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.

 

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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,

 

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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.

connecting with Grace Kelly

In a blog entry nearly 20 years ago I mentioned the ancestry of Grace Kelly featuring (at number 1822) a certain Leonhard Treusch who is also in my family tree. Back then, his inclusion in my ancestry was slightly speculative, based on the fact that Leonhard Treusch was the founding father of the village of Hiltersklingen after the Thirty Years War and my ancestor Anna Katharina Treusch was born in that very same village more than 100 years later in 1784. And I had read somewhere that Leonhard was the only carrier of the name Treusch who had survived the war. So I adopted him as an ancestor by default, without a precise connection.

Now, after writing about the Odenwald vicar Adam Getrost, I checked up on the Treusch connection again and found that a friendly genealogist has shared very comprehensive data on Gedbas which not only covers much of my Odenwald ancestry including Adam Getrost, but also spells out the connection to Leonhard Treusch. It turns out I had guessed his place in my list correctly although there were four generations missing in the information I had until now.

Oh and the nameline goes back eight generations further through to a guy called Drusche who was born at Meßbach in the 14th century (estimated 1375). He's in the 20th generation of my family tree and thus among the earliest ancestors we know by name.

Grace Kelly in High Noon. Source: Wikipedia.

To celebrate this advance, I'll write out what we know about old Lenny:

 

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Leonhard Treusch

He was born around 1610 in Ober-Gersprenz where he took over the farm of his father (also called Leonhard) in 1635. Apparently there were debts attached to it, which is why there is paperwork referencing this transfer. And it sounds like he was the only surviving son of Leonhard the older. I assume that his girly sounding nickname Lenchen is supposed to express the fact that he is Leonhard the younger.

In 1642 he acquired half a "Hubengut" at Unter-Gersprenz, which had fallen back to the counts of Erbach after the lineage of the owners died out. (A Hube or Hufe was a standard plot of land for farming, the farmer was called the H¨bner, which became a common family name.) That year he also became the mayor of the village (Schultheiß).

Around 1645 he married Elisabetha NN in Pfaffen-Beerfurth. They had at least eight children (the owner of the dataset writes he doesn't normally list those who died under the age of ten years), whose birth places trace the family's relocations:

Margaretha born 10.01.1644 Gersprenz, married Sebastian Daum in 1662, had 11 children.

Philipp Jakob born in May 1649 at Gersprenz, married twice and had 12 children.

Eva born 13.02.1652 at Pfaffen-Beerfurth, married Georg Trautmann in 1681 had three children.

Katharina born about 1652 Pfaffen-Beerfurth, no further info.

Leonhard born 15.01.1654 Pfaffen-Beerfurth, married Catharina Koch in 1683, had 7 children including my ancestor Bernhard Treusch.

Anna born 11.02.1655 Pfaffen-Beerfurth, married Johannes Trautmann in 1673, had 10 children.

Katharina 03.09.1657 Hiltersklingen, married Johann Berg in 1678, had three children. This is Grace Kelly's lineage.

Peter 19.08.1660 Hiltersklingen, married Catharina Heilmann in 1687, Elisabeth Lautenschläger in 1691, had five children with the latter.

And boy, Elisabetha and Leonhard must have been busy with weddings and grandchildren!

In 1651 he became Schultheiß of Pfaffen-Beerfurth.

In 1660 he was charged with resettling the village of Hiltersklingen which had been devastated and abandoned during the Thirty Years War. He and his family were the first residents of the village and when a second household turned up he was named Schultheiß. The move from Pfaffen-Beerfurth to Hiltersklingen brought a change of his legal situation as he moved from the county of Erbach to the realm of the Bishop of Mainz. There are documents about this mentioning that the counts of Erbach gave him his freedom. The move may also explain why he is listed as Roman Catholic whereas everybody else in the Odenwald family since the Reformation have been Protestants.

He died at Ober-Hiltersklingen on 6.1.1690 at the age of 80, leaving a vast family as seven of his chidren got married and had children of their own.

 

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

a vicar in the Odenwald

After compiling CVs of a dozen protestant priests in the ancestry of Helene Kauer (see the list at the bottom of last week's entry), I now feel I should have another look elsewhere in the family tree. So far I only know of one (and he's also a fairly recent addition, from November 2021), namely Adam Getrost who was the vicar of Rimbach in the Odenwald. Here is what we know about him so far:

 

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Adam Getrost

He was born 18.12.1627 in Creuzburg, Thuringia. The place is in the Wartburgkreis (district) so presumably close to the historically extremely important Wartburg castle, where Martin Luther took refuge and translated the New Testament into German a century earlier.

His parents were Adam Getrost (born 1600 at Creuzburg) and Elisabetha Herwig (born 1601 at Creuzburg), who had married in 1623. Beyond that, there are different versions of Adam's ancestry online. In one, his paternal grandmother is Anna Guthen, in another we find Margerita Assmus in that spot. The Guthen ancestry has a generation more and also more details of ancestors, while the Assmus version has a very comprehensive list of descendants and is also represented in geneanet.

The name Getrost is an interesting and rare one, related to the verb trösten (to comfort), so pointing to a supportive and comforting person. The name distribution today is centered on the Odenwald with nothing in Thuringia, so this seems to suggest that Adam had good reasons to flee from there, and horrible things may have happened to his name line relatives there. In line with that:

On 4.8.1637 his father died at Creuzburg aged only 37, when his youngest son was only seven months old, as the church records note, without revealing the name of that child (Guthen version).

His mother died 17.9.1654 also at Creuzburg, recorded under the name Getrost, so obviously she hadn't married again.

On 28.11.1654, just two months after his mother died, he married Maria Elisabetha Rodenhausen from Eschau in her home town. Eschau is near Aschaffenburg and today part of Bavaria, but back then it had nothing to do with Bavaria. It was ruled by the counts of Erbach, who also ruled the Odenwald region where the newly wedded couple settled down.

Their daughter, Susanna Getrost, was born 12.2.1656 at Zotzenbach, Odenwald.

Further children listed on GedBas (the Assmus version):
12.04.1664 Abraham
15.09.1667 Eva
about 1669 Philipp
about 1670 Heinrich
05.12.1671 Maria Salome
about 28.09.1674 Michael

until 1662 he was Präzeptor (elementary school teacher) at Michelstadt, Odenwald.

Michelstadt (Odenwald)
Source: Von User: Bgabel auf wikivoyage shared, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23023847

In 1665, he became the vicar of Rimbach, Odenwald, and initially also served as a schoolteacher there.

His daughter Susanna married Sebastian Schütz in around 1678. Both my Odenwald great-grandparents (who ran the bakery at Lorsch and were first cousins) descend from this couple.

In 1686, a the first school house was built and Nikolaus Ludwig Hof became the first teacher. As the population recovered after the Thirty-Years War, the numbers there must have then been enough people and young families to require the separate offices of vicar and teacher.

He died 24.9.1704 in Rimbach aged 76, so may well have stayed as vicar until his death.

His son Johann Michael Getrost, served as a teacher at nearby Zotzenbach 1710-1722 (elsewhere in the source it says that the school in Zotzenbach only started operating in 1729, so he may have taught at Rimbach). Gedbas suggests that he was a shoemaker as well as a teacher. After him, three generations of Getrost descendants were teachers at Zotzenbach from 1729 through to 1826, but also agricultural workers during the summer season. As reported by local historian Jakob Getrost in 1960.

Sources:

Agathe Schmid-König Schulgeschichte(n), 18. März 2025

GedBas entry Adam Getrost with the Assmus grandmother

the Anna Guthen version

Update 10.6.2026 I just discovered that the Guthen version, a dataset by Wilfried Doll, includes my family through to the generation of my parents, and also includes the link back to Leonhard Treusch, an ancestor I share with Grace Kelly. And probably with everybody who has ancestry in the Odenwald. This wasn't immediately obvious as the ancestry and descendant charts on GedBas only display a limited number of generations at a time, but I just stumbled on it when I checked up on the Treusch link which has been a cherished hypothesis for many years. Funnily enough, Grace Kelly also has a dozen clergymen in her family tree. The search for "Pfarrer" yields 20 hits on the page but sometimes the word appears twice under the same person.

 

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

a catholic carolingian town

Lorsch is quite important in my family history but when I prepared the first set of lost cities entries, I struggled to find a suitable postcard, other than the ubiquitous Torhalle from around 900 (so a bit older than my records).

As my great-grandparents ran a bakery in the Bahnhofstrasse (station road), I now looked for postcards of that street specifically and found this one:

source

Not sure if the bakery is in it, and it is a bit hard to check as the building has disappeared, but I will visit and try to find out at some point.

What happened: The old baker, Adam Eberle (born 1863) married his cousin Anna Barbara Schütz in 1890 and set up the bakery at Bahnhofstraße 27 soon after. The town had around 3,800 residents then. He struggled initially and had to rely on agriculture and his relatives in the rural Odenwald region nearby for support. The four children had to help out as well, eg making deliveries. Nevertheless, the bakery ran for several decades, until around 1930. Anna Barbara died in 1934, Adam in 1938. The house remained in the possession of their three daughters until the last of them died in 1973. It was then sold to the city, which ended up demolishing it for road building. So the relevant dates for our series are 1890-1938/1973.

Lorsch, the site of a famous Carolingian abbey from 764, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was a small and very catholic town then, and the family rooted in the protestant hinterland has tended to blame all its difficulties on the hostile environment, but it is hard to check the truth behind that. Today's population is around 14,000. The town now takes pride in the byname "Karolingerstadt" - with no chance of living up to its Carolingian heyday.

Locations:

• Bahnhofstraße 27 (building was demolished in the 1970s).

Previously in the #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929-1934

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

The Mastodon thread for season 2 starts here.

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

becoming Peter

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 34:

Of Peter the future customs officer and coffee confiscator we have very few photos growing up at Lorsch. We've seen him as a little boy in this family portrait, then as a teenager here, and that leads us already to the young adult portrait photos I'm rounding up here, all undated.

So in no particular order, he had his portrait taken with a chair:

... with a sword of unknown significance (born in 1900, he may have been called up to serve at the tail end of the first world war, but I don't know of any actual war experience then):

... and finally with his girlfriend Frieda, possibly on the occasion of their engagement (although there is also a studio portrait from that time):

I'm loving the geology in this last one, but not sure where or when it was taken. As the two met in Minden, where one of Peter's colleagues was lodging with Frieda's parents, I am thinking this could be to do with the nearby Weserdurchbruch, where the river Weser cuts through the mountain range. The cool thing about this is that the river Weser really did cut through what was previously a continuous mountain range, at a time when glaciers blocked its previous route.

PS What we know about Peter growing up is that he was musical and keen to play the violin, but the struggling baker's family didn't have the funds for that. The closest he got was a cigarbox instrument lovingly crafted by his dad (but sadly lost). But he did manage to catch the attention of a certain young pianist, above, and when he later did have the funds he bought the violin I have recently rescued for their second daughter, who didn't really get on with it.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

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Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda
25. old aunts and young children
26. a semi-mysterious aunt
27. a gathering at Gellrichs
28. farm work at Bad Landeck
29. meet the Weitze family
30. a post-war wedding
31. the joy of chemistry
32. the joy of botany
33. becoming Frieda
34. becoming Peter

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

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.