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.

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 2024, 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.