plants recycling metals

It has been known for centuries that certain kinds of plants thrive on soils heavily contaminated with toxic metals, even on mining waste. It took a while for people to realise that these plants can be used to extract desirable metals from such soils. Especially in our times with ever-growing hunger for resources like nickel, gold, and rare earth metals, the rising prices of these metals have led to some plant-based mining methods becoming economically attractive.

Read all about it in my latest feature which is out today:

Mining metals with plants

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 3, 2 February 2026, Pages R73-R75

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF. Last year's features will still move to the open archives as this year advances.)

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.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

The yellow zinc violet (Viola lutea ssp. calaminaria) has historically served as an indicator plant for soils rich in zinc ores. It is still found on former mining sites in the area where the borders between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany meet. (Photo: Gilles San Martin/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

a rare find

At the beginning of January I discovered a 19th century French book selling for a very affordable £ 1.50 at a charity shop and really liked the look of it so I just bought it without thinking much about it.

With a leather back and nice marbling on the hardcovers it looks like this:

It's a first edition of Le docteur Pascal, the last volume of Emile Zola's epic series of novels Les Rougeon-Macquart, from 1893. Sadly somebody cut out the family tree of the Rougeon-Macquart family which was included as a fold-out page. Otherwise it is in good condition, slightly foxed as they like to say in the trade but I love it.

More photos:

The good thing about French books in the Oxford second hand and antiquarian market is that there's supply from expats and visiting academics but virtually no demand, so I can snap up some rather amazing things sometimes (I don't do that for German books very often these days because I get them free in the street libraries in Dusseldorf, but see this one and these from pre-plague times). Abe books currently has several copies of the Zola for sale at prices of a few hundred pounds, so I think I managed to find a bargain here ...

lives of Helene and Julius

continuing with the ancient info rescued from from the website about the Weiß chronicles, and following up from generations 10-6 in this blog entry, and Generation 5 here, we now come to:

4. The businessman

Helene Kauer, born in 1885 as the youngest of the five long-lived girls from the household of railway man Christoph Kauer and his wife Margarethe Imig, later told her grandchildren that she wanted to be a teacher when she was young, but that her parents couldn’t afford the fees to send her to the teacher’s seminar. Equal opportunities, she said, ended at the age of 10. Up to the fourth year of school, boys and girls had the same lessons. After that, girls were taught things like needlework and home economics, while boys studied more academic subjects like maths. Helene said she always considered that unfair, and when the time came she made sure that her daughters were able to study at university just as her son did.

Around 1905/06. she was still living with her parents at Adamsweiler (at the small railway station mentioned above, of which her father was the boss), when her cousin Julius Düsselmann (son of her aunt Elisabeth Catharina Imig, 1851-1924), came to live at Merlenbach, Lorraine, not all that far away. Julius (1883-1950) was an adventurous type and already had made a trip to the German colony in South West Africa (today’s Namibia), where he took part in the suppression of the Herero uprising. Historians now think that the colonial rule was upheld quite heavy-handedly, with interventions bordering on genocide.

The most notorious episode is the battle at the Waterberg of August 11, 1904, in which the German troups under the command of Lothar von Trotha surrounded 6000 Hereros, including women and children. The Hereros managed to break out into the Omaheke desert, where they were left to die of thirst and starvation. However, apart from some vague hints to “horrible things” he witnessed, we don’t know in detail what Julius did there or what he thought of it all.

In any case, he came back with ill health and had to settle for a quieter lifestyle, becoming the manager of a grocery shop belonging to the mining company in Merlenbach, 50 km east of the village of Adamsweiler, where his aunt and uncle lived with their two youngest daughters, Regina Katharina (“Kätha”) and Helene. Auguste and Anna were already married and had children of their own, while Johanna worked at Saargemünd at the post office.

Julius was the 4th child of a bunch of six produced by Karl Düsselmann (1841-1927) and Elisabeth Imig (1851-1924). I remember that my great-aunt used to refer to Julius’s younger sister Alwine anagrammatically as “Tante Lawine,” i.e. Aunt Avalanche. He also had a half-brother from Karl’s earlier marriage to Maria Schledorn.

Julius’s maternal ancestors were the Imigs from Simmern. On his father’s side, they all came from the Niederrhein area, i.e. the town of Krefeld, where many of them worked in the textile industry which Krefeld is famous for (see the Krefeld clan entry). Intriguingly, Karl’s mother was called Elisabetha de la Strada (1804-1882), whose paternal line we believe to have come from Italy. The current theory is that her great-great-grandfather had immigrated from Italy (a family tradition says it was from Capri, specifically) and worked as a gardener at a castle, which we believe to be Schloss Oranienstein at Dietz, Lahn. We now have a documented Johannes de Lastrada whom we believe to be that immigrant (though the gardener may have been in a different generation, and one de la Strada who is documented in archives relating to Oranienstein was a traiteur, not a gardener) . This Johannes de Lastrada married Elisabeth Hemmler at Wetzlar in 1681, they had 6 children baptised there between 1682 and 1691. In the marriage entry and in one of the baptisms, it is noted that the father of the family is Italian. (More about the Stradas here.)

The set of Karl’s ancestors is complete back to the 8th generation (i.e. Julius's great-grandparents), and there are some patches going back to the 10th generation, where we find the names Siepmann, Wilsberg, Röshof Wolffs, de la Strada, Hemmler, Jacob, Zeisen (=Zeutzem, Zeutzheim), Enkrich, Saur, Schönau, Giesen, Baxher (Bacher?) Vossen, and Gather.

In September 1907, Helene and Julius married. They spent their honeymoon at the Belgian seaside resort of Oostende, as my great-aunt told me in a letter. Apparently, Oostende was a very posh place back then, and the very posh ladies wore very posh frocks ensuring that their physical shape remained obscured even when they went swimming.

It is also said that, before they got married, Helene and Julius consulted a geneticist who assured them that their being first cousins would not affect their chances of having healthy children. (Which leaves me wondering exactly what kind of miracle diagnostic methods the geneticists of 1907 possessed?!)

And three healthy children they did have (although only one lived to an age commensurate to those of the Kauer girls):
1.   Ruth Düsselmann, 1908-1993, see below.
2.   Werner Düsselmann, 1911-1941.
3.   Esther Düsselmann, 1918-1983.

It is reported that Julius had been keen to emigrate to America, as his half-brother Karl had done already, and his brother Wilhelm would do as well in 1924 (while his oldest sister Elise only emigrated as far as the Netherlands, together with her husband Otto Finkensieper and their three sons). However, Helene dissuaded him from this plan.

Still, enterprising as he was, he set up his own shop in Luisenthal (Saar), which seems to have done well, as he opened a second one nearby, under the supervision of Helene’s sister, Kätha.

However, due to a heart defect that is believed to arise from a tropical disease he caught during his time in Africa (possibly typhus), he was forced to retire from business in 1918, at the age of only 35. The family, now complete after the arrival of the youngest daughter, Esther, moved to the Lower Rhine area, where the Düsselmann lineage came from. His brother Wilhelm helped him find a countryhouse with 6 acres of land and 200 apple trees at Mennrath, where they lived off the savings and the pension he received as a war veteran.

Only five years later, inflation put an end to this lazy life. Julius was forced to take on a sequence of jobs in various kinds of commerce. By 1928, the family lived in the town of Rheydt, Königsstr. 32, where the firstborn, Ruth, finished high school that year. (Rheydt is now part of the city of Mönchengladbach.)

In 1932, after a short spell of unemployment, Julius became a salesman for the textiles company C. Brühl & Co. at Rheydt (the company celebrated its centenary in 2023, but is now based in Rotenburg/Fulda). Following successful business in East Prussia, Julius was given the opportunity to start a new branch at Königsberg, which became a success. In 1936, the whole family, including faithful Aunt Kätha, moved to Königsberg, Münzstr. 10, renting a fourth floor flat with 8 rooms. They bought some of the furniture from a Jewish dentist who read the signs of the times and emigrated to Palestine. They let out the Mennrath estate. The factory, based at Kantstraße 10, started to run under Julius’s name, producing professional clothing and uniforms.

In 1937, Julius suffered severe injuries in a car accident. While he stayed in hospital, his son Werner interrupted his medical studies to run the business. At that point, the company had 150 employees and a new branch at Zinten, 30 km south of Königsberg. Werner then stayed on as a deputy manager until he was called up for military service at the beginning of the war.

In 1940, Julius split his business from C. Brühl by paying back the investment and a share of the profit.

Werner Düsselmann, who served as a simple soldier and truck driver on the Eastern front, was shot dead by snipers on the day of his 30th birthday, in 1941. His wife and young son both survived the war.

A week before Werner’s death, his sister Ruth had already paved the way for the family to return to the Hunsrück area (where her aunt Johanna Kauer lived in the house she built on her retirement in 1934), moving to Hahnenbach on the pretext of having to care for her aunt. After Werner's death, however, she returned to Königsberg to help out in the company.

In August 1943, Ruth went back west for good, taking both her children and Aunt Kätha to Hahnenbach. A year later, Königsberg suffered devastating air raids. Over 4,000 residents died, 200,000 were left without abode. Julius and Helene protected themselves from the firestorm by covering up with bath robes dunked into the water of the lake at the Königsberg castle. The factory was also damaged, but could continue production on a smaller scale, with 25-30 machines.

In December 1944, Helene went west and moved in with her sisters, daughter, and grandchildren at Hahnenbach. Julius stayed behind, but in January 1945, when visiting the seaside near Pillau, he spontaneously decided to board what turned out to be the last ship to leave the Königsberg area. Very wisely, he had been carrying his travel documents and essentials with him for a while. By the end of the month, the city was surrounded by Russian troups.

Julius arrived at Hahnenbach in February 1945. In August, as the war was over, and he set out to make a fresh start, he moved his family to Bad Nauheim (a famous art nouveau spa town north of Frankfurt), where they lived at Frankfurter Str. No. 26 at first, then moved to Frankfurter Str. 12, a substantial villa from 1898, which was to stay “in the family” until 1979. Initially, the family occupied only one room of this building. Using his old business contacts, Julius set up a wholesale trade for textiles. However, he did not have the time to develop this last business venture very much, as he died suddenly, in March 1950, at the age of 66, when visiting his daughter Esther at Frankfurt.

Helene continued to live at Frankfurter Straße 12 with her daughter Esther, who remained unmarried. They sold the property at Mennrath and set up a guest house catering for visitors to the spa facilities that Nauheim is famous for. (Come to think of it, maybe the town is more famous for the fact that Elvis Presley spent his military service time there, but I don’t know whether any of my relatives met him! They’re not very musical on that side of the family.) The two main floors of the “Pension Düsselmann” had 12 rooms with around 300 m2 total surface area, not to mention the small flat in the loft and the vast basement including a derelict bowling alley. Esther and Helene used three rooms themselves, leaving nine rooms plus the flat for paying guests or visiting family members.

Helene lived to the age of 87 in full possession of her wit and mental abilities. She died in November 1972, the only great-grandmother I got to know.

Despite having a diploma in economics and a PhD dissertation in the drawer (it had become meaningless after the war, as it dealt with trade opportunities in Eastern Europe, or something like that!), Helene’s daughter Esther did not inherit her father’s business sense. She kept spending inordinate amounts on changes to the interior layout of the house (we made jokes about how the toilets ended up in different locations each time we visited!), while leaving the roof and structure to rot. On top of that, she also liked to spend generously on taxi rides, furniture made to measure, and antiquarian books. (I shouldn’t moan about the latter, though, as she left the books to me!) When a series of strokes left her paralysed before the age of 60, the family found out that the sale of the villa was only just enough to cover her debts. She died in 1983, aged 64, leaving my grandmother, Ruth, as the last survivor of the three children of Julius and Helene.

PS I created a new portal to navigate family history blog entries in the shape of a permanent Who Is Who page. This is because the old webpage at michaelgross.info will go offline on February 2nd.

nature's chemistry

In the long list of potential books that I didn't quite get to the printers, there's one that I wanted to call Nature's chemistry - essentially a collection of snappy stories from the chemistry/biology interface. I think this idea came up just at the wrong time, namely at the point when my German publishers, Wiley-VCH gave up on such collections of stories. Previously they had been quite happy to publish them in their series Erlebnis Wissenschaft, probably based on the success of John Emsley's work in German translation, not so much on the success of my books.

Anyhow, Nature's chemistry never happened, and it never occurred to me to add the word amazing to the title. Now Michael Freemantle did just that , and with that magic ingredient he managed to get it published with the Royal Society of Chemistry, so well done to him. I was grateful to learn from his book about the chemistry of snowdrops (on the cover) and beaver excrements, but predictably more critical when reading about fields I have also covered. Overall, I guess it will face the same amount of disinterest from the general public as my books, so I suspect I should be supportive in solidarity.

My review of the book is now out in the January issue of Chemistry & Industry:

Made better by nature

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 1, January 2026, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

on the origins of radio

Some thoughts on:

Listen in: How radio changed the home
Beaty Rubens
Bodleian Library Publishing 2025

I saw this small exhibition at the Weston Library last year and came away with not much more than some memories of a few old radios and covers of early editions of the Radio Times (published since 1923). It wouldn’t have occurred to me to invest £ 30 in the accompanying book. Less than a year later, however, I spotted it in a street library and picked it up. That’s the thing with street libraries, you can always return what you don’t like, so there’s zero risk in trying something out.

In the event I surprised myself by reading the entire book cover to cover. It starts from the invention of radio and the first technologies that enabled pioneering spirits to “listen in” (as they said in the 1920s) from the comfort of their own homes, albeit with the discomfort of fiddly equipment and bulky headphones.

Rubens describes the impact broadcasting had on home life in Britain, from its start in 1922 until the second world war - after which television sets started to invade homes and diminish the importance of radio. Of special interest to me was the ambiguous role of radio in giving access to culture (including eg live music) to households, but in many cases replacing the live entertainment that people were making for themselves before (gramophones and TV sets were also complicit in this). By making some of the best performances of classical music, for instance, available to all, broadcasting discouraged mere mortals from trying for themselves, because they would not be able to compete. This led to today’s situation where playing your own music has become a niche hobby, while most people think of music as something that streams out of their devices.

It was instructive to me to follow this development in the UK setting, not only because the BBC pioneered the technology, but also because in Germany we have the “1000 years” interlude where the Volksempfänger was Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine and the medium had to be reinvented after the collapse. As Rubens briefly mentions, part of the idea of rolling out a cheap and cheerful radio for all to the entire population was that these devices didn’t have the power to pick up foreign stations, so they tied listeners to the Nazi propaganda.

As it happens, I don’t know whether the musicians starring in my musical memoir had radio in the 1920s. Both Frieda the pianist and Heinrich the cellist will have had radio after the war, and both households went to join neighbours for shared TV viewing, but about the radio listening of the 1920s I am entirely in the dark, which made Rubens’s findings from early sociological studies of radio listening interesting.

Another very interesting thing I learned from the book was the earlier existence of systems that transmitted audio from theatre or music events live through phone lines to paying subscribers. This was first demonstrated in France in 1881 as the théâtrophone, and found commercial use there and in Britain (as the electrophone in 1896). Marcel Proust is among the few contemporary users of the service who left us written testimony. Allegedly there is no written testimony from subscribers to the British service, but I am struggling to believe that. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, in some old letters kept in a drawer. The number of electrophone users in Britain peaked at just over 2,000 in 1923, before the technology was swept away by the wireless.

The book comes with lavish illustrations (as you would expect from a volume accompanying an exhibition) with historic photos, cartoons and covers of magazines. What is sorely missing is a timeline - as I discovered when trying to find the dates I referenced above. Wikipedia has one for developments globally, from which I learned that Argentina started broadcasting entertainment programmes in 1920. The book didn’t mention that either. The centenary to which the book and the exhibition were pegged is that of the first broadcasts from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter near Daventry in Northamptonshire, which for the first time reached most of the UK in the summer of 1925.

Here's a review in the Observer (when it was still part of the Guardian group)

turning violins inside out

Pirate Luthier update

Over the xmas period, I learned how to open up violins, glue cracks, and close them again. I practiced that on the not very special violin number 13 before addressing the quite lovely Guarneri copy number 30, the one which won the prize for the most beautiful case.

After the operation number 30 looks like this (still with the historic strings and tailpiece, which I'll upgrade before returning it to its owners):

In addition to the two cracks I repaired now, I discovered another two that had been repaired previously:

Note the label which says it is a copy of a Guarnerius from 1725 (as opposed to my favourite violin from my collection which is a Guarnerius from 1731). I really like the look of the inside of these instruments (see also the cello I opened up), with all the rough bits contrasting the smooth outside. Here's the inside again with my patches added:

... and the detached and repaired top from the outside:

... and the whole thing after closing up again:

After this glut of photos I'm sure you'll be glad to see the back of it:

It does have a beautiful back, doesn't it.

Number 13 (of which I used a photo in my year review) is also closed again, but it has some damage on the fingerboard which I'll have to sand down before I set it up, so I'll report on that next month.

I've now moved the list of instruments that pass through my pirate luthier workshop to a permanent page which I will update whenever necessary, independent of the blog entries.

PS While shopping for accessories for this violin, I discovered that CJ Stephens, where I buy some of my supplies, sells DIY violin making kits ...

life of the station master of Adamsweiler

continuing with the ancient texts rescued from from my old website about the Weiss chronicles, here's the short biography of Christoph Gottlieb Kauer, so following up from generations 10-6 in this blog entry, we now come to:

5. The railway man

A fateful day

August 18th, 1870, must have been one of those days when everything goes wrong. Either that, or some people in very high positions were extremely stupid.

In either case, the early morning of that day saw some 200,000 German soldiers moving at an angle of 45 degrees towards a line of 112,000 French soldiers who occupied a safe position on high ground a few kilometre from the city of Metz, and who had had time to dig trenches for their protection. The strategic vision of the German commander, Helmuth von Moltke, was to outflank the French line. There were a few problems with that plan. First that he didn’t know how long that line was, as nobody had actually gone to check. Second that some of the generals at the front just ignored his orders to hold still and drove their men into the gunfire regardless.

On the other side, things went just as spectacularly wrong. General Bazaine, a distinguished soldier who had simply been promoted one step too far (in an early example of the Peter principle), did not even consider the possibility that he might be able to win this battle. His only ambition was to secure his retreat to Metz, which was to prove the trap in which Moltke eventually caught him. A single day of supreme stupidity and pointless slaughter left more than 12,000 French soldiers dead, wounded or prisoners. The German side counted 20,160 men who were left dead or wounded. Among the latter was a 25-year-old from Simmern, Christoph Gottlieb Kauer.

Christoph Gottlieb Kauer was born at Simmern in 1845 as the first child of shoemaker Mathias Kauer and his wife Sophie Weiß. He completed an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, but then worked as a clerk for a notary.

Simmern was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. For young men this meant that they had to do obligatory military service for three years, starting at the age of 20, followed by another four years in the reserve and one year in the “Landwehr.” Thus, Christoph Gottlieb will have done his service years from 1865 to 68. In July 1870, when Bismarck’s infamous Ems telegram tricked France into declaring war on Prussia, he was well within his reservist years. Within two weeks of the declaration of war, he must have been in the army of over 1.1 million men dispatched towards French border.

Christoph served as a corporal in the 8th company of the 3rd infantery regiment of the 29th brigade. This was part of the First Army led by General Karl von Steinmetz (1796-1877), a veteran of many wars, starting with the liberation of Napoleonic rule in 1815. This time, however, Steinmetz soon became a liability by following his own impulses and ignoring the subtle strategies and direct orders of the chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891).

This problem became most obvious in the battle of Gravelotte on August 18, 1870, the biggest and bloodiest battle of this war. Steinmetz was supposed to pin down his end of the French line near the village of Gravelotte while other parts of the German Army moved towards the far end to outflank the French. Moltke had stripped Steinmetz of the command of two of the Corps in his First Army, including the VIII Corps in which Christoph served. Furthermore, Moltke had ordered him to hold still during the 18th, to allow the left wing of the German armies time for the planned strategic move.

Around noon on that day, however, Steinmetz grabbed the command over the VIII Corps back without anybody’s authorisation. By 2:30 pm he had enough of sitting still and -- in clear breach of direct orders -- sent three of the four brigades of the VIII Corps, including Christoph’s 29th brigade, forwards in an attempt to take the farm St Hubert, an exposed outpost in front of the French lines. To get there, the infanterists had to advance across a ravine with no protection, utterely exposed to the French troups equipped with superior mitrailleuses and long range rifles.

The three German brigades didn’t have the slightest chance to get there and were mowed down within minutes. The survivors sought shelter and only much later managed to take St. Hubert, after the German artillery had forced the French out of it. And even then it didn’t bring them any luck and they had to evacuate it again before nightfall.

Legend has it that Christoph shouted “Hooray” a little too enthusiastically when storming towards French positions, allowing a projectile to enter his wide-open mouth and take a large chunk of his jaw-bone on the way out. He grew a rather large beard to cover up the disfigured jaw. But considering the many thousands who died on that day, he (and our lineage) had a lucky escape.

On the next morning, the German troups found that the French had given up and retreated to Metz, where Bazaine’s army surrendered on the 28th of October. By then, the empire of Napoleon III had collapsed, following the defeat of Sedan, where the emperor was taken prisoner. In compensation, Bismarck constructed a new German empire, under Prussian leadership, as King William of Prussia became the emperor William I on January 18, 1871. General Steinmetz was “promoted” to the position of governor of Posen in a move designed to keep him out of mischief (and out of what remained of Moltke’s hair!), while Bazaine was court-martialled and found guilty of treason for giving up too easily.

In spite of (or because of) this traumatic event, Christoph was an early enthusiast of the European idea, later inscribing his family bible with a short poem including the line: “Europa ist mein Vaterland.” In compensation for his battle injury he was offered a career in the railways of the newly conquered Alsace-Lorraine region, the state-owned Reichseisenbahnen in Elsass Lothringen.

Marriage

In 1874 he married Margarethe Imig (1847-1930), also from Simmern, daughter of Weißbender (a cooper who made smaller vessels for dairy and kitchen use from lightly coloured wood, hence the "white" part) Wilhelm Imig (1820-1877) and Regina Catharina Strack (1817-1877). These two had seven children and 40 grandchildren. Margarethe was number two, but number four, Elisabeth, is also of interest, as her son, Julius Düsselmann, married Margarethe’s daughter Helene Kauer, and these two happen to be my great-grandparents.

Margarethe’s ancestors are all from the Hunsrück area for as far as we can tell (to the 10th generation, counted from myself). The Imig lineage can be traced back to Mathias Immig, born 1657 at Fronhofen near Simmern. He lived to the age of 71, but his wife Magdalena outperformed him, reaching the age of 88, which for somebody born in 1651 must have been a miracle. This may be where Margarethe and her five daughters got their longevity genes from.

There is a lovely story of a bunch of would-be emigrants in the early 18th century, including an Imig family, coming from the Pfalz region and heading for America, who got stuck after some 200 km near Kleve, on the Lower Rhine, and founded a “colony” comprising the villages of Pfalzdorf and Luisendorf.

To this day, there are many Imigs in both villages. The most prominent of them was the historian and poet Jakob Imig, 1905-1994. The ancestors of the Imigs in this group of frustrated emigrants have been traced back to Peter Imig, born 1620 in Fronhofen and his wife Gertrud, who was born in Biebern (1621) but died in Fronhofen (1684). While the link to “our” Imigs cannot be established with certainty, Peter and Gertrud Imig might very well be the parents (or other close relatives) of Mathias Imig, who was born 37 later in the same village.

After the war, Christoph Kauer worked with the nascent railways in the Alsace region, moving along with the job, as becomes obvious from the different birth places of his children (Mulhouse, Morhange, Fontoy). His last appointment was that of a station master at Adamsweiler (Adamswiler), where three of his daughters got married in 1900-1907, and where he died in 1909. I have a picture postcard of Adamsweiler showing the railway station as one of the four “tourist attractions” of the village. In front of the station you see a lineup of a station master with a very big beard, his wife, his 5 teenage daughters, and the station staff. When I visited the place in 1989, the station at Adamsweiler was still standing, essentially unchanged, but boarded up and put up for sale.

After Christoph’s death, Margarethe went to live with her second daughter, Auguste Fuchs (see below) at Saargemünd (Sarreguemines), Lorraine. The area became part of France in the Versailles Treaty, and in June 1919 Margarethe was forced to leave. She moved to Bad Münster am Stein, where she lived with her daughter Johanna (or Auguste?) until she died in September 1930, aged 83.

There are quite a few objects from the household of Christoph and Margarethe still in the family today, including a 20-volume encyclopaedia (Pierer’s Conversations-Lexicon), a grandfather’s clock, the bible mentioned above, and six pieces of furniture.

Intriguingly, Christoph and Margarethe produced two sons who died in infancy, and 5 daughters who lived between 73 and 87 years (which, for children born in the 1870s and 1880s is quite an achievement). Clearly, they weren’t meant to spread the name Kauer any further. While two of the five daughters remained childless, the other three had a total of nine children, including my grandmother, her brother and sister, and their six first cousins. With a few of them my grandparents and my great-aunt still held contact when I was a child. Names including Nelly and Martha were mentioned frequently, only I didn’t have the faintest clue who these people were!

1. Christoph Gottlieb Matthias, born 12.10.1875, died within a month.
2. Johanna Sofia, born 9.11.1876 Mühlhausen, died 26.11.1953 Hahnenbach. She remained unmarried, worked as a secretary at Bad Kreuznach. In 1934, she took early retirement and used her savings to build the house at Hahnenbach, which is still in the family. The land was provided by the distant relatives from the Weiß/Schmidt/Weirich/Giloy lineage (descended from Maria Magdalena Weiß, second child of the teacher Christian Gottlieb Weiß). These families have been running the only pub in the village over centuries.
3. Auguste (1879-1952) married in 1900 Wilhelm Fuchs (1872-1963) Postinspektor at Münster a.St.
  1.   Helene (1901-1965) married Mr Petz
  2.   Natalie “Nelly” (1906-1984) married (1931) Christian Paust. One son, Dieter, and two grandsons.
4. Anna Katharina (1880-1965) married Heinrich Thiebold (1877-1948), a teacher from Brebach (Saar).
  1.   Erwin born 1902, died in infancy.
  2.   Martha (1907- ) married Willi Helmer, Saarbrücken, one son, two daughters.
  3.   Robert born 1910, married Aenne Schmidt.
  4.   Herta born 1917.
5. Louise Regina gen. Kätha (1883-1960), remained unmarried, served as household helper to her sister Helene.
6. Helene, married Julius Düsselmann
  1.   Ruth (1908-1993)
  2.   Werner (1911-1941)
  3.   Esther (1918-1983)
7. Karl (1888-1891) died of measles.

More details re the descendants in the Kauer Clan entry.

Update 25.1.2026: I created a new portal to navigate family history blog entries in the shape of a permanent Who Is Who page. This is because the old webpage at michaelgross.info will go offline on February 2nd.

the urban ecology of feeding birds and squirrels

Back in December, I spotted a research paper about the ecological impact of human-provided food on squirrel populations, and I started to wonder whether similar work exists for the various species of "garden birds" that many of us like to feed in winter. Incidentally, I installed an inherited bird feeder outside my window around the same time, to get some first hand observations in. (It may be an age thing, too.)

It's always fun writing about squirrels, but the most spectacular results I discovered were those of the hummingbirds in California. Due to the widespread use of feeding stations with fake nectar, these birds have extended their range dramatically and also undergone measurable anatomical evolution.

Read all about it in my latest feature which is out today:

Feeding change in urban wildlife

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 2, 19 January 2026, Pages R31-R33

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF. Last year's features will still move to the open archives as this year advances.)

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.

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Last year's thread is here .

Squirrels like this Eastern grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) thrive in urban parks and benefit from food supplied by humans. A study on the Eurasian red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) in Japan has shown that the urban populations also have improved reproduction chances compared with the rural ones. (Photo: Jules Verne Times Two/julesvernex2.com/CC-BY-SA-4.0.)

The same issue of CB also contains story of Veronika, the back-scratching bovine that probably wins the internet today (open access). I already saw a Guardian headline about it.

chronicles of the Weiß family

This fundamental rock on which much of our family history is built has been on my website since time immemorial, but as I am now giving up on my hosting arrangement, I'll need to save it here (and update it a bit as well, with links to recent developments):

Back in 1891, a four-times great uncle of mine took the trouble of writing down the history of his family in some detail, in a document entitled “Familien Chronik der Familie Weiß” (cited as “the Weiß chronicles” below). My great great aunt Johanna Kauer borrowed this document from a cousin in the 1930s, copied it and added details of her own family.

It’s a story of refugees from the troubled Eastern parts of Europe whose descendants ended up in the Hunsrück mountain range beween Rhine and Moselle, and settled there for many generations. In the 19th and 20th century, there were moves to the West and East respectively, each time followed by a rather hasty return to the Hunsrück.

What is also remarkable about this lineage is that there are nine different professions in 10 generations (myself included). Therefore, I used the professions in the chapter titles, as they will facilitate navigation. For the same reason, the chapter numbering goes backwards, counting down to my generation as the number 1.

Table of contents:

I. The Weiß chronicles (1680-1891)

10. The merchant
9. The parson
8. The village mayor
7. The teacher

II. The Kauer family (1844-1972)
6. The shoemaker
5. The railway man
4. The businessman

I. The Weiß chronicles (1680-1891)

10. The merchant

Christian Weiß is regarded as the founding father of this lineage, only because we know very little about him and nothing at all about his parents. He must have been born around 1680 -- the only clues being the birth years of his son Johannes, 1704, and of Johannes’s future father-in-law, 1681. The Weiß chronicles state that Christian Weiß was a merchant who was born in Silesia, which then belonged to the kingdom of Bohemia, was evicted from there because of his protestant faith. The conflict between a largely protestant population and a catholic ruler in Bohemia was the ignition for the Thirty Years War. As the protestants lost and the catholic rule was re-established, many protestants fled. (By the way, all people in this story are Lutheran protestants, unless specified otherwise.)

However, Christian Weiß himself was probably too young to to be a Bohemian refugee involved in the immediate aftermath of the war, so maybe his parents were evicted. In any case, the chronicles say that Christian Weiß found refuge in Königsberg, without any further specification. We had always assumed that this was the city belonging to the Brandenburg-Preußen dukedom (which in 1701 proclaimed itself the Kingdom of Prussia under Frederic I, in a ceremony held at Königsberg). Another descendant of the Weiss lineage, however, found evidence suggesting that Christian Weiss (whose name may have been different, too) lived in a village called Königsberg in Hessen, close to the town of Wetzlar.

Christian Weiß settled there and had two sons with his wife Maria Elisabeth. We don't know her maiden name, but she may have family ties to the village of Seibersbach, because their son Johannes received his confirmation there.

A bit of number-crunching to fill the space: If, as 20th century research suggests, each person has a 90% probability of being the child of the man whom they believe to be their father, Christian Weiß still is more likely to be my ancestor than not, at 53 %. Just as well that we don’t know anything about his father, because that guy would only have just under 48 % chance of being the true founding father of the lineage.

9. The parson

Of Christian Weiß’s two sons, one stayed in Königsberg and took up his father’s trade, while the other, Johannes Weiß (1704-1772) studied theology at Gießen (which makes the village of Königsberg appear a much more plausible starting point than the city in East Prussia would have been) and came as a parson-in-training (Pfarrkandidat) to Dörrebach in the Hunsrück mountain range, just a few kilometers west of Bingen on the river Rhine. There he was appointed a parson in 1729. In May 1740 (according to the Eckweiler book, the Weiß chronicles claim it was 1742), he moved to a parsonage in Eckweiler (some 20 km deeper into the Hunsrück), where he remained a parson until his death in 1772. In fact the Weiß chronicles were written in that very same village nearly 120 years later.

The village of Eckweiler dates back to the 9th century, its church to around 990. Sadly, its history spanning more than a thousand years came to an abrupt end.

In 1979, the village was officially dissolved. Following the introduction of Phantom fighter jets on the nearby airfield of the Bundeswehr, the noise had become unbearable. The last 250 villagers were relocated to a brand new suburb of the nearby town of Sobernheim, and all buildings except for the church -- not the original building, but the same location where Johannes had held his service some 250 years earlier -- were demolished. Too hastily, as it turned out, as the end of the cold war also saw the Bundeswehr selling off the airfield to a car manufacturer who planned to use it as a test course, but never did. So Eckweiler, known locally as “the church without a village” is very nice and quiet nowadays.

The church of Eckweiler, the only building left standing of the historic village.
Source: Wikipedia / Von Devlaminck - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0,

There is a book about the history of Eckweiler, its church, and its parsons. According to this source, Johannes Weiß was a very assertive type of person, who would always make sure that everybody got their due. In first years of his 32-year tenure, he had the church renovated inside and out. His lasting legacy, however, was to be the village school, built in 1770.

According to the same book, Eckweiler had 157 inhabitants in 1769, all of whom were protestants. Johannes’s parsonage also extended to the neighbouring village of Daubach, with 80 inhabitants including 36 protestants.

In 1732, Johannes married Katharina Elisabeth Ebener or Ebner (1712-1750), the daughter of the parson of Alterkülz (still Hunsrück, but 40 km NNE of Eckweiler), Philipp Ebener (~1681-1734). The Weiß chronicles state that Ebener’s family was originally from Hungary and was deplaced by the Thirty Years War, but that must have affected Philipp's grandparents, as his father, Johann Jacob Ebner, was born in 1646 at Trarbach on the river Moselle, where he was a conrector, i.e. a teacher entitled to teach the final year pupils at grammar schools (Lateinschule). The school still exists today and has confirmed that Johann Jacob Ebner taught there from 1686 till 1708, and his son Philipp Nikolaus from 1708 till 1720, i.e. before becoming the parson of Alterkülz.

Note that the Ebener and Weiss folks of this generation must have been moving in the same circles as the writer W.O. von Horn (real name Friedrich Wilhelm Philipp Oertel, born in Horn), who comes from a family that includes five generations of protestant priests in that area. In fact at least four marriages of my direct ancestors happened at Horn, so some of these may have been officiated by a member of the Oertel family.

Johannes and Elisabeth had seven children,

1. Johannetha Weiß married a forester named Federkeil, at Gebroth (Hunsrück).
2. Johann Gottlieb Weiß, the future mayor of Pferdsfeld, a neighbouring village.
3. Regina Weiß married a Mr Weimar from Dörrebach.
4. Maria Elisabetha Weiß married Philipp Jakob Bauer, a parson at Enkirch, who later took over the parsonage of his father-in-law at Eckweiler. Maria died childless in 1819.
5. Marianne Weiß married Philipp Orth from Weiler near Martinstein, on the river Nahe.
6. Philipp Theodor Weiß became a private tutor for the counts of Solms, he drowned while hunting wild ducks in the back waters of the river Rhine.
7. Christian Weiß died while a student at university.

... of whom the second will be of interest for our lineage:

8. The village mayor

Johann Gottlieb Weiß was born in 1736 and went on to become the mayor of the village of Pferdsfeld (which, like Eckweiler, was evacuated in 1978-82 because of the military airfield). He married Anna Katharina André from Gebroth (a tiny village, just a few km E of Eckweiler). We know nothing about her family (except that the family name has survived at Gebroth to this day). Note, however, that Gottlieb’s older sister Johannetha had also married someone from the same village (see above), so there may be some sort of pattern.

Following the example set by his parents, they had seven children,

1. Johann Philipp Weiß, a teacher at Weiler on the river Nahe, married Anna Margaretha Kaiser, from Merxheim (Nahe).
2. Johannetha Weiß married Leopold Wagner from Winterburg.
3. Magdalena Weiß married Johann Fleischer from Pferdsfeld.
4. Philipp Weiß, a teacher at Gödenroth, and later at Winningen (Mosel), married Katharina Petermann from Allenbach.
5. Regina Katharina Weiß married Johann Fuchs from Eckweiler.
6. Christian Gottlieb Weiß, became a teacher at Hellenthal, Raversbeuren and Simmern u. Dhaun.
7. Maria Katharina Weiß, born in 1786, married a parson called Ried from Schauern (Hochwald) and went off to Rio de Janeiro, allegedly (here's what really happened).

... of whom the sixth will be of interest for the continuation of our lineage:

7. The teacher

Christian Gottlieb Weiß (1782-1867) is the earliest born ancestor of whom we have a photo. He worked as a teacher, at first in Hellenthal (Eifel, i.e. north of the Moselle). This is where he seems to have found his wife. In 1806, he married Anna Gertraud Käuer, (1777-1858; alternative spelling: Keuert) from Gemünd. Her parents, Tilmanus Keuert and Regina Catherina Freischmid were from Hellenthal (Eifel).

He then taught at Raversbeuren, and from 1819 until his retirement in 1853 at Simmern unter Dhaun, a village today known as Simmertal, not to confused with the main town of the region which is also called Simmern. They are both on the same little river, the Simmerbach, but Simmern unter Dhaun is close to where it joins the Nahe river (near Kirn), while the town of Simmern is upstream, on the highlands of the Hunsrück. Relative to Christian Gottlieb’s home village of Pferdsfeld, Simmern unter Dhaun is just 5 km SSE, so he may have jumped at this opportunity to work closer to his family home, after the previous jobs were much farther away.

The school at Simmern unter Dhaun can be traced back to 1563, for which year the village chronicles record that a teacher’s salary was paid. In 1824, five years into Christian Gottlieb’s tenure, the “protestant elementary school” had 126 pupils. The following year, 14 Jewish children joined them as well. In 1838, the position of a second teacher was approved, and in 1841 a Mr Schneider was hired.

In 1846, the school house, dating back to 1747, was extended with a second storey. Since then, it had two classrooms and two flats for teachers, plus a barn and stables. However, as these buildings were too small to get a proper farm going, the schools land was leased to local farmers. We don’t know whether either of the flats was occupied by the Weiß family (whose children were all grown up by then).

Christian Gottlieb’s earnings at that point were:
* 47 Thalers from the Fabry foundation
* free residence, firewood, small amounts of natural produce;
* as a sacristan, bell-ringer, and organist for the local church he also got 1 Thaler in cash and
* 22 Thalers worth of natural produce.

In 1851, Christian Gottlieb built a house with barn and stables where he then lived with his wife and the growing family of his daughter Henriette, who had six children with her husband Friedrich Kaiser. One of them, Johann Kaiser, moved into the house of his parents in 1913, after retiring from his job as a teacher in Cologne. The house stayed “in the family” for more than a century, until 1961.

In 1852, the government of the Kingdom of Prussia, of which the Hunsrück area was now a part, politely enquired whether Christian Gottlieb didn’t want to retire from his teaching job, as he was already 70 years old, and there had been complaints about him. He retired the following year, after 34 years as a teacher at this school. Mr Schneider took over as first teacher for a year, but in 1854 new teachers were appointed to both positions. He received a decent pension and was able to celebrate his golden wedding anniversary in 1856.

Anna Gertraud died in 1858, aged 81. Christian Gottlieb died in 1867, aged 85. The school house survives to this day, but is in residential use today.

Portrait of Christian Gottlieb Weiß taken in 1866, at which point he was retired, widowed, and a little bit forgetful, but otherwise fine, I guess.

Christian Gottlieb and Anna Gertraud had 8 children and at least 20 grandchildren. The fifth, and to some extent also the second child will be of interest for further developments, while the 7th is the author of the Weiß chronicles.

1. Karoline (Kornelia) Weiß, 1807-1877, married farm labourer and coachman (Georg) Philipp Fuchs, at Simmern unter Dhaun. Reportedly, there have been troubles related to alcoholism and tuberculosis in that family, but they still managed to have 11 children, born 1829-1851.
2. Maria Magdalena Weiß, 1809-1885, married Peter Schmidt from Hahnenbach. They had one daughter, (Caroline) Wilhelmine Schmidt, * 1848, who married Ferdinand Weirich, and from whom the Weirichs and Giloys at Hahnenbach are descended, who who kept the village inn until the late 20th century.
3. Johannetha Weiß, 1809-1879, married Friedrich Dick from Monzingen, reported to have set sail for America with “a stable full of children.” (Possibly because of the famine of 1845/46 triggered by potato blight.)
4. Karl Weiß, a railways man at Hamm (Westfalen), married Wilhelmine Schmidt from Hamm, had one daughter.
5. Sophie Weiß, 1815-1862, see below.
6. (Regina) Wilhelmine Weiß, 1817-1865, did not marry.
7. Christian Gottlieb Weiß, born ca. 1821, in 1844 married a widow, Maria Katharina Kessel, had two sons and two daughters. He is the author of the Weiß chronicles. His daughter Sophie Weiß married a Mr Kehrein. Their son Karl Kehrein married his cousin Lina Martin, also a great-grandchild of the teacher C. G. Weiß (via his 5th child, Sophie, the next stop in our lineage). Through Karl Kehrein, who was a baker at Kirn and knew my great-great aunt Johanna Kauer, the Weiß chronicles came to our knowledge. Sadly, however, Karl Kehrein’s descendants don’t know what happened to the original.
8. Henriette Weiß, 1822-1895, married Friedrich Kaiser, had 6 children: Karl, Fritz (2 children), August (3 children), Johann, Hermann ...

II. The Kauer family (1844-1972)

From this point onwards, we leave the original contents of the Weiß chronicles. My great-great aunt, Johanna Kauer, who had saved the chronicles for our family by copying them from an original held by her second cousin Karl Kehrein, seamlessly turned them into the Kauer chronicles by adding details of her own family. Increasingly, the following events are also backed up by original documents which we still hold.

6. The shoemaker

Sophie Weiß (1815-1862) was born at Raversbeuren, during the second placement of her father’s teaching career, but mainly grew up at Simmern unter Dhaun, where the family settled in 1819. In 1844, she married Mathias Kauer (1813-1885), a shoemaker from the town of Simmern, the administrative centre of the Hunsrück area, some 15 km N (and upstream) of Simmern unter Dhaun.

Simmern had officially been a town since 1330. More intriguingly, it was the capital of an independent country, the dukedom of Palatinate-Simmern, for a quarter of a millenium, from 1410 to 1673. Look at it now, and the idea seems absurd. Tragedy struck when the last duke died without a successor and the French king Louis XIV laid claim to the territory for his family, but didn’t get the approval of the German nobility assembled in the Reichstag.

In 1689, French troups burned the town, blew up the castle, and demolished the fortifications. The town’s archives were lost and Simmern’s time of glory went up in smoke along with the rest of it. Very slowly, the town recovered from its darkest hour. By 1800, it had some 2000 inhabitants and was the centre of the canton Simmern with some 12,000 inhabitants.

In October 1794, French troups conquered the Hunsrück area, and General Bernadotte took over Simmern. The town remained French throughout the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, who introduced his characteristic brand of administration to the Hunsrück. After Napoleon’s demise, Simmern fell to Prussia, where it remained until Germany was united in the empire of 1871. Today it is a perfectly average small German town. Practically nothing reminds the visitor that it once was the capital of a country.

When Sophie Weiß came to Simmern to marry Mathias Kauer, the Kauers had been at Simmern for two generations. Mathias’s father Christoph Kauer, also a shoemaker, had been born there in 1785, but Mathias’s grandfather Christian Kauer, a linen-weaver, settled there in the 18th century, coming from nearby Kirchberg. Christian Kauer’s wife, Maria Magdalena Hebel (1747-1790), on the other hand, came from an old Simmern family and had a minor claim to (reflected) fame, as a first cousin of the author Johann Peter Hebel (Das Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreunds). Hans Jakob Hebel, who may or may not be an 11th generation ancestor of mine, was a tanner and Bürger at Simmern. He got married in 1639 and died in 1651.

This is the founding couple of the Kauer clan. They had eight children, six of whom lived to adult age, and 18 grandchildren, listed here.

Much of the info on the old website that followed after this point (generations 5 and 4) has been superseded by things I published on the blog in recent years, so I may not need it here any more. I'll link to the relevant entries and maybe create a couple of new entries specifically for each generation:

5. The railway man: Christoph Gottlieb Kauer 1845-1909 from Simmern is Number 2 in this blog post, the longer biography which I originally wrote for the website with the Weiss chronicles is now here.

4. The businessman Julius Düsselmann has appeared in my series Every picture tells a story several times, eg here.

Update 25.1.2026: I created a new portal to navigate family history blog entries in the shape of a permanent Who Is Who page. This is because the old webpage at michaelgross.info will go offline on February 2nd.

website on the move

I haven't updated my dear old website for a few years (because life was moving fast and the process of uploading files to the site was painfully complicated), and a recent invoice revealed that the cost of hosting it was rising to more than a dollar a day, which made me realise that this arrangement was rather a waste of money.

screenshot of my index page which apparently I haven't changed since January 2012

As a temporary fix, I have now created permanent "pages" on this blogspot account, including one for my homepage, to which my domain name www.michaelgross.co.uk points, as well as an updated version of my whoIam biography page and the list of my books. This was also an opportunity to get rid of the numerous am*zon links I still had on my book pages from the early days before enshittification. I'm giving up on the list of all my articles, which I hadn't updated beyond December 2020 and on the family history page as these activities are now better represented by the relevant tags on the blog. The hosting service of the website ends on February 2nd.

A history of my website is here. The full version continues to exist on my hard drive and various USB sticks of course, so I may resurrect it elsewhere at some point, maybe on the occasion of its 30th birthday in December ...

Update 25.1.2026: I created a new portal to navigate family history blog entries in the shape of a permanent Who Is Who page.

stopping the shark trade

A rare bit of good news for marine biodiversity arrived last December from the unlikely location of landlocked Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The 20th conference of the signatories to CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) significantly enhanced the protection of sharks and rays. Time for another feature about cartilaginous fish, or as I now like to call them: chondrichthyans:

Chondrichthyans at the crossroads

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 1, 5 January 2026, Pages R1-R3

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF. Last year's features will still move to the open archives as this year advances.)

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.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

An oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus, Critically Endangered) observed at Elphinstone Reef, Egypt. The species has now been added to the Appendix I of CITES, meaning that all trade is banned. (Photo: Polygonia c-album/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

a coconut fiddle

In december I discovered an unusual kind of two-string fiddle at a charity shop. It was lacking the pegs, strings and bridge, the body is a coconut shell with holes that seem to be carved to create the image of an angry cat (or is that me imagining things?):

I think it may be some sort of Asian instrument. The Vietnamese dan gao also appears to have an artfully carved backside (though not necessarily cat-faced). Southern coastal China and Taiwan have a coconut fiddle known as yehu, apparently, where the "ye" syllable specifies that it's made out of a coconut. The Indonesian kongahyan is also similar. If anybody happens to know anything about this sort of instrument, all hints appreciated.

As I couldn't find an exact equivalent to inform me about the set up required, I just improvised something with the materials I happened to have:

The bridge is half a bamboo ring which I previously used on violin 1) before cutting a proper bridge for it:

and the pegs are just sticks from a shrub (Philadelphus coronarius, I think) in our garden.

It does sound nice on the open strings, but the harmonics aren't all that great, so I'm now wondering whether to put the strings much closer to the stick or to add some rings around the stick as frets. Either approach would make it easier to produce higher notes by pressing down the strings. Some of the Asian instruments on Wikipedia also seem to have the strings shortened by a loop tied around the neck and pulling them down. Oh and I should make a bow for it too. Watch this space.

PS the list of instruments I have taken on for repairs is now on a permanent page which I'll update as I go along:
pirate luthier logbook