’s where the Streiffs are, she said.
Sure enough, there were dozens of Streiff memorials but not any from the era of Dave’s immigrant ancestors. That’s because if the rent isn’t paid on a cemetery plot, the graves are removed and the plot rerented. It’s rare to find graves more than 100-150 years old. I was happy to at least find the area where Dave’s Streiff ancestors lived and snap a few photos.
Then it was on to Jack’s Schulz (originally Schütz) ancestral home, a mere crossroads called Bickenholtz. We found the little church but it was immediately evident there wouldn’t be any significant graves in the tiny churchyard.
There was an older couple with a younger man also squeezed into the yard reading the inscriptions and I heard sounds of disappointment from the woman in German.
“Suchen Sie auch alte Steine?” I asked, wondering if she was also looking for old stones. She was, and was hoping to find her ancestors. I pointed to Jack and told her his ancestors were born here.
“Mine too!” she said. I then told her Jack’s ancestors had traveled to Romania in the 1700s.
“Mine too!” she said, and she asked me which Romanian village they lived in.
“Bogarosch,” I said.
“Mine too!”
What an amazing coincidence to find another descendant of the 18th century migration from this exact village in France to the exact same village in Romania. We exchanged stories and learned that while Jack’s grandfather left Bogarosch for America in 1903, this family stayed in Romania until Nicolae Ceaușescu forced the remaining ethnic Germans to “repatriate” despite having occupied the same land for hundreds of years. Consequently, she grew up in Germany.
As we were talking a storm cloud raced toward us and we all took to our vehicles.
While we sat there in the rain I checked Jack’s family tree on my iPad. I couldn’t find a connection between this family and Jack, but I did find that the man memorialized on the side of the church, Simon Holzinger, is Jack’s 6th-great grandfather.
Jack instantly claimed ownership of the church and wanted to go inside, so we dashed through the rain to take a look. This isn’t the same building his ancestors worshipped in — that one’s long gone — but it was on this spot where his ancestors were baptized and married, many moons ago.
Once the rain stopped we were on our way again. I think we made a pretty good start on Jack’s Finding Your Roots tour.
