cities, towns and villages that got away

Lost cities season 2: epilogue

In the lost cities series I have been introducing 22 towns and cities where some of my ancestors (and one set of inlaws) used to live for extended periods of time. In 20 cases the relevant people were resident in the 20th century, only two of these places were already "lost" in the 19th. Twelve of the places were then or are now "big cities" in the sense that a "Großstadt" in Germany is defined as a city of more than 100,000 residents. The series was somewhat biased towards places I find interesting in the respective time and/or in the shape I can visit today.

There are of course many other places popping up in my family tree that may not meet these arbitrary selection criteria - they may be too small, too distant in time, too uninspiring or maybe I just haven't quite figured out yet what their attraction is. The lost cities I selected are often tinged with a tiny bit of nostalgia for a place & time combination that was right for at least some time.

Here are some other places that didn't make the cut. First some that I have introduced before in a different context, and perhaps they weren't quite interesting enough to motivate a repeat appearance. Come to think of it, this list may well evolve into a third series of past places, perhaps dropping the "cities" label (most recent stays first, end years bold):

• Peter and Frieda lived at Gronau from 1926-1932. I've shared a photo of Peter at the relevant border crossing here. Their second daughter was born on the Dutch side of that border.
• Julius and Helene lived in many places - I've shown their shop in Luisenthal (Saar) here. The family stayed there from 1911 to 1918. After which they made the fundamental error of moving to the countryside. It didn't last long.
• Adamsweiler, where our old station master Christoph Kauer worked until his death in 1909, was a cute little station but it is sadly in the middle of nowhere. I visited the station once in the 1980s and have no memory of the village, I think it is essentially a through road with a dozen houses. Among the previous stations where he worked, Mülhausen/Mulhouse is the biggest and most interesting city (just over 100,000 now), and the village of Fontoy/Fentsch may also be worth looking at, as it's the birthplace of Helene.
• Simmern must have been a great place before 1689, but never recovered from the attention of Louis XIV, as I have written previously. 3/16 of my DNA comes from the town and the surrounding villages since the dawn of time (ie at least since the 15th century), see the map below. In the 1870s, the Kauer and the Imig Clan left Simmern behind in the name of progress, and I am sure that was a good move. (As mentioned in the Imig Clan entry, some Imigs were among the families who tried to emigrate to the New World in the 18th century and only got as far as the lower Rhine area, I just love that story, need to do a dedicated blog entry for that some time.) Shoemaker Matthias Kauer was the last ancestor to die in Simmern, in 1885. He's also the second oldest one of whom we have a photo.
  

  Map of the villages around Simmern where just under a quarter of my ancestry has been living for centuries. The numbers on the red dots indicate how many ancestors are known to have been born in a given location. Not sure where the original map came from, I only have a colour photocopy or printout of what must have been a much larger map probably dating from the late 20th century.

• Steel workers from Wallonia moved to Fachbach on the river Lahn in 1672 - they stayed there for several generations and form a significant part of the ancestry of the de la Strada family that settled in Krefeld after 1776. I wrote about their migration history here.
• I wrote about the miners migrating to Sainte Marie aux Mines (Markirch) before 1732 here. The notoriously un-googlable Paul Simon moved on to get married in Böchingen in 1768.
• I mentioned the high school at Trarbach (Mosel) here, where two generations of Ebner ancestors were teachers in the late 17th / early 18th century. The older teacher was born at Trarbach in 1646 in a family of refugees from Hungary - not clear from when they were resident in Trarbach. The younger of the pair died 1734, but his wife survived him and remarried, so it is unclear how long she remained present at Trarbach. His daughter married a pastor who ended his career as the vicar of the small village of Eckweiler (157 residents then, wiped out in 1979), leading to a descent of our lineage into a more rural environment in the following generations. The Ebners had at least seven children, so it may be worth checking the others and setting up a Trarbach Clan (in the meantime, see this GedBas file). So very roughly, we're looking at 1646 to 1734, just because these are the data points we have. In 1904 Trarbach on the right bank of the Mosel was merged with Traben on the left bank to form Traben-Trarbach which today has just under 6,000 residents. OK, having said all this, Trarbach may be a candidate for a third series with smaller towns hidden deeper in the past.

Some make too transient an appearance to leave a permanent impression

• Richard studied at Vienna and Göttingen before arriving at Bonn. I don't recall any Viennese memories but he did talk about famous Göttingen profs such as David Hilbert (1862-1943).
• Peter and Frieda also lived at Hamm for a year around 1933. I know nothing about Hamm, but it is very well connected on the railway network. It also has a direct Regional Express connection to Düsseldorf-Bilk (the RE6 to Minden). That brings the total to seven. Good enough reason to visit the place?
• Zella St. Blasii, today part of Zella Mehlis, population 12,400, was the birth place of Heinrich the cellist, but it was only a stepping stone in the itinerary of his father Richard the railway man. Although Heinrich spent the rest of his life being labeled a Thuringian because of his birthplace, to the best of my knowledge nobody ever shed a tear for the memories of Zella St. Blasii.
• Maria Luise Mentzel, Heinrich's mother, died at Magdeburg in 1916, three years after her husband died at Tangermünde where they had lived since 1888. I'm guessing she may have moved to Magdeburg to live with her daughter Gertrud, but I'm not sure as I have no evidence either way.

Many of the places (especially in the earlier family history) were simply too small for my tastes

• Dieuze is Richard's birthplace but we have to remember that his father's regiment was sent there as a punishment for unspecified misbehaviour while they were stationed in Strasbourg. It was a tiny village with absolutely no claim to fame.
• Schwaney has an amazing musical tradition but has never been more than a village (current population 2000). Frieda's grandfather from Schwaney died before she was born, so there wasn't any chance of a transfer of that musical culture. Unless they have it in their DNA ...
• Münzesheim isn't much bigger and became part of the new town of Kraichtal. Similarly, many other relevant places around that area are just villages, such as Elsenz, which is now part of Eppingen. The most interesting thing about them is that the area was comprehensively depopulated in the Thirty Years War and resettled in the second half of the 17th century by immigrants from Switzerland (my immigrant ancestors are listed here), which due to its long lasting peace and prosperity had a relative population overload.
• Similarly, the ancestry of the Lorsch family is scattered around Odenwald villages which are all too small to be featured here. Some have a long history, such as Zotzenbach, which was first mentioned in 877, so is due to celebrate its 1250th birthday soon. It is now part of Rimbach. Maybe I should pick one representative out of the crowd of small places. The area also had a population bottleneck after the 30 Years War, meaning that everybody with ancestry in that region is probably related to my mother and to Grace Kelly.

Your guide to the complete #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929 - 1934
13. Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
14. Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
15. Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
16. Breslau 1830 - 1877
17. Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952; Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
18. Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
19. Idstein 1714-1804
20. Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961
21. Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936

and once more in chronological order, sorted by the year in which the city was lost to my direct ancestors:

• Idstein 1714-1804
• Breslau 1830 - 1877
• Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
• Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
• Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
• Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
• Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
• Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952;
• Bonn 1929 - 1934
• Rheydt 1923 - 1935
• Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936
• Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
• Aachen 1936 - 1940
• Königsberg 1935 - 1945
• Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
• Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
• Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
• Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961
• Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
• Würzburg 1961 - 1968
• Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
• Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015

a city of war and peace

Lost cities 2:10

About this series: Until 1960, all my direct ancestors from the great-great-grandparents through to my parents lived in towns and cities. After November 1972 nobody did, as my parents and grandparents had embraced the car-dependent life in the sticks and the previous city-dwelling generations had all died out by then. When I escaped the countryside and moved to various university cities I discovered that I had been missing out on the opportunities and structured environments of cities since we moved away from Würzburg when I was 5 years old. I started to strongly identify as a town mouse, even though I had to re-learn city life (which is why I didn't dare moving to really big cities like Berlin). In this series I am reclaiming my urban heritage in exploring/presenting some of the towns and cities that my DNA passed through within the last two centuries. As the four generations before me have mostly been quite mobile (often starting with employment in the nascent railways), there are many towns and cities popping up in my family tree, including quite a few where I wouldn't mind living myself.

Münster (Westfalen) was the university where most people from my school went to study, so not something I would have considered for my escape, and it has suffered from this image problem ever since. Only recently it hit me that three of my grandparents lived there at two separate times, and we may still have relatives there.

Münster, seen from a greater distance, is an attractive university city, with an interesting history. From 1534 to 1535 anabaptists ruled the town in a highly unusual rebel state (anabaptist dominion). After a coalition of protestant and catholic troups reconquered the city, the bodies of executed anabaptist leaders were left in cages suspended from the spires of St. Lamberti church to be eaten by birds. The cages are still there today, presumably as a reminder to citizens not to revolt against the official church. On a more positive note, the city also hosted the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648.

Under Prussian rule since 1815, it served as the capital of the Westphalia province. By 1915, it passed the threshold of 100,000 residents and became a major city. Today, with a population of over 300,000, the city hosts one of the biggest universities in Germany and it is famous for its cycling culture.

City Wine House and the town house, in a postcard from 1928.
Source.

What happened: In between her two stints at Freiburg, Ruth also studied in Münster for a semester (winter 1928/29, although I'm still in the dark regarding the reasons for the move back and forth.

A few years later, my other grandparents, Peter and Frieda lived at Münster for two years 1934-1936 with their two young daughters. Unfortunately they don't show up in the address book of the city dated 1934/35, they may just have missed the registration deadline for that one? On January 30, 1936, Peter was promoted to the position for which they moved to Aachen.

Frieda had a cousin, Ewald Brunschier (1912-1956), whose daughter lived in Münster after the war, but Ewald died in Neesen so seems to have stayed closer to home. Ewald's widow died in Münster in 2000.

Seasons 1 and 2 of the #lostcities series now complete (but there will be an epilogue or two):

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929 - 1934
13. Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
14. Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
15. Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
16. Breslau 1830 - 1877
17. Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952; Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
18. Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
19. Idstein 1714-1804
20. Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961
21. Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936

NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim, Hamborn, Krefeld, Gütersloh and Bruchsal.

The Mastodon thread for season 2 is here.

I have now started a pin board "vintage postcards" on pinterest with postcards from the cities in this series.

on the origins of smell

I am old enough to remember when olfactory receptors were discovered, and have written about them a fair few times since then (heck I even have a tag for that). In the new developments in the smell field last year I really liked the way that a clever combination of old and new may provide a breakthrough. Smell has become ridiculously complex and fragile during the evolution of tetrapods (ie since our ancestors stopped being fish and started to grow legs to walk around on land and sniff the air). Now researchers have gone back to reconstruct the simpler and more robust olfactory receptors of early tetrapods, and based on structures obtained for these, it may become easier to predict (eg with alpha fold) and study structures of the receptors we have now.

It's all explained with a bit more detail in my latest feature which is out now:

Chemical communicators

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 2, 20 January 2025, Pages R45-R47

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

In Western culture, the sense of smell is much less valued than vision and hearing. (Photo: vikjam/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

how transport got derailed

A few things I learned from:

Railways of Oxford
A transport hub that links Britain
by Laurence Waters
Pen & Sword 2020

The trouble with railways books is that they are mostly written by and for locomotive nerds and trainspotters, so I didn't read all of this book, skipped all the sections on "motive power", but still learned a few things about the developments that led to the dire situation we're in, without electric trains, and without a rail connection to most of the surrounding towns (Witney, Abingdon, Wallingford, etc.).

Waters starts at the very beginnings, when Oxford became the end of a branch line opened in 1844, with the first station located in Grandpont - not much left to be seen there. Even then the typical Oxford town and gown wrestling matches worked against the railways. The University objected to a transport system that might enable mere students to escape and visit other places to have fun. It eventually agreed on the concession that undergraduates were banned from using the trains and Great western had to police the ban. The University has also played an unfortunate role in preventing the introduction of electric trams in the early 20th century.

The later mess with two stations next door to each other is more widely known, especially as it left us with the Rewley Road swing bridge, for which guided tours are available during Open Doors weekends. The second station was on the plot where the Said Business School stands now.

Regarding the missing links to Oxfordshire's towns, it was new to me that Abingdon once had a branch line and a station closed in 1984. Apparently the station was demolished and replaced by a Waitrose supermarket soon after.

Judging by the bus schedules and daily traffic jams on the A40, the missing link that is producing the biggest share of our road traffic is the Witney branch line which was closed in 1970. What I learned about this one was that there had been a proposal to extend this line ending in Fairford westwards to Cheltenham, making it a valuable crosscountry connection that might have survived the Beeching cuts. The 1923 proposal would only have required 8 miles of extra track. Objections against the extension were raised by Great Western, for fear that the line might take away traffic from their existing services. I think that is the stupidest thing (of many) that happened to the railways around here. Branch lines ending in small places like Fairford (pop. 3,200) are economically challenging by default, but if the same small place is just one of the stations served between two bigger ones, the overlapping itineraries of people going to and from Oxford or to and from Cheltenham give a much more even usage, as anybody who has ever travelled longer distances on Germany's RE regional express trains will have noticed. Basically, Oxford to Cheltenham is an RE line that should be here now, but Great Western and Beeching conspired to kill it. (Funny that Beeching didn't make suggestions re which connections should be added to the network to make it more economically viable.) Every once in a while there is a proposal to rebuild the Witney line, but Waters considers it unlikely to happen.

Regarding recent passenger services, I learned that Oxford had cross country services to the south coast far beyond the one to Bournemouth we have now. There were also direct trains to Weymouth, Portsmouth, Brighton and Hastings, which were dropped in 2007.

So the strapline A transport hub that links Britain is bound to raise a sarcastic snigger from anybody who may be trying to travel anywhere other than London from here, but knowing what we've lost is important to inform strategic thinking about what may be reclaimed. The Chiltern Line to Marylebone has set a good example for what can be achieved.

an old Irish banjo

pirate luthier adventures, interlude:

My freegle call for broken instruments (which I've now paused for the time being while catching up with some more challenging repairs that have piled up) was specifically targeting bowed string instruments of the violin family, but it has also brought in some plucked instruments.

One is this Irish five-string banjo, which had been in the same family for four generations since a band master by the name of Sullivan brought it from Cork to Carnarvon (now Caernarfon, North Wales) in the late 19th century. I set it up with a new bridge and a set of strings (the bronze-wound 4th string is original, but I bought the full set so this can be exchanged if required). Everything works fine and it sounds just like a banjo as far as I can tell.

Strangely, I don't feel much of an urge to play it, so if somebody around Oxford would like to play it I'll be happy to pass it on for a refund of the costs incurred for strings and bridge. It comes with the original historic hard case, which just about holds together still but doesn't have its lock any more, so to use it for carrying the instrument one would at the very least have to add some sort of fastening mechanism to it.

Have some photos taken after I received it:

and here is my setup:

an ancient university

Lost cities 2:9

About this series: Until 1960, all my direct ancestors from the great-great-grandparents through to my parents lived in towns and cities. After November 1972 nobody did, as my parents and grandparents had embraced the car-dependent life in the sticks and the previous city-dwelling generations had all died out by then. When I escaped the countryside and moved to various university cities I discovered that I had been missing out on the opportunities and structured environments of cities since we moved away from Würzburg when I was 5 years old. I started to strongly identify as a town mouse, even though I had to re-learn city life (which is why I didn't dare moving to really big cities like Berlin). In this series I am reclaiming my urban heritage in exploring/presenting some of the towns and cities that my DNA passed through within the last two centuries. As the four generations before me have mostly been quite mobile (often starting with employment in the nascent railways), there are many towns and cities popping up in my family tree, including quite a few where I wouldn't mind living myself.

Approaching the tail end of season two, I remembered two university cities which I had previously dismissed as too transitory, but on reflection I realised more things happened there, so they're in. First up, my parents' station before Würzburg, and a lovely city too.

Freiburg's University was founded in 1457 and is thus among the five oldest in Germany. The town today situated in the corner where Switzerland, France and Germany meet has variously belonged to Austria, France, and the dukes of Baden. The arrival of the railway line from Karlsruhe to Basel brought tourism to the town and the Black Forest region. Freiburg grew to become a city of 100,000 residents just before WW2. After the war, it was briefly the capital of the Baden region, which in 1952 merged into the new southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg.

The university has always maintained a stellar reputation especially in the sciences. It boasts five Nobel laureates in chemistry alone, including the founding father of macromolecular chemistry, Hermann Staudinger.

The university on a postcard from 1930, the year Ruth moved from Freiburg to Bonn. I reckon it will have looked similar still when her son arrived in 1957.
Source.

What happened

My grandmother Ruth finished school at Rheydt in 1928 and started studying chemistry, physics and biology at Freiburg in the summer semester of the same year. Not sure why, but she moved to Münster for the winter semester and returned to Freiburg for the summer semester of 1929.

In the summer semester of 1930, she moved to Bonn and stayed there until her final exams.

My father started studying chemistry at Freiburg in the summer semester of 1957, but initially didn't get lab space for the important practicals, so took until late 1961 to finish his intermediate exams. He also found a lot of time for cultural interests. In the first year there were three visits to Strasbourg, and he claims he saw every production of the Wallgrabentheater, a small, alternative theatre. My mother followed in the summer of 1958, at which point they bought a matching pair of his and hers bicycles which survived into the 1980s. In the winter semester of 1961/62 they both moved to Würzburg.

My aunt also studied at Freiburg, however, and stayed on to work in the physics department of the university after graduating, while her husband completed his PhD. Her family stayed at Freiburg until well into the 1970s.

When I was growing up in the sticks, we used to go skiing in the Black Forest in the Christmas holidays, and sometimes stopped over in Freiburg, staying with my aunt's family, so I do have some vague childhood memories of the city.

Locations

• Vierlinden 5
• Kreuzstraße

Previously in the #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929 - 1934
13. Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
14. Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
15. Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
16. Breslau 1830 - 1877
17. Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952; Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
18. Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
19. Idstein 1714-1804

NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim, Hamborn and Krefeld.

The Mastodon thread for season 2 is here.

UPDATE 19.1.2025 I have now started a pin board "vintage postcards" on pinterest with postcards from the cities in this series.

quantum mechanics in the snow

some thoughts on

The Universal Theory
(Die Theorie von Allem)
Timm Kröger
Germany 2023

This film had a grand total of three screenings at Oxford's Ultimate Picture Palace, and I was lucky to catch the last one. IMDB doesn't even list a UK release for it, although the Observer had a review.

So a quantum mechanics meeting in the Swiss Alps gets derailed when the multiple universes theory gets a bit too real and weird things start to happen. I loved the black and white cinematography - films set in the 1960s should be in black and white really! - and the portrayal of the 1960s physicists, and also the underlying romance thread. Not everything made sense, but that's very fitting for a film about quantum mechanics, and I tend to like things I don't understand completely. Also, to be taken as evidence on how weird a European movie must be to have a chance of even a fleeting appearance in UK cinemas.

I am sure that people more knowledgeable in sci fi and classic American cinema will find lots of references to all sorts of things (as some reviewers have pointed out), but I'm more of a naive viewer in that respect and can enjoy the film on its own merits.

A good one to see on the big screen with the glorious Alpine views if you can, but I might also be tempted to rewatch it in a smaller format at a later point. Also, I'm a bit tempted to watch Drei Männer im Schnee to compare and contrast - also black and white Alpine scenery, I expect, but no quantum mechanics, as far as I remember from reading the book multiple times when I was growing up.

Not adding this to my films not shown list as it was obviously shown, if ever so fleetingly, but will add the tag regardless.

not quite a shtetl

Lost cities 2:8

About this series: Until 1960, all my direct ancestors from the great-great-grandparents through to my parents lived in towns and cities. After November 1972 nobody did, as my parents and grandparents had embraced the car-dependent life in the sticks and the previous city-dwelling generations had all died out by then. When I escaped the countryside and moved to various university cities I discovered that I had been missing out on the opportunities and structured environments of cities since we moved away from Würzburg when I was 5 years old. I started to strongly identify as a town mouse, even though I had to re-learn city life (which is why I didn't dare moving to really big cities like Berlin). In this series I am reclaiming my urban heritage in exploring/presenting some of the towns and cities that my DNA passed through within the last two centuries. As the four generations before me have mostly been quite mobile (often starting with employment in the nascent railways), there are many towns and cities popping up in my family tree, including quite a few where I wouldn't mind living myself.

The lovely market town of Idstein is pushing the boundaries a bit as its residents are more remote in time and the data availability is more of a challenge, but I'll include it regardless, as a reminder that I have yet to visit it, and because it was home to the only Jewish ancestors I know of.

Idstein today has a historic centre with some very pretty half-timbered houses dating from around 1600, so this area would have looked similar in the 18th century as today. Located on the edge of the Taunus range just north of Wiesbaden, it was ruled by various branches of the house of Nassau, until it fell to Prussia in 1866. In the 17th century the Nassau count had dozens of women executed based on witchcraft allegations there. The town also had a rather wobbly balance of welcoming / harrassing Jewish residents as will become obvious below.

Idstein as shown in a steel engraving dated 1835
Wikipedia photo by Frank Winkelmann - Eigenes Werk, CC BY 3.0,

What happened - I've written about the Jewish ancestors at Idstein before, but not about the Schmidt family - the ancestry of the Protestant girl the last Jewish ancestor married. The Schmidts are actually better documented so they also have the earliest dates:

On 13. 6.1714 Conrad Georg Schmidt was baptised in Idstein, so I am assuming that his parents Heinrich Schmidt, cooper, and Anna Apollonia Thiel, were resident in the town before that time, but we don't have any dates for them.

In 1731 Isaak Lazarus from the nearby village of Usingen obtained the Schutzbrief, a protective document allowing him and his wife Bele to settle in Idsteinn where he worked as a cattle trader.

In 1744 their son Jakob Isaak obtained the Schutzbrief and married Libbet.

In 1745, the boy who was later to be called Karl Henrich Weyland was born - presumably Jakob Isaak's and Libbet's son. They lived in their own house in Borngasse 8 and ran a shop there. There were only seven Jewish families in Idstein registered with a Schutzbrief around this time, and Jakob and Libbet are the only couple that could plausibly be Karl Henrich's parents.

So small was the Jewisch community in Idstein that it didn't have its own cemetery. Until 1874, residents were buried in nearby Esch instead, but that cemetery was completely destroyed in the Nazi era.

From 1750 Jews were banned from operating "open shops". As our shopkeeper carried on regardless, he was ordered to pay a penalty of 10 guilders in 1756.

In 1746, Conrad Georg Schmidt, farm worker and cooper, married Anna Christine Fischer from Ober-Seelbach in Seelbach - but settled in Idstein. There are a dozen places called Seelbach, but this one seems to be quite close to Idstein

In 1749 Katharine Margarete Schmidt was born.

On 1.5.1768, Karl Henrich Weyland, a butcher, was baptised at the age of 23. He married Katharine Margarete Schmidt in September of the same year. Her father had died the year before. He appears to have borrowed the family name of Weyland from records of an earlier Weyland family that lived at Idstein in the 17th century.

1770 Gedbas has a Christian Weyland born in Idstein around this time - could be the first child of this marriage.

On 7. 7.1778 Anna Christine Weyland was born in Idstein.

Her mother died 1792, her father in 1796. The death of her grandmother Libbet in 1804 is the last timepoint associated with Idstein.

In 1810, Anna Christine married the shoemaker Johann Christoph Kauer in Simmern. Although none of her direct ancestors survived after 1804, she may have stayed with other relatives at Idstein until she got married. The house in Borngasse 8 remained the property of Libbet's son in law until he sold it in 1826,

The conservative time range estimate, however is 1714-1804

Locations

• Borngasse 8 - google doesn't offer me any streetview images, will just have to go there myself, old school.

Previously in the #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929 - 1934
13. Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
14. Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
15. Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
16. Breslau 1830 - 1877
17. Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952; Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
18. Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023

NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim, Hamborn and Krefeld.

The Mastodon thread for season 2 starts here.

UPDATE 19.1.2025 I have now started a pin board "vintage postcards" on pinterest with postcards from the cities in this series.

tiny survivors

Tardigrades (water bears) have often appeared in my writing as an example of remarkable resilience under extreme conditions. Our shared history goes back to the German edition of Life on the Edge, which came out in 1997, and from there they spread into the pages of Astrobiology. I just noticed I even created a tag for them back in the 00s when they took up space travel. Since then, they even landed on the Moon.

Surprisingly, however, I haven't had a full feature dedicated to them. As there have been several new developments in the field of tardigrade evolution, ecology and resilience accumulating in the last few months, and as I often use the first feature of the new year to describe "fantastic species", I felt the time had come to put the spotlight on tardigrades. In the process, I learned that apart from individual specimens surviving the most horrendous physical conditions one can imagine, their lineage has also survived the last three of the five big mass extinctions. Hence it isn't even a an exaggeration to call the feature:

Ultimate survivors

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 1, 6 January 2025, Pages R1-R3

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Much about the distribution, ecology and physiology of tardigrades remains to be explored. (Photo: Frank Fox/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE).)

a small town with a big palace

Lost cities 2:7

About this series: Until 1960, all my direct ancestors from the great-great-grandparents through to my parents lived in towns and cities. After November 1972 nobody did, as my parents and grandparents had embraced the car-dependent life in the sticks and the previous city-dwelling generations had all died out by then. When I escaped the countryside and moved to various university cities I discovered that I had been missing out on the opportunities and structured environments of cities since we moved away from Würzburg when I was 5 years old. I started to strongly identify as a town mouse, even though I had to re-learn city life (which is why I didn't dare moving to really big cities like Berlin.) In this series I am reclaiming my urban heritage in exploring/presenting some of the towns and cities that my DNA passed through within the last two centuries. As the four generations before me have mostly been quite mobile (often starting with employment in the nascent railways), there are many towns and cities popping up in my family tree, including quite a few where I wouldn't mind living myself.

When I started getting obsessed with the musical biography of Heinrich our family cello and the eponymous cellist, I also got in touch with the descendants of Maria's nieces, I had never met them before but had heard as a child that they are an amazingly musical family and have produced several professional musicians. Maria grew up in Bruchsal, and some of her relatives have lived there for more than a century, so that's a good enough excuse to include the town here.

Bruchsal hosted the residence of the bishops of Speyer since 1716. Which explains the rather sumptuous baroque palace built from 1722 based on plans by Balthasar Neumann (famous for the Würzburg Residenz among other things). Today, the Palace is home to a rather lovely museum of musical automata.

Next door is a less appealing vast prison complex, which was built in the 1840s and has been the site of some infamous history including Nazi era executions. Both the palace and the prison look rather oversized on the map of what remains a small town. At the beginning of the 20th century it had fewer than 15,000 residents. It only passed the 20,000 mark around 1955.

In 1841, Bruchsal became an important railway stop half-way between Heidelberg and Karlsruhe.

In 1945, when Allied troops were only 20 km away on the other side of the river Rhine, it was bombed to the ground.

What happened:

I'm not sure when the family of Maria Pfersching (future wife of Heinrich the cellist) settled in Bruchsal. Maria was born in Münzesheim, where her paternal family was long established (now part of Kraichtal and with 2,800 residents too small to qualify as a lost city). Her mother, Barbara Klundt, from the eponymous winegrowing dynasty in the Palatinate, died in this place in 1886 (aged only 39), so I'm assuming the family lived there until that point. In 1889, Heinrich Pfersching remarried in Bruchsal and lived there until his death in 1905. His mother, Elisabeth Hörle, survived him and died in Bruchsal in 1909.

Maria grew up there and in 1903, aged 22, moved across the river Rhine to Strasbourg to train as a secretary there. It's just over 100 km away, so I am guessing she must have gone back to visit quite frequently (which would explain Heinrich's heartfelt poems about good byes). She stayed there until she married Heinrich in 1908 and followed him to Dieuze.

Descendants from Heinrich Pferschings second marriage lived at Bruchsal until 2023, so for more than a century. After the end of World War I, Maria and her son Richard were evicted from Dieuze, Lorraine, and found refuge with the Bruchsal family. Richard attended school there for half a year until Heinrich got a job at Elberfeld and the family moved there. I guess I'll ignore this half year, it would make the numbers game complicated, and they didn't have their own place and were kind of visiting family. I'll just go for 1889 - 1909/2023.

Source

Locations

Bruchsal was a mythical place for much of my life as my grandparents talked about it but never took me to visit. I only got round to visiting Richard's last surviving cousin there in 2018. It was an extremely hot day, so we spent much of the time indoors, and I also visited the museum of musical automata in the palace and learned how robots using 19th century wind-up technology can play violins, but I will have to revisit some time to get a better impression of the town as a whole.

Previously in the #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929 - 1934
13. Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
14. Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
15. Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
16. Breslau 1830 - 1877
17. Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952; Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951

NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim, Hamborn and Krefeld.

The Mastodon thread for season 2 starts here.

UPDATE 19.1.2025 I have now started a pin board "vintage postcards" on pinterest with postcards from the cities in this series.