of goats and Bitsches

Names with a geographically defined origin - kind of a series.

When I was looking into the connection to Grace Kelly's ancestor Leonhard Treusch in the Odenwald, I was reminded of another case of a nameline leading back to the place after which the people are named to add to my occasional series, namely the Bitsch lineage hailing from Bitsch in Switzerland, in the German-speaking part of the Kanton Wallis / Vallais. (Not to be confused with Bitsch in Lorraine.)

The lineage can be traced back to Christian Bitsch, who was born around 1611 in Bitsch and died in Schiers (Kanton Graubünden/Grisons), which is also the place where his relevant son, also Christian, was born. We don't have documentation for the older Christian's birth in Bitsch, so my guess would be that when he settled in Schiers he became known as the guy from Bitsch, and the name stuck.

The younger Christian Bitsch was among the many Swiss immigrants who helped resettle southwestern Germany after the devastation of the Thirty-Years War. He went to the Odenwald area, married Katharina Zehfuss from Wernigerode (Harz) at Reichenbach in 1666, had at least 11 children (that's a lot of bitches!) and died at Raidelbach in 1708.

Her name, which literally translates to "toe-foot", sounds a bit strange, but her paternal grandfather was called Baltzer (Balthasar) Ziegenfuss, which means goat's foot, which makes more sense, especially as he died in Geisleden, a place that also has a goat in its name. Oh and the Swiss village of Bitsch has a goat in its coat of arms. Coincidence? There's definitely a goat theme emerging in this story.

Coat of arms of Bitsch, Switzerland.

The most recent Bitsch in my family tree, Barbara Bitsch, was born at Bonsweiher (now part of Mörlenbach) in 1704. So we have four generations of Bitsches.

Interestingly, the distribution of the name is still heavily focused on the Odenwald, with a secondary hotspot in Baden.

 

---

 

List of origin stories for name lines in my very irregular series:

• Siepmann from the farm "Am Zipp" in Schwelm.
• Trimbach - a wine-growing family in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, Alsace to this day, originally from the eponymous village in Switzerland.
• Zeutzheim from Horchheim (Koblenz), not far from the village of Zeuzheim.
• Wolff (named after the Wolffskotten farm in Styrum).
• Kauer (linked to the Kauerhof at Nickweiler, mentioned in 1074).
• Weyland is a name chosen by my most recent Jewish ancestor upon his adult baptism.
• Obelode is a unique name linked to a farm at Steinhagen near Bielefeld.
• From the same branch of the family tree and geographic area comes the French connection of Dopheide / d'Oppède.

Ancestors' names matching place names that I should look into include: Trimbach, Wilsberg,

 

---

 

Confused about who is who? - see my new name index for all things family history.

There's also a nascent index of place names here.

Stop press, here's the index of migration events.

what happened in Hamborn

I'm trying to figure out what happened to the ca. 15 children of the East Prussian patchwork family we met in the Every picture series, so let's tag the three patches. There are the litters Faust 1 and Faust 2 sharing Franz Faust (1857-1938) as a father, and the Wittke family from Wilhelmine Domscheit's (1863-1942) first marriage.

Of the (at least) four children of Faust 2, we know that the sisters Auguste and Hanna moved west to the short-lived industrial city of Hamborn in the 1920s, wheras Luise landed in Lippstadt via a refugee camp in Denmark so presumably stayed in East Prussia until January 1945. We know that their brother Otto Faust (born 1895 as the first child of Faust 2) died in January 1945 in the attempt to defend East Prussia.

Browsing lots of address books of Duisburg, I now discovered that the semi-mysterious aunt Therese Vietz (who could be from any of the patches) also lived in Hamborn for several decades, actually two doors down from her sister Hanna. So from 1950 to 1980 we have three patchwork sisters living on a geographically very limited patch in the former city of Hamborn, now part of Duisburg, less than a mile apart.

The iconic town hall of Hamborn, which reminds me of the one at Elberfeld, built only a few years earlier.
Own photo. More photos from my recent visit to Hamborn in this flickr album.

So to gain some clarity I need to spell this out as a timeline. Dates before 1950 are from documents and addresses on envelopes; from 1950 onwards from the excellent collection of addressbooks of Duisburg) in the city archives.

Timeline: 100 years in Hamborn

1922 13.10. Auguste registers at Weseler Str. 95 as a lodger with a resident called Hirsch. At the time, Weseler Str. and especially its intersection with Kaiser Wilhelm Str. were becoming the big shopping destination in the new city, with the Arnold Pollmann department store completed in 1929, after which the area is now named Pollmannkreuz.

1923 2.2. Auguste moves to Wittfelderstr. 189a (still in Hamborn but on the southern edge of the city).

1923 23.3. Auguste marries Ernst.

1924 2.8.; 21.11. They live at Kampstr. 140a, which is the northern edge of the Dichterviertel (poets'/writers' quarter) , a major development of workers' accommodation built by the Thyssen company (mines and steelworks).

By 1927 they move one block further east to Knappenstraße 43 which may have been new then, as this northeastern part of the Dichterviertel was developed later than the bit around Goethestraße.

1930s Auguste's sister Hanna and her husband Fritz Krieger also live in Knappenstr., at number 51 (based on a list of residents compiled by Auguste's son born 1926 who refers to the residents listed as the "Ureinwohner", ie original or indigenous residents). Other neighbours include the Kuhwald family.

section of a map from 1936. Schachtstraße is on the left under the red number 15, Knappenstraße runs diagonally into the top right corner. Hamborn town hall, post office, and the protestant church where Auguste and Ernst married are all on the large through road Duisburger Straße just southwest of the centre of this map. Although chronically overrun by cars now, it is essentially a 15 minute city, as everything is within walking distance and there are trams too.

1943 Hanna and Fritz now live Schachtstr. 27.

1945 Ernst dies, Auguste continues to live in Knappenstraße 43 with her sons.

1950 Therese now lives in Schachtstraße 23, two doors down from Hanna and Fritz. Therese is recorded as a widow in the address book of 1950, but we don't now what happened to Mr Vietz (or even what his first name was). We also don't know whether Therese arrived at Hamborn before the war like Hanna and Auguste or whether she had to flee from East Prussia like Luise.

1973 last addressbook entry for Auguste and her son Erwin in Knappenstraße.

Around 1975 Auguste has to leave her home of five decades in Knappenstraße as the site is cleared for a new development. She moves to Obere Holtener Str. 87. This is on the northeastern edge of Hamborn, the street leading towards Holten which is now part of Oberhausen. She was in a way unlucky to be in the newer and less coherent part of the Dichterviertel, as the older part around Goethestrasse has largely survived to this day (see my photos from Goethestraße on flickr). As do the Schachtstrasse houses where Hanna and Therese lived for several decades.

1977 First addressbook entry for Auguste and Erwin in Obere Holtener Str. In Knappenstraße, the odd numbers from 29 to 59 are now missing from the address book.

1979 Auguste dies. Two of her sons still live in Hamborn. Therese and the Kriegers are still living in Schachtstraße. The town of Walsum, which in 1975 also became part of Duisburg, also has a street called Schachtstraße. Therefore:

by 1981 the former Schachtstraße has become Dr-Heinrich-Laakmann-Straße, named after a catholic priest who taught at the nearby Abteischule and died in Hamborn. Therese is still there in the address book of 1981, but the Kriegers no more.

1982 Last entry for Therese Vietz in the address books.

1984 Therese Vietz no longer appears in the address book.

2015 The last survivor of Auguste's sons dies in Hamborn.

2025 A new development of 80 homes goes up on the north side of Knappenstrasse. where the lower odd house numbers must have been. Google Street View shows vegetation on that side of the road right now, and then the 1970s four-storey apartment blocks from around number 47 onwards. So maybe the development in the 70s never extended to this area of the new project? Meanwhile the relevant houses in the former Schachtstrasse are looking really lovely on Street View.

Resources

• Lovely website from Duisburg city about the district Hamborn.
• History of the Dichterviertel (in German), the area of which Knappenstrasse is a part.
• Havenburn, Hamborn, Duisburg-Hamborn: Geschichte und Geschichten. Walter Braun Verlag Duisburg 1979. I found a copy of this at a book exchange when I visited.

PS some of the patchwork grandchildren emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, so if anybody down there sees this and has ancestors in East Prussia named Faust, Domscheit, Wittke or Witt, do let me know.

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.

crossing the Mediterranean

Humans have been crossing the Mediterranean for millennia, even before the Phoenicians invented the ways and means to build proper ships. I took a recent study of the ancient genomes of numerous people living in the Phoenician colonies around the Western Mediterranean as an excuse to look into the ancient travels on the Mediterranean, including when and how people first reached the islands. Your regular reminder that humans have always migrated and will continue to do so.

My feature is out now:

Mediterranean movements

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 13, 7 July 2025, Pages R639-R641

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

Genomes from Punic burials reveal the surprising diversity of the people who lived in communities that were culturally Phoenician. The image shows pendant masks from Carthage made of glass paste in the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. (Photo from the exhibit Carthage: The Immortal Myth inside the Colosseum and taken by G41rn8/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

homo migrans

It is a sad irony that the current wave of (populist, racist, fascist etc) sentiment against people who migrate from one part of our planet to another comes at a time when genetics enables us to better understand humanity's past migrations, and to appreciate that humans have always been migrants. They may stick around for a few generations if the living conditions are favourable, but in the long term, across centuries, all human ancestries have a migration background (the more interesting parts of mine are in the 17th century).

The current anti-migration populism is all the more tragic as the ongoing climate catastrophe is already displacing people and will displace millions more. As Gaia Vince has argued in her excellent book Nomad Century, migration should be embraced as an essential part of the adaptation to climate change, rather than vilified.

All of which provides good enough reasons to add another feature to the ones I have already written about the many migrations of the past. This time the focus is on Europe in the first millennium CE, but inevitably, given the current political meltdown, it is also about the present and future of humanity:

Migration in our genes

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 3, 3 February 2025, Pages R81-R83

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

Even before the Viking invasions, European populations migrated over long distances. This nineteenth-century painting is Viking Armada by Edward Moran (1829–1901). (Painting courtesy of The Knohl Collection.)

ancient Australia

From a European / Western perspective, we're used to thinking of Australia as a new world that has only recently been discovered and settled by our heroic ancestors. Ironically, however, the out of Africa emigration of modern humans that eventually spread around the world appears to have reached Australia a lot earlier than Europe, never mind the Americas.

We still know far too little about the 70,000 years of human history in Australia and the larger landmass of Sahul which also comprised Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. Recent research, however, has yielded insights into likely scenarios how the migration into Sahul may have fitted with the changes of environmental conditions. For the later stages of Australia's hidden history, genetic and linguistic evidence are now coming together to reveal a coherent story. I've rounded up some of these studies in my latest feature which is out now:

Ancient Australia

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 11, 03 June 2024, Pages R513-R515

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Aboriginal rock art created by the Wunambal People in the caves at Wary Bay, Bigge Island, Kimberley, Western Australia. The painting shows a Wandjina figure representing a cloud and rain spirit. (Photo: John Benwell/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0 Deed).)

wandering wine

As the climate gets hotter, wine cultivars will have to move polewards to remain in favourable conditions (as I discussed previously in C&I). A recent massive genome study unravels the past moves of grapevines since their domestication so that's been a good excuse to write about wine and climate again, and also throw in a bit of family history (of which the longer version is here).

The resulting feature is out now:

Wine on the move

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 7, 10. April 2023, Pages R239-R241

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Climate change has shifted the growth regions of traditional grapevine varieties, to the extent that merlot grapes can now be grown in Canada, as shown here in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. (Photo: laughingmango/Getty images.)

people move

In one of the most important books of recent years, Gaia Vince managed to knit together two big issues of our time, climate catastrophe and migration, into a coherent argument that even manages to squeeze some hope out of the mess we're in. Whereas politicians and media too often tend to exaggerate migration problems while ignoring or playing down climate problems, Vince argues that migration is not only a normal part of being human but also a necessary part of the solution to the problems we're facing including climate catastrophe.

Nomad Century
by Gaia Vince
Allen Lane 2022

The book has already been widely reviewed and recommended, so to add my voice to the choir, here's my long essay review out now in C&I:

Moving times

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 1, January 2023, Page 36

access via:

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

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

Blackwells

off to Canada

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 3.

Let's have some migration stories from the folks that had already migrated from East Prussia to the Rhein-Ruhr area in the early 20th century. Some kids of the next generation then moved on to overseas, including Grete Kalippke, a niece of Ernst Leopold the steel worker. Grete's mother, Anna Kosmowsky (Ernst Leopold's sister), married Gustav Kalippke and settled at Mülheim. (Gustav Kalippke was born in Gerdauen, East Prussia, close to where the Kosmowsky migrants came from. As with the Hamborn couple of Auguste Faust and Ernst Leopold Kosmowsky, we aren't sure whether the westwards migration was a joint project or whether upon arrival the associated with fellow East Prussian and thus were likely to marry them too.) They also had two sons who both died in World War II.

In 1948, Grete married a guy called Heinrich Diewert, and the pair of them immediately emigrated to Canada. Actually, there were Diewert people in Canada before that time, such as young Erwin Diewert and his parents, so I am not sure whether Heinrich really emigrated or just returned home? I am having trouble finding any Diewert people in Germany. It's all a bit weird, and multiple traces lead to Ukraine.

Anyhow, here she is at Würzburg (not sure whether anybody in her family had any connection to the city or whether they were just passing through as tourists, in any case it is a very touristy thing to have your photo taken at this precise spot on the old bridge, with the Festung in the background!):

then at Bremen, with her new husband, en route to the New World:

and at a later point I assume she took up flying to visit the relatives back home, because here she is at Düsseldorf airport with a plane to catch:

It just occurred to me, as she died aged 40, that the appalling lack of air traffic safety in the 1960s may have been why, so I checked, and no it wasn't.

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada

The new twitter thread for the new season starts here.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

brother Klundt

Nearly seven years ago, I wrote up what I knew about the descendents of my ancestors Johannes Klundt and Eva Hust, who had emigrated to the Black Sea (today’s Ukraine) with their youngest children, while the oldest son, Johann Jacob Klundt (1782-1853; my four-times-great-grandfather) stayed in Germany.

The post has created a lot of interest (as well as inspiring a master dissertation from the young historian in the family) and most recently, two readers have been able to fill me in on the descendants of the youngest son, Georg Michael Klundt (1805-after 1866), about whom I knew nothing back then. It turns out his son became famous as a founder of the Baptist community in Bulgaria, but let’s start from the beginning again, from the migrating couple, and the new village of Rohrbach where they settled.

I found the historic report of school master Fritschle (an English translation available here) who taught at the village school in 1848 and wrote a detailed account of its history with its ups and downs. It started in 1809 with 26 families, and another 69 families arrived in 1810. Another arrival of five families brought the number to 100 families with 475 individuals. There were numerous Fritschle individuals among the settler families, so the schoolmaster definitely came from within that community, but I don't know his first name and haven't been able to identify him in the databases.

Fritschle noted that this happened under the authority of the governor “Rischileu”. I recently learned from Neal Ascherson's excellent book Black Sea that the city of Odessa, founded around the same time, was essentially run by French nobility that escaped the French Revolution. So this governor was Armand-Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie de Vignerot du Plessis, the 5th Duke of Richelieu and Fronsac (1766 –1822) who later returned to France to serve in the restored monarchy.

In 1810, my relatives at Rohrbach accounted for two households with nine individuals:

Founder family: Johannes Klundt, 51; Eva Katharina Hust, 48; Eva Catharina, 18; Heinrich, 13; Johann Michael, 9; Georg Michael, 5.

First generation family: Wilhelm Klundt, 25; Ottilia Golum, ca. 22; Jakob, 3

Fritschle notes that the Russian government paid for a stone-built house for every family. All other necessities such as farming equipment, seeds, animals and food were provided on a credit basis.

According to Fritschle, the colony failed to thrive in the first 18 years, because the colonists were lacking the relevant skills and/or work ethic, and for most of the time, the village didn’t have a pastor to instil the fear of God in its residents. Pastorn Elias Hübner was appointed in 1812, but died after less than two years in the job.

In 1824, the pastor Johannes Bonekemper (1795-1857) was appointed as pastor for both Rohrbach and the neighbouring colony of Worms (7km away). Bonekemper was of Reformed protestant faith, but was also tasked with offering Lutheran services. Also, from 1826, a new schoolmaster arrived, Wilhelm Eberhard, who taught until 1843 and is credited with a change of culture.

Bonekemper spread the “Erbauungsstunde” idea (a daily hour of spiritual recollection) around the Southern parts of Russia, creating what became the “Stundist” movement. A more extensive account of his role in the Reformed faith is here, scroll down to the subheading "Life in Russia". By 1847, the spiritual fervour of Bonekemper's followers got out of hand to an extent that authorities persuaded him to move on which he did in 1848. Schoolmaster Fritschle, by contrast, created the impression that Bonekemper resigned voluntarily and praised the spiritual renewal he achieved: "The blessings of his 24-years' work with us will long be remembered." Bonekemper was intending to emigrate to the USA, but didn't make it.

In the early 1840s, seven families from Rohrbach, including Georg Michael Klundt and his wife Elisabeth Feiock (* 1817 Rohrbach) moved to the new colony Neu-Danzig and took the stundist idea there. They had married in 1836 and had three children, including Margaretha (1837), Jakob (1839) and Barbara (1841). They may have had additional children in Neu Danzig, possibly including Beatha Klundt.

By 1840, the founder couple Johannes Klundt and Eva Hust had died, but all their children had families, with up to eight children. In stark contrast to the school master's moans about the colony’s initial lack of economic success, this family was thriving rather nicely, as judged by survival rates. Not counting the descendants they left behind in Germany, the founders had at least 19 grandchildren, and 22 great-grandchildren.

In 1864, the Klundts in Neu Danzig became Baptists, which was a growing but illegal faith in Russia. In 1866, Jakob and his young family fled to Katalui, in the Danube delta, which was then a German colony under Osman rule, now known as Cataloi, Romania. This wider area on the West Coast of the Black Sea is called Dobruja, and the German settlers were known as the Dobrujan Germans. Georg Michael followed them and died there after 1866. The above-mentioned Beatha Klundt and her husband Johann Wilhelm Graf also moved there. Their first three children were born in Neu-Danzig in 1862-1865, but the fourth was born in Cataloi in 1867.

Jakob started a Baptist community in Katalui, which appears to have been so successful that he was hired by the British and Foreign Bible Society as a Bible colporteur for Bulgaria and part of Macedonia and Albania in 1872. For eight years he worked and traveled from Albania, but dangers and difficulties he faced there led him to move his base to Bulgaria.

From 1880 and for the rest of his life his base was in Lompalanka, now Lom, Bulgaria, and any history of Baptism in Bulgaria includes his biography (see eg here) and sometimes even a portrait (see below). His name in Bulgarian looks like this: яковъ клундтъ (in case anybody wants to dive into Bulgarian sources). Accounts mention his wife Regina as an active participant in the Baptist community, but don’t mention his descendants by name. He did have a son in law who later took over his role as pastor in Lom, so at least one daughter survived. We believe that no sons survived to adult age.

Jakob died on March 28, 1921, in Kazanlak, Bulgaria, where he was staying with his son in law (the obituary does not mention his daughter at this point, not sure if she was still alive).

Of Jakob’s sisters, we know nothing about Margaretha beyond her date of birth, but his younger sister Barbara married Philipp Krause and had five children. Only Barbara Krause (* 1864 in the Black Sea colony of Worms) survived to adulthood, she married Johann Brandner, emigrated to South Dakota (as many other descendants in her generation did too) and had 14 children.

Portrait of Jakob Klundt which appeared with his obituary in The EVANGELIST, Organ of the Evangelical Baptist Union of Bulgaria, editor: Rev. V. Tachtadjieff, Tchirpan.

Special thanks to Mihai, whose comment under the original Klundt Clan post already contained a lot of information about Jakob Klundt and set further investigations and contacts rolling.

last call for brexodus

Ever since the 2015 general election, living in the UK as a non-British EU citizen has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I have (mentally) prepared to move out at various low points, including Cameron's re-election, the referendum, the Brexit Bill which set the Article 50 procedure rolling, and now the prorogation of parliament aiming to facilitate a no-deal brexit.

So, well, it's been rather lovely living here for the first 25 years or so, but the way things are going we can't really be sure it will be safe to stay. Under Theresa May's plans, non-British EU citizens who want to stay have to apply for settled status by the end of 2020. Which makes 2020 the crunch year. If on 1.1.2020 Johnson is still PM and/or the UK has left the EU without an agreement, I think it will be time to move on rather than applying to register. Funnily enough, the very preliminary exit plan I scribbled down after the 2015 election also leads up to a 2020 exodus date. My crystal ball wasn't lying back then.

Right now there's still hope the whole thing will go up in a puff of smoke, but if the sword above our heads is still there in January, let's get a move on. It is actually dangerous to gradually adjust to worsening political climate and think it will be ok. Bad people feel encouraged by the direction things are going, and they will make everyting worse, so there is a possible feedback loop that may already have passed the point of no return.

I'll welcome suggestions re. where in the EU27 might be a soft landing place for someone grown accustomed to the cultural life of Oxford and London.



Cover of the issue of Der Spiegel dated 7.9. Since this one, the following issues of the magazine have failed to arrive here. The Death Eaters wouldn't go as far as embargoing foreign news media, or would they? (Update: the issue of 14.9. arrived on the 28th. Normally they arrive after 3 days, i.e. on the Tuesday after the cover date.)

Update 2.10.2019: Now they're blocking my escape route - when I take the Eurostar to the continent, I normally travel on the X90 to Baker St (and enjoy the 35 mins walk from there to St. Pancras). The news today is that the X90 service will stop operating after January 4th (see also the report in the Oxford Mail). As it happens I would normally come back from my next trip a few days after that date. Feels like somebody doesn't want me to come back ... or like pub staff starting to wipe the tables and putting the chairs up. Speaking of which, the pub where we were having four different sessions each month since the beginning of the year has also kicked us out on Monday giving just 24h notice. Oh well. Maybe all of these things are signs that it really is time to move.

tourist trails

Global tourism is growing so steeply that it is rapidly becoming a problem not just for popular destinations (like Oxford, for instance) but also for the environment. Driven by China's wealth explosion and innovations from budget airlines through to airbnb, it produces a carbon footprint that is scary and growing.

As part of today's special issue on migration, I had a closer look at the global impact on tourism in a feature which is out now:

Global tourism's growing footprint

Current Biology
Volume 28, Issue 17, 10 September 2018, Pages R963-R965

FREE access to full text and PDF download




Own photo (2016)

homo migrans

Open Archive Day

Science magazine published a special issue on human migrations earlier this month, underlining the points that all humans have a migration background and movement is vital for science and progress (while also sticking out their tongue to the Drumpf administration).

Which reminds me that I had a feature on migrations published two years ago, which is now in the open archives:

Genetic traces of mankind’s migrations

landschreiber Mohr

Mohr is an interesting German family name, as it is also an ancient word for dark-skinned people (related to Maure, as in Mauretania), much older than the 19th century import “Neger” related to Spanish / English negro. Both of which, of course, are today considered rude. Mohr may thus in some cases be pointing to a distant migration background, to a darker looking person arriving in the village and being called names which stuck. However, there are also two alternative explanations, one relating to moors (swamplands), the other to pig breeding, so you can’t be sure which of the three applies.

Our Mohr ancestors can be traced back to the small town of Gemünden in the Hunsrück mountains. There we find a Hans Mohr in the 16th century, to whom all of the Mohr families in the Hunsrück area seem to be connected. One significant lineage leads to Nikolaus Mohr of Kellenbach near Kirn, which is well-documented in GedBas.

Our lineage, however, involves Johann Conrad Mohr, who became a Landschreiber for the Duke of Simmern – today a very inconspicuous town of 7000 inhabitants, but it was a state capital until Louis XIV’s troops burned it down in 1689 in the Palatinate succession wars (part of the Nine Year Wars), when they also created that very romantic ruin still overlooking Heidelberg today. The Landschreiber was a leading position in the regional administration, second only to the Amtmann. (I have no idea how these job titles might be translated into English but I’m open for suggestions.)

Considering the importance of his position, it appears likely that Johann Conrad Mohr will have studied law in Heidelberg. What we know for sure is that he married Katharina Bilger at Heidelberg on 25.6.1611 and at least one of their nine children (Juliane Elisa) was born there in 1613.

His tenure as Landschreiber lasted from 1615 to his death (from the plague) on 25.6.1635, interrupted by six years of Spanish occupation, 1626-1632. His boss, the Count-Palatine of Simmern-Kaiserslautern, Louis Philip (1602-1655) reigned 1610-1655, so no change there. Louis-Philip was the younger brother of the “winter king” Frederick V, whose misfortune led to the 30-Years War.

Among the Landschreiber’s children, Johann Ludwig, born 1617, is well represented in GedBas. Intriguingly, he married one Angelique de Madra, who allegedly came to the court at Simmern at 15 as a religious refugee and was then brought up there.

We’re after the older son, Andreas Mohr, however, who was born either in 1612 or in 1615, possibly still in Heidelberg, before his parents moved to Simmern. He married Walburgis, and became a forester, in which role he is documented at Rheinböllen in 1672. Two generations followed in this profession – the son Hans Peter, recorded first at Rheinböllen, then 1670-80 at Argenthal, and the grandson Mathias Mohr at Mengerschied. His daughter Juliane Mohr, born 1717 married an innkeeper at Simmern called Johann Kuhn, which is where we leave the Mohrs and the forests.

Simmern in 1648 by Matthäus Merian, source.

PSJuliane Mohr's female line descendency leads to Regina Catherina Strack who was the founding mother of the Imig clan, so find her descendents there.

Australian genomes

After rapidly developing the second and third generation sequencing methods that make it feasible and indeed affordable to sequence many human genomes, research has been slow to turn to address human genetic diversity (most of which is in Africa, not between the arbitrarily defined "races") and the migrations in which our ancestors spread out around the globe. Even though extinct relatives including Neanderthal and Denisovan have had their genomes published years ago, it's only now that Australia and Papua New Guinea are receiving adequate attention. The genomes of their indigenous populations cast a unique and revealing spotlight on the history of our species.

Read all about it in my latest feature:

Out of Africa, into Australia
Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 21, 7 November 2016, Pages R1119–R1121

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Since modern humans expanded into the Australian continent some 40,000 years ago, they developed a rich landscape of cultural and linguistic diversity — until the arrival of the colonialists who failed to appreciate their ancient civilisation. (Photo: © Wayne Quilliam Photography/Yothu Yindu Foundation.)

5 languages in search of an author

review of

Elena Lappin
What language do I dream in?
Virago 2016

Elena Lappin (nee Biller) was born in Russia, grew up in Prague speaking Russian at home, emigrated to Germany as a teenager after the suppression of the Prague Spring, then went to Israel to study, lived in Canada, Israel again, and the US, before ending up in London. This book is not so much about what language she dreams in, but about how she could become a writer after having to leave the country of the language she felt most connected to, which was Czech. After many wanderings, she decided that English was the one.

Only after she was already settled in London and in English as her writing language, she found out that she was not related to the man she believed to be her father. Her biological father – the son of a minor Soviet agent in the US who had to flee to Moscow – was a native English speaker, giving her language settlement a kind of retrospective biological justification.

Another intriguing aspect of her story is mentioned only in passing: her younger brother, Maxim Biller, facing the same problem, came to a different solution – he stayed in Germany and is now a fairly well-known German writer.

Along with her own quest for the right language to write (and dream) in, Lappin also discusses some of the famous examples of émigré writers adapting to new languages, including Vladimir Nabokov (and his memoir, Speak, Memory, which also deals with this issue), Joseph Conrad, and Milan Kundera. She forgets to mention Kurt Tucholsky, who fell silent during his exile in Sweden and died from an overdose of sleeping pills in a presumed suicide after realising he couldn’t continue to be a writer after being separated from his native language.

Thus, in a mixed-up world, everybody has to find their language for themselves, and some may fail to do so. In Lappin’s case, each of the languages not only stands for a specific culture and geographic area, but also for a subset of her extended family – there is no language that all her relatives share, so with her five languages she is the only link that connects the family network fragmented by migrations and language changes.

As a fellow writer also juggling half a dozen languages I found her memoir very relatable. Failing that, readers will also discover an intriguing and warm-hearted account of the global migrations of Jewish families from Eastern Europe, reminding me that most people have migration background of some kind.

more Huguenots

When I reported on the suspected Huguenot connection of my ancestor Jean Bonnedame (* 1699 at Billigheim) , I didn’t know the last name of his wife, Maria Sara, whom he married in 1724. We now know that she was called Maria Sara Bouquet, (*1699 Minfeld).

Correction 9.7.2026: I corrected the birth year of Jean B. to 1699. There seems to have been a confusion with his father, also called Jean, who was born 1666 at Mörlheim. See eg here.)

It turns out that her family appears to be of Huguenot origin as well. Specifically, her father Philipp Bouquet was probably born around 1655 in the pays de l'Alloeu, a small patch of land just west of Lille (today in north of France) which originally was one of the provinces of the Spanish Netherlands. He came to the town of Billigheim (in the Palatinate, just south of Landau), which had a significant population of Huguenot refugees, with his father Laurent Bouquet (Boquai) in 1664. We don’t know anything about his mother. In 1685 he married Christina (last name unknown) at Archenweyer near Billigheim. Their son Isaac Bouquet was born in Archenweyer in the same year.

Like many other Huguenots, the Bouquets followed the invitation from the Duke of Prussia and moved on to the East, to the Uckermark area around Prenzlau in 1686, and were still there in 1690. (A list of residents confirms there were no Bouquets left behind in Billigheim by 1692.) However, there are no family events recorded in the Uckermark and by 1699 they were back in the Palatinate, where Philipp was administrator (Hofbeständer) at Minfeld. Sara Bouquet was born there in December 1699. Philipp Bouquet died on the Baltic island of Rügen, which must have been in Swedish possession at that time. We have no idea how or why he got there, so any clues appreciated. Christina died at Mörlheim in 1733.

There are a few Bouquet (Bocquet, Boquai, etc.) families documented in the area that is now the region Nord/Pas de Calais, but most are catholics, so ours are the black sheep. If anybody knows anything about protestant Bouquet families in that space and time, all hints would be much appreciated.

A couple of generations down the line this means that the couple that emigrated to the Black Sea, Johannes Klundt and Eva Maria Hust, may both have had quite a lot of “migration background”. Johannes Klundt has three grandparents of suspected French or Swiss origin. The odd one out is Anna Apollonia Schmitt. And the name Hust may also be of French, ultimately of Hungarian origin.

Sailly sur la Lys - one of the four towns of the pays de l'Alloeu.

« Prevote » par Médard — Travail personnel. Sous licence CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prevote.jpg#/media/File:Prevote.jpg

migration mapped

My great-great-great-grandparents, born in the early 19th century, appear all to have been very solidly German and settled in their respective little patches of the very colourful map of that time. These 28 people (there's been a bit of inbreeding) come from 8 geographically separate regions within what would in 1871 become the German Empire, so they are a meaningful statistical sample of the German population.

I had to go back a further three to six generations to find out that the picture of settled clans rooted in their respective landscapes was completely wrong. For instance, entire villages in the Kraichgau area - one of the 8 regions where my ancestors lived in the 19th century - had been resettled with Swiss immigrants at the end of the 17th century. Elsewhere, Huguenots left their mark, as did skilled metal workers hired in from Wallonia and further migrants from Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, today's Belgium, and probably other places yet to be discovered (I'm gradually building a collection of migration stories here).

I concluded from these findings that everybody has migration background - one just has to dig deep enough to find it. Genomics and genotyping techniques allow scientists to investigate the bigger picture of human migrations on a country, continent, and global scale with unprecedented resolution. The studies confirm the conclusion that I drew from my family research - people have always migrated to seek opportunity and flee hardship, and deep down we are all migrants.

I've had a detailed look at the new science of the genetics of human migration against the backdrop of current political haggling over migrants in my latest feature which is out now in Current Biology:

Genetic traces of mankind's migrations
Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 9, 4 May 2015, Pages R345–R347
Open access

Own photo of the Cowley Road Carnival which every year celebrates cultural diversity around here.

Klundt Clan

Migration in my family tree normally works like this – direct ancestors coming in (eg from Wallonia), and aunts/uncles going out (eg to Brazil). There is one married couple of direct ancestors, however, who emigrated to Russia and stayed there for the rest of their lives (to make matters worse, many of their great-grandchildren later emigrated to the US). Fortunately, their firstborn son and his family stayed in Germany, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now and you might be staring at an empty screen. So here comes a story of fearless migrants and wine makers:

Johannes Klundt was born November 2nd 1759 in Wollmesheim, a village near Landau in the Southern Palatinate, a traditional wine growing region, the second of five children of Konrad Klundt and Maria Johanna Bodang (this name appears to be a palatinate distortion of the French name Bonnedame). His parents had a very small vineyard there (just half a hectare), and some 3.5 ha other agricultural land. Splitting this between him and his older brother would have left too little for either party to survive.

Johannes married Eva Hust (1762-1837) in 1781 – she may also have a migration background, as the name Hust is almost non-existent in Germany, but there are lots of them in France and Belgium. They had five sons and a daughter, born between 1782 and 1805.

Moving out

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Tsars actively encouraged settlers from southwest Germany to move to the Odessa area at north coast of the Black Sea, which was then a new addition to the Russian empire and is today part of Ukraine. A village called Rohrbach (today: Новосвітлівка - Novosvitlivka), some 120 km north-northeast of Odessa, was built in 1805 and the first German settlers arrived there in 1806. My ancestors Johannes Klundt and Eva Hust got there in 1809, after a journey of 80 days, most of which was done by ship (specifically, in improvised wooden boxes that were used one-way only) down the Danube.

Source

So who came along and who stayed behind? When Johannes Klundt left, his parents were no longer alive. We know that of his five sons, the first one, Johann Jacob (1782-1853; my four-times-great-grandfather), stayed behind. He had already set up his own family in nearby Godramstein, with his wife Katharina Barbara Müller (1781-1813) from that village and his son Georg Nicolas (1805-1851) who was to become a farmer and wine maker.

The second, Wilhelm (* 1785) was still unmarried and came along. Their only daughter Eva Catharina (* 1792) and two younger sons, Heinrich (1797-1851) and Johann Michael (1801-1876) were still children when the Klundts emigrated, so they came along by default and lived their lives in the German colony near the Black Sea. We don’t know what happened to the other son.

Johannes’s older brother Johann Jacob (1756-XXX) presumably inherited the modest house and land of Konrad Klundt and worked as a cooper and farmer. (There are two family vineyards called Klundt in neighbouring Mörzheim today (led by Sven Klundt and Walter Klundt), but we’re not sure exactly how they are related to this family.)

Intriguingly, one of the many Klundt descendants in Rohrbach, Heinrich’s granddaughter Katherina Klundt (1857-1949) later married a man called Johann Hust, who was also born in Rohrbach, which makes me think that a brother or cousin of our Eva Hust may have emigrated together with the Klundt family. We don't really know much about Eva Hust's family at all, except the names of her parents, so we don't know whom she left behind or may have taken along for the ride.

The four children who came along to Rohrbach between them provided Johannes and Eva with 26 grandchildren, who all (except one) appear to have stayed in the Odessa area all their lives. (Intriguingly the three sons contributed 13 grandsons carrying the name onwards). When Johannes died in 1833, and Eva in 1837, they left behind a healthy and thriving clan that seemed to have established itself in its now environment.

The village economy in general seemed to be doing well in those times, according to this report. Villagers grew large amounts of wheat, but also held sheep and produced some wine. The population of the village grew from 602 in 1816 to 1581 in 1859.

Moving on

From 1871 onwards (with a ten-year transition period), the colonists lost the privileges that they had enjoyed for two generations, and life on the Black Sea suddenly looked a lot less attractive. Apart from the loss of financial incentives, the young men were also facing the obligation of six years service in the Russian army. Thousands of German settlers emigrated again. The population of Rohrbach peaked in 1894, then dropped by a third, mainly as a consequence of migration to the US. Of the more than 60 great-grandchildren of our founding couple, at least 12 emigrated to the US, where they kept the reproduction rate up, so there must be hundreds of descendants of the Klundt families from Rohrbach in the US and also in some other parts of the world. They are listed here by a descendant of Heinrich and here by a descendant of Eva, but I haven't counted.

In 1884, Jacob Klundt (1855-1939), the eldest of Johannes's great-grandchildren, and his wife Maria Lutz (1854-1939) with their children (three were born in Russia, but not sure if all three survived) took the lead and emigrated to Mitchell County, South Dakota. Then they moved to the city of Alexander, South Dakota. Jacob’s mother, Juliana Kulatus (1835-1925), five brothers and one sister, Katherina (the one who married Johann Hust) joined them there in 1889. As the remaining three siblings and their father Heinrich Klundt had died before the emigration, this means the entire surviving clan moved to the US, where Juliana became a proud grandmother of 50. A bunch of Johann Michael’s grandchildren also emigrated to the US between 1893 and 1907, as did a few scattered individuals and families across the board. They had a lucky escape, because the 20th century held disaster in store for those settler families who stayed in Russia.

In 1889, the combined Klundt families moved to Dakem, North Dakota, on three covered wagons. During the years in South and North Dakota, Jacob Klundt and Maria Lutz had another eight children. They tried to establish a farming business there, but found the climate too different from what they were used to on the shores of the Black Sea.

Thus, in 1902, Jacob’s family (with ten children) migrated further west to Franklin County, Washington, where they bought land near the Snake River, north of the town of Walla Walla, from a Mr Page – after whom the location was named in 1903. Conrad’s family followed them, while Katherina and the other brothers stayed in North Dakota.

Until 1919, the Klundts ran a ferry across the river as well as their farm. Jacob’s son Charles Klundt became the first postmaster of Page when a post office was installed in 1903, later to be followed by two of his brothers.

The Klundts also set up a shop, a church, and fisheries. They also established a modest vineyard of two acres and actually produced wine. This makes me think that they probably handed down their wine-making traditions over the generations since they left the palatinate, and also grew vines in Rohrbach. For a more detailed account of their lives in the US, see the historical sketch provided on this page. The village of Page no longer exists, sadly, as it disappeared under water in 1961, when a dam was built on the Snake River. But there are a lot of vines growing on the slopes near the Snake river nowadays, and maybe the Klundts have something to do with that.

So the bottom line is I have every excuse to obsess about wine, it runs in or veins …

Note: Alternative spellings of the name in old records include Clund, Klund, Chlundt.

losing our mobility

With the general resurgence of various nationalist and rightwing movements across Europe, which will probably have a significant impact on the European elections in May, there is the risk that we may lose mobility, which will also cause problems for science. My latest feature, written after the Swiss referendum on "mass immigration" takes a closer look at what's at stake.

New barriers to mobility in Europe?

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 7, pR257–R259, 31 March 2014

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.03.019

Free access to full text and PDF download

... and now also with buttons for easy tweeting and sharing !

brazilian relatives

Back in 1891, when my great-great-great-great-uncle Christian Gottlieb Weiß wrote up what he knew about his ancestors and relatives, he noted about his aunt:

„Maria Katharina Weiß, geb. 17.2.1786 verh. mit Pfarrer Ried aus Schauern (Hochwald) ist in Rio di jeneire (Südamerika)“

which for a long time was all we knew about that branch of the family. We have now found out, however, that this family emigrating to Brazil has left many dozens of descendants there. They didn’t in fact go to Rio but to São Leopoldo, like a lot of other emigrants from the Hunsrück area did, too. The spelling of the husband’s name is Rieth, and he wasn’t a vicar either.

Helpful fellow genealogists in Brazil sent us a big chunk of data of Rieth descendants, which I’ll summarise the important bits here:

Maria Katharina (or Maria Barbara according to other sources) and her husband Georg Philipp Rieth (1784-1843), together with their two sons Philipp Christian Gottlieb (*1811) and Johann Friedrich (*1814) emigrated in 1829, arriving in São Leopoldo on 25.5.1829.

Both sons married within the community of German migrants from the Hunsrück. Philipp Christian Gottlieb Rieth married Maria Elisabeth Schiehl (born 1820 in Hundsbach near Meisenheim) in São Leopoldo in 1838. Johann Friedrich Rieth, confusingly, married Maria Caroline Rieth (1824-1898), born in Schauren like he was, so more likely than not a cousin. This second Rieth family (the parents are Georg Heinrich Rieth and Johanna Dorothea Schlieper) arrived in São Leopoldo on 29.12.1825.

Each of the two had eleven children, many of whom went on to marry other people from the German community (we find the names Uebel and Purper from Oberstein, Hemb from Niederkumbd, Haag from Sensweiler near Trier), producing more than 40 great-grandchildren for Maria Weiß and Georg Philipp Rieth.

These descendants stayed mostly in the surroundings of São Leopoldo (i.e. in the state of Rio Grande do Sul), settling in places like Lomba Grande, Hamburgo Velho, Sapiranga. In this area, you’ll even find streets and a school named after people with the surname Rieth.

Image source and further info:
Wikipedia entry on German migration to Brazil (in German)