the teacher of Simmern unter Dhaun and his family

Moving on through the Weiß lineage, after the vicar's and the destiller's we now arrive at the teacher's family.

 

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Christian Gottlieb Weiß (1782-1867) and Anna Gertrud Keuert (1777-1858)

Christian Gottlieb Weiß was born 12.5. 1782 at Pferdsfeld as the sixth of the seven children of the mayor / teacher / distiller Johann Gottlieb Weiß and his wife Anna Katharina Andrae. He is the earliest born ancestor of whom we have a photo.

Like both his (older) brothers, he became a teacher. This may mean that he studied at university, which I consider likely given the abundance of vicars in his ancestry, many of whom worked as teachers before finding a church job. However it wasn't a given at the time, as there were village school teachers without academic education. He had his first teaching position in Hellenthal (Eifel). This is where he seems to have found his wife. On 13.7. 1806, he married Anna Gertraud Käuer (1777-1858; alternative spelling: Keuert) at Kirschseiffen. Her parents, Tilmanus Keuert and Regina Catherina Freischmid were from Hellenthal and her ancestry is solidly from that area.

The first two children, Karoline and Maria Magdalena, were born at Hellenthal in 1807 and 1809, respectively.

In 1809/10 the family moved to Raversbeuren (Hunsrück), where the next five children were born between 1810 and 1819 (see the list below).

The last of the eight children, Henriette, was born in 1822 at Simmern unter Dhaun, where Christian Gottlieb taught from 1819 until his retirement in 1853. This village is today known as Simmertal, renamed to avoid confusion 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.

The school at Simmern unter Dhaun, now a private residence. Photo by Jörg Groß.

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 school's 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 eight 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 seventh 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. Katharina Sophia Weis * 25. 3.1815 Raversbeuren + 8. 1.1862 Simmern, married the shoemaker Mathias Kauer in Simmern, at which point our lineage becomes the Kauer clan. All their descendants are listed here.

6. (Regina) Wilhelmine Weiß, 1817-1865, did not marry. (the birth and death year are from the residents book of Simmern unter Dhaun, suggesting she lived to 47 or 48. Johanna Kauer wrote that Regina died at age 20. Not sure who is right.

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 written in Eckweiler in 1891. His daughter Sophie Weiß married a Mr Kehrein. Their son Karl Kehrein (1880-1942) married his second cousin Lina Martin, also a great-grandchild of the teacher C. G. Weiß (via his 5th child, Sophie, see here). 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 ...

Note that Christian Gottlieb is the last academically educated ancestor in my lineage, after ten generations with lots of vicars and teachers (often connected matrilinearly). After him we have three less than academic generations ending with Helene who wanted to be a teacher but wasn't allowed to study - for economic reasons mainly. She made sure that all her three children (including two daughters) got the opportunity she missed out on. Helene's lifespan did not overlap with that of her great-grandfather Christian Gottlieb, but she would have known that he was a teacher, and others in the extended family were teachers as well, including her uncle, the pioneering special needs teacher Friedrich Kauer. Friedrich is a grandson of Christian Gottlieb via his 5th child, Katharina Sophia Weiß.

Also, thanks to Anna Gertrud Keuert, I have 1/64 of Eifel ancestry, which I should subtract when I say that 3/16 of my ancestry is from the Hunsrück. Together with 1/64 from Idstein, this is the biggest outside influx absorbed into the Hunsrück family tree, leaving me with 5/32.)

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events

the female line

Some thoughts on

The female line: Researching your female ancestors
Margaret Ward
Countryside Books 2003

One of the many books I picked up from the clearout where I also boosted my Bloomsbury collection, this is one I read immediately as it chimed with my findings around the vicar of Eckweiler, namely that the women in the vicars' families helped to uphold the Lutheran traditions in matrilinear networks.

Ward's book is about the lives of women in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which family history researchers may find out interesting details that may not show up in the official records. As such, a lot of the specific information on British sources and circumstances weren't particularly helpful for my research, but it was a fascinating and inspiring reminder of how much information about the lives of women in past times we may be missing. And what kind of questions we might be asking ...

World of Books

Some of the things I did not know were that

• in the first half of the 19th century premarital sex was widespread and almost the custom in some areas, in an effort to avoid any surprises regarding infertility (we have an example of that in the 1826 wedding which gave us the Krefeld Clan - the first child was born eight weeks and two days later);
• as recently as in the Napoleonic wars, some soldiers' wives were following the regiment although that was forbidden by law.
• In the early 19th century, there wasn't a law specifically banning women from the vote. If, for instance, a woman's name appeared on the voters register by mistake, she was actually entitled to vote.

Some employment stats were also quite impressive verging on scary, eg relating to the army of servants, and to the prevalence of prostitution.

I was a bit disappointed to find no reference to the issue that I'm currently researching, ie the matrilinear networks of vicars' wives, but otherwise I found it a quite inspiring read. It contributed to my decision to give the wives co-headlining status in the ancestors' biographies I am currently publishing in the Thursday series (starting with the vicar of Eckweiler). And I've also launched a systematic search for pregnant brides in the 19th century, watch this space!

the distiller of Pferdsfeld and his family

Reworking the biographies of the main line of the Weiß Chronicles, we now move on from the vicar of Eckweiler to his son. We had him tagged as the mayor of Pferdsfeld (next door to Eckweiler) but it turns out he was also a teacher and a distiller making brandy (Branntweinbrenner). We have a few village mayors across the family tree, but he's the first distiller I come across, so that will be his USP from now on.

We also found out that his wife may have had more vicars in her family tree than he had. All of which warrants a new (joint) biography (replacing the one in this blog entry, which was basically a transfer of an ancient page from my old website when it went offline):

 

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Johann Gottlieb Weiß (1736-1800) and Anna Katharina Andrae (1742-1816)

Johann Gottlieb Weiß was born 9.11.1736 at Dörrebach as the second child of the vicar Johannes Weiß and his wife Katharina Elisabeth Ebener. He grew up in Eckweiler and went on to become the mayor of the village of Pferdsfeld (which, like Eckweiler, was evacuated and demolished in 1978-82 because of the military airfield).

The Weiß Chronicles only describe him as the mayor of the village, which was more of a part-time job considering how small it was. According to this GedBas entry, Johann Gottlieb was mayor from 1778 until 1782, and also a teacher and a distiller of brandy.

The job of village teacher was often a first employment for theology graduates fresh from university while they were hoping to get on the career ladder of the church or at least become a village vicar. Although we don't know for sure if and where he studied, given that his father was a vicar and both his brothers studied, this is the most likely career path. He just got stuck on the teacher stage - maybe he liked it or there was a shortage of church positions at the time, seeing that many of the existing clergymen were busy trying to get all their sons into the system.

An 18th century distillation apparatus at a museum in Bitburg, Eifel)
Source: Wikipedia Von Foto: B. Kaufmann - Template:Kreismuseum Bitburg-Prüm, CC BY-SA 4.0,

In 1765 he married Anna Katharina André (Andrae, Andreae) from Gebroth (a tiny village, just a few kilometres east of Eckweiler). The Weiß Chronicles contain no info whatsoever about her family, but it turned out to be quite amazing, with lots of clergymen and other interesting connections. Recent blog entries about the Andrae ancestry are now here and here. The family name has survived at Gebroth to this day. Note also that Gottlieb’s older sister Johannetha had also married someone from the same village (see here), so there may be some sort of pattern.

Following the example set by his parents, they had (at least) seven children, born between 1768 and 1786.

Note that all three sons of the family became teachers, so we have a phase transition from an ancestry of Pfarrhaus families to a population of teachers. Among them, my ancestor 6. Christian Gottlieb, who will get a separate entry as well.

He died 1.4.1800 in Pferdsfeld aged 64. His widow died 6.1.1816 in Schauren aged 73. So presumably she lived with her daughter Maria Katharina and her family, who emigrated to Brazil 13 years later (see number 7. below).

There is some info and pictures of Pferdsfeld in this family history page, from a family whose ancestors emigrated from Pferdsfeld to England in the 19th century, when the Hunsrück area was hit by a famine.

The next generation(s):

1. Johann Philipp Weiß *24.4.1768 a teacher at Weiler on the river Nahe, married Anna Margaretha Kaiser, from Merxheim (Nahe). According to the residents book of Weiler they have four sons born 1822 -1830 and a daughter born 1834. At the time of Johann Philipp's death, 15.6.1853, his wife and all five children are alive. Nothing further is known about them.

? The residents book of Pferdsfeld notes a son called Johannes born 14.7.1770 who doesn't show up in the WC. If correct, he may have died young.

2. Johannetha Weiß * 4.7.1772 married Leopold Wagner from Winterburg.

3. Magdalena Weiß * 28.2.1774 married Johann Fleischer from Pferdsfeld.

4. Philipp Weiß *4.5.1775 a teacher at Gödenroth, and later at Winningen (Mosel), married Katharina Petermann from Allenbach.

5. Regina Katharina Weiß * 10.9.1779 married Johann Fuchs from Eckweiler. Not sure if and how he's related to Johannes Fuchs from Allenbach (number 4 in this Fuchs family tree) who had lots of sons at Eckweiler. They are all called Johann something, but are a bit younger than Regina Katharina. The oldest one who is not otherwise married is Johann Peter (1788-1860).

6. Christian Gottlieb Weiß, born 1782, became a teacher at Hellenthal, Raversbeuren and Simmern u. Dhaun. He married Gertrud Keuert from Hellenthal and they had eight children. Their joint biography is now here.

7. Maria Katharina Weiß, born in 1786, married a parson called Ried from Schauern (Hochwald) and went off to Rio de Janeiro, according to the Weiß Chronicles. In fact, they arrived in São Leopoldo on 25.5.1829 (here's their emigration story). The husband and sons are: Georg Philipp Rieth (1784-1843).

1. Philipp Christian Gottlieb, * 25.4.1811 in Schauren, oo 17.10.1838 in São Leopoldo Maria Elisabeth Schiehl, 11 children
2. Johann Friedrich * 20.12.1814 Schauren, Holzschnitzer, Sattler, Tischler + 27.2.1866 in São Leopoldo oo 30.11.1841 Mariana Caroline Rieth (1825-1898), 10 children
The family is in GedBas as well (ancestry is a bit sparse).

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events

being Homo

I have been reporting on progress into genetic studies of human evolution ever since Svante Pääbo's group published the first glimpses of the Neanderthal genome. Less frequently I have also ventured deeper into time, where morphology is the only handle we have to try and draw up a family tree of our evolutionary ancestors. The categorisation of some ancient fossils as Homo while others are filed in other, extinct genera, has always struck me as illogical and confusing. So I was very glad when I stumbled across a new paper that calls for a revision (and expansion) of our genus. That was a good enough excuse to write another feature about human evolution, which is out now:

What it means to be Homo

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 18, 21 September 2026, Pages R963--R965

Restricted access to full text and PDF download

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF and the magic link has expired.)

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 .

Homo erectus was a hominin species that thrived for nearly two million years across three continents. Proteomic studies suggest that this species may be the source of ‘super-archaic’ gene variants inherited by modern humans via Denisovans. (Photo: Emöke Dénes/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

a 200th wedding anniversary

Tomorrow (21.9.2026) will be the 200th wedding anniversary of the founding couple of my Krefeld Clan:

Wilhelm Düselmann * 13. 8.1804 Krefeld + 17.12.1865 Krefeld

and

Elisabetha de la Strada * 17.12.1804 Krefeld + 15.12.1882 Krefeld.

I blogged a list of the descendants we knew back in 2009 in one of my first blog entries on family history, and this has led to to additional information (we now know of 13 children, with the girls brought up catholic and the boys protestant to reflect the different confessions of the parents, 32 grandchildren, and hundreds of fascinating people further down the line) as well as to real life meetups with several relatives I was previously unaware of, so this wedding held in Krefeld 200 years ago is a bit special. I was slightly tempted to try and organise a family event for the occasion, but that would have required actual people skills which I don't have so I'll just commemorate the day with another blog entry.

Sadly we don't have photos of bride nor groom, although both lived long enough to suggest they may have had a portrait taken in their old age. Incidentally, the oldest surviving photographs made by Nicéphore Niépce date from 1826 as well. A wedding photo or our couple would have looked interesting, because the first of the 13 children was born eight weeks and two days after the wedding, on 18.11.1826.

What we have is the actual marriage certificate:

Photo of a photocopy of what appears to be the original marriage entry in the archives of the town, with the signatures of the newlyweds and their witnesses, and surviving parents. First we have what must be the presiding official. Then, in larger handwriting, Margaretha Düselmann (nee Wilsberg, mother of the groom), Wilhelm Düselmann (groom), Hermann Düselmann (brother of the groom, born 1798), Elisabetha Delastrata (bride), then in the bottom line Heinrich Siecher (?) or something similar, who allegedly was a brother in law of the bride but I don't have a matching name on my records. And the last name I can't decipher at all. Even though the mother of the bride, Margaretha de la Strada (nee Giesen) was present as well so should have signed.

The fathers of both families had died a few years before the wedding. Note also that Elisabetha's older sister Maria Catharina de la Strada married Jacob Joseph Nolden at the same time.

I've blogged about Krefeld as one of my "lost cities" here (although it is not quite lost, some distant relatives still live there).

Further revelations relating to the Krefeld Clan are tagged #düsselmann.

the vicar of Eckweiler and his family

After I discovered so many clergymen in the family network around Johannes Weiß (see the preliminary list at the bottom of this blog entry), I had another look at his biography and at what became of his children. Note that his wife is at the core of a matrilinear transmission of Pfarrhaus (vicarage) traditions, so she becomes a co-headliner.

So here comes a revised and updated version of the biography (replacing the one in this blog entry, which was basically a transfer of an ancient page from my old website when it went offline).

 

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Johannes Weiß (1704-1772) and Katharina Elisabeth Ebner (1712-1790)

Johannes Weiß was born on 29.9.1704 at Königsberg (near Wetzlar, today Hessen) as the son of the merchant Johann Justus Weiss (ca.1675-1740) from Silesia and Maria Elisabeth Straus from Königsberg. His confirmation was at Seibersbach (Hunsrück) in 1717, which suggests there may have been family connections to that area where he later worked. He studied theology at Gießen and came as a parson-in-training (Pfarrkandidat) to Dörrebach near Seibersbach. There he was appointed a vicar in 1729. The job also included the parish of Seibersbach, and I understand that the vicar had to live in the Pfarrhaus at Seibersbach as the one in Dörrebach had been usurped by the Catholics since 1703.

In 1732, while serving at Dörrebach/Seibersbach , Johannes married Katharina Elisabeth Ebener or Ebner, born at Trarbach in 1712, the daughter of the vicar of Alterkülz (Hunsrück), Philipp Ebener (~1681-1734). Previously (from 1708 to 1720), Philipp had been a teacher at the Lateinschule in Trarbach, like his father before him, see my biographies of Ebner father and son here. A potted history of Trarbach and the Lateinschule is here. So Katharina Elisabeth Ebenerlived at Trarbach for the first eight years of her life. With three university-educated men in her immediate ancestry, and many more in the extended family (including the illustrious Arnoldi clan), she had a Pfarrhaus background while her husband was a newcomer in this scene. Considering this imbalance, I would suspect that her family picked him on the grounds that he was an eligible Sponheim vicar who wasn't a blood relative.

Johannes and Elisabeth had seven children that we know of, with the first five born at Dörrebach/Seibersbach between 1734 and 1739. See the list of their descendants below.

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

In May 1740 (according to the Eckweiler book, the Weiß Chronicles claim it was 1742), he moved to become the vicar of Eckweiler (some 20 km deeper into the Hunsrück), where he remained in office until his death in 1772. In fact, one of his great-grandsons wrote the Weiß Chronicles in that very same village nearly 120 years later.

The last two children we know of were born at Eckweiler in 1742 and 1751. Seeing that their mother only turned 30 in 1742, there may have been children in that interval who didn't survive?

According to the Eckweiler book, 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. Documents relating to the funding for the school house reveal that Eckweiler at the time was the poorest parish in the district.

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.

Johannes Weiß died on 4.1.1772 aged 67. In 1773, his son in law, Philipp Bauer, was installed as his successor.

His widow continued to live at Eckweiler with her daughter and son in law. She died there on 1.8.1790 aged 78 (or just under).

In 1818, Philipp Bauer was the first vicar of Eckweiler to retire from the position, as he was deemed unfit to carry on at age 85. He died later the same year. Note, however, that according to this Gedbas entry he only lived to age 83 (however, that entry doesn't know about his marriage, so it may not be a reliable source). All vicars of the parish are listed here.

The next generation(s):

1. Christian Weiß * 1734 died 1754 while a student at university.

2. Johannetha Weiß * 1735 married a forester named Federkeil, at Gebroth (Hunsrück). Familysearch offers a plausible match in Johann Andreas Federkeuel who married Johannetta NN, with a son Johann Christian Federkeuel born in Gebroth in 1761.

3. Johann Gottlieb Weiß * 1736 the future mayor of Pferdsfeld. He married Anna Katharina Andrae from Gebroth, who turned out to have lots of clergymen in her ancestry (as well as a brother who studied theology). Funny that the author of our Weiß Chronicles (WC) showed no curiosity in her ancestry and doesn't even mention her parents. She was his grandmother! According to this Gedbas entry, Johann Gottlieb was also a teacher and a distiller of brandy. A separate blog entry about him and his family is now here.

4. Regina Catharina Weiß * 1738 married a Mr Weimar from Dörrebach. There are a few Weimar / Weymar families in that village listed in Gedbas to the extent that in there was a wedding when bride and groom bore that name in different spellings. One suitable candidate who isn't otherwise married would be Valentin Weimar the elder, who had a daughter Johannetta born 1766 Dörrebach, who then went on to marry Valentin Weimar junior and had at least nine children with him.

5. Maria Anna Dorothea (WC: Marianne) Weiß * 1739 married Johann Georg (WC: Philipp) Orth from Weiler near Martinstein, on the river Nahe. He is number IX-59 in the Orth genealogy, to which we also have connections here. They have six children and 17 grandchildren according to the Orth page. Four of the children died before reaching school age, only two sons survived and got married:
Philipp Georg, * Weiler 31.1.1760, + …, ∞ Weiler 24.2.1784 Catharina Elisabeth Keip (Geib) from Staudernheim, 7 children; only one marriage and no grandchildren reported.
Andreas, * Weiler 16.1.1763, + Weiler. 14.10.1839, church elder. ∞ Weiler … 1787 Maria Elisabeth Waldmann, * Weiler 8.4.1770, + ebd. 20.12.1842, 10 children, only three marriages (two daughters to the same man) and four grandchildren reported.
Although these families don't seem to be doing very well, I have been contacted (separately) by two people counting Maria Anna Dorothea Weiß as their ancestor, so some people did make it through the hard times.

6. Maria Elisabetha Weiß * 1742 married Philipp Jakob Bauer, a vicar at Enkirch, who later took over the position of his father-in-law at Eckweiler. Two children were born 1773 and 1781 but died in infancy. Maria died in 1819.

7. Philipp Theodor Weiß * 1751 became a private tutor for the counts of Solms, he drowned while hunting wild ducks in the back waters of the river Rhine, according to the WC. The church records of Pfalzdorf, the colony of thwarted emigrants where his aunt Anna Maria Ebner and her husband Carl Morlang (1720-1799) had settled, note that he served with the family Bilgen at Schmithausen castle (Kleve district) when he drowned on 2.1.1777. No mention of ducks there. Ironically, his employer, Geheimrat Casimir Bilgen, was appointed by Frederic the Great as the administrator in charge of the water regulation and dyke construction on the Lower Rhine.

Thus, it appears that all three sons may have studied to follow in their father's footsteps, but two died young and the surviving one only became a teacher and mayor. Of the four daughters, one married a vicar, one married a descendant of the Orth family which includes lots of clergymen in earlier times, and the other two appear to have stepped out of the circle of clergymen marrying each other's daughters, although we're not sure what Mr Weimar's profession was.

Thus we can clearly see the ambition to carry on the Lutheran Pfarrhaus tradition, which was quite possibly her idea rather than his, but the family suffered a series of misfortunes which led to the tradition dying out in this branch.

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events

a Bloomsbury collection

I've long been a fan of the Bloomsbury group simply based on the very amazing book by Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians, which I read and reviewed in 2009. Later I also bought a big photo book about Charleston and watched the movie Carrington. And read a book about the actual neighbourhood of Bloomsbury. Five years ago, I read The hours and blogged about the Bloomsbury set on that occasion. I guess what I love about the group is that it is like a big family of intellectuals, with everybody writing about everybody else, and a lot of the later material about Bloomsbury has been written by children and grandchildren of the original group, so it works a lot like family history on a celebrity level.

Now I picked up around ten Bloomsbury-related books from neighbours clearing out stuff, so my collection now looks like this (minus the actual Book of Bloomsbury, which went into hiding as I was rounding up books for the photo):

Own photo.

So I'm now in the process of establishing a dedicated Bloomsbury shelf. Might even read one or two of the new acquisitions. Watch this space.

PS: I've now applied the new tag #bloomsbury to everything related to the group and/or the place (six entries so far). This has become necessary as I appear to have reviewed quite a few books published by Bloomsbury, so the search function yields a mixture of both kinds of entries.

the people of the echoing valley

In a letter about the discovery of the Weiß Chronicles, Johanna wrote that the teacher Christian Gottlieb Weiß (1782-1867) had his first teaching job in "Höllenthal" - which would suggest the etymological interpretation as "Hell's Valley". I had always assumed that this was the historic name of the village now known as Hellenthal (Eifel), but Wikipedia seems to think it's got nothing to do with hell, and that it's all about the Hall you hear in the valley, ie the echo (Old High German hellan, to sound, resonate). As there was a lot of mining and metalworking in the area, the valley may have been echoing with the clanging of hammers and anvils.

Anyhow, Christian Gottlieb, who is also the earliest born ancestor of whom we have a photo, found himself a wife at Hellenthal. In 1806, he married Anna Gertraud Käuer, (1777-1858; alternative spelling: Keuert), whose ancestry is solidly from that village. Coming out of the Weiß family that is crawling with clergymen (up to 13 among his direct ancestors, many more in the extended family), he is the first in our lineage to leave that tradition behind and marry somebody with no church family background whatsoever. Also, he married outside the (former) Sponheim territory, where the whole clergy marriage network operated. And she was four years older than him.

Back in the noughties, my father hired a professional genealogist to look into the Hellenthal ancestry. He drew up a report on Anna Gertraud's family and found 14 of her 16 great-grandparents. No academics in sight but a few metalworkers. And a very tightly knit community where the family names like Vader(s), Pieroth and Bastert occur in duplicate in the generation of the great-grandparents. I was reminded of that fact when I updated my list of family names recently, so am now looking into the Hellenthal family tree again in the hope of discovering common ancestry for those pairs of great-grandparents sharing a surname.

My scan of a tourism brochure from the 1990s.

So here comes a little family tree for Anna Gertraud:

1. Anna Gertrude Keuert (Kauer) * 8. 3.1778 Hellenthal; ~ Gemünd + 7. 4.1858 Simmern u. Dhaun (80)

 

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2. Keuert Tilmanus * 24. 8.1749 Hellenthal + 8.12.1819 Hellenthal (70) smith, agricultural worker

} oo 29. 5.1777 Gemünd

3. Regina Catherina (Maria Catherina) Freischmid * 14. 5.1747 Hellenthal + 28. 3.1813 Hellenthal (65)

 

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4. Johann Peter Keuert * um 1725 Hellenthal + after 1759

} oo 11. 2.1748 Gemünd

5. Anna Catharina Dresen (Drees) * 4. 3.1715 Hellenthal (if no. 10. correct) + after 1759

 

6. Paulus Freischmid * 23.12.1696 Hellenthal + 1. 5.1752 Hellenthal (55)

} oo 21. 5.1724

7. Maria Piroth (Pyroth) * 25. 4.1705 Hellenthal + Hellenthal (73) [] 3.10.1778

 

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8. Mattheis Keuer * 27. 8.1690 Hellenthal + after 1737 Hellenthal

} oo 29. 5.1719 Gemünd

9. Elisabeth Bruch (Bruich) * 26.12.1698 Kirschseiffen + after 1737 Hellenthal

 

10. Jacob Drees * 9. 2.1681 Hellenthal +

} oo 1. 5.1708 Gemünd

11. Gertrud Lüperts * um 1685 Hellenthal + before 1748

 

12. Paul Freyschmidt * around 1675 Hellenthal + 1724 Hellenthal

} oo

13. Elisabeth Pyroth * 1676 + 1705-1724

 

14. Johann Pyroth * 9. 1670 Hellenthal + after 1715

} I.oo around 1704

II.oo around 1707 Maria Hellenthal in Hellenthal

15. Elisabeth Thus (Theissen) * 10.12.1677 Hellenthal + 1705-08

 

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16. Tilmann Keuer * around 1660 + after 1696

} oo before 1682

17. Gertrud Vader * around 1660 + after 1696

 

18. Peter Bruch * around 1660 Heimbach ? + after 1702

} oo 1683-87

19. Ida Bastert * 8. 3.1662 Kirschseiffen + after 1702

 

20. Johann Drees * around 1650 Bronsfeld +

I.oo before 1672 Catharina Huperts

}II.oo 1680

21. Margaretha Kuhl

 

22. Arnold Lüperts * around 1650 Bronsfeld + 1688-1708

} oo before 1672

23. Maria Huperts * around 1650 Hellenthal + after 1688

 

24. (Freischmidt)

} oo

25.

 

26. Firmondt Pieroth

} oo

27. Cathrin Basters

 

28. Paul Pyroth (junior) * before 1650 Hellenthal ? + after 1678

} oo before 1668

29. Johanna Balters * + after 1678

 

30. Heinrich Thus * + after 1686

} oo around 1675

31. Maria Vader * before 1660 + after 1709

 

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38. Johann Pastart (ert) *

} oo vor 1660

39. Elsgen Bungart

 

40. Thonnes Dreßen * Bronsfeld near Schleiden (recorded as a godfather in 1671)

56. ?Paul Pyroth (seeing that 28. was referred to as Paul Pyroth Junior?)

Note that there is a family tree on familysearch which is much less complete and deviates in the paternal grandparents and their parents. They also have a wrong year of birth and death for 2. Tilmanus - according to them he would have been 9 years old at the birth of his daughter. My guess is they picked another person also called Tilmanus Keuer and thus ended up with a different set of ancestors on the paternal side. So I guess we can safely ignore that dataset.

 

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A few leads for further investigations:

Bastert (yes, the name means exactly what you think): There is a Pastert ironworks tradition in this area, see for instance Peter Pastert (1641-1728) in Schleiden (northern neighbour of Hellenthal). Also, a Bastardt family near Schleiden has been involved in a long running inheritance dispute in 1618-1628.

Pyroth / Pierot: The spelling varies wildly, but our genealogist and others have speculated that these people go back to a francophone lineage of Pierrot (derived from Pierre, the French version of Peter). As Hellenthal is a mining and metalworking town, this name could be from migrating miners coming in from Wallonia. We have some of these elsewhere too, eg in Fachbach.

Vaders: The genealogist said there were several Vader families in the previous generation and he couldn't establish a specific connection to any of them. There are seven GedBas entries for a (Peter) Reinhard Vaders born Hellenthal around 1635 who in 1674 married Anna Magdalena Lang from Neunkirchen (Saar) and moved there, producing lots of Vaders descendants. Seeing that he was around 40 at the time of this marriage, he could very well have had a previous family at Hellenthal, from which 17. Gertrud or 31. Maria Vader could be his children. Or his nieces. His parents were Franz Vaders and Evgen NN. All the Gedbas profiles seem to come from Saarland descendents not too interested in Hellenthal, so this trace goes cold very quickly.

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events

another old violin's tale

Some thoughts on

The Violin Maker’s Secret
Evie Woods
Harper Collins 2026

Bookshop.org

Last year I read an old (1914) novel about a fictional Stradivarius violin following the fates of real and fictional players through the centuries of its lifetime. The author of that very romantic romp hiding behind a male pseudonym was Anna von Bonin (1856-1933).

Now I discovered a modern equivalent in the novel by Evie Woods (120 years younger than Anna von Bonin). It is a similarly wild romantic romp, but thankfully this time the violin is not a Stradivarius. It was made by a fictional Irish luthier called William Rathbone who died in 1841. He allegedly learned the craft from Thomas Perry (1738-1818) and knew Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840). Again, we're getting a mix of historic and fictional people through the two centuries of the violin's lifetime (1817-2025). There is a fantasy element in that the soul of the luthier's tragically deceased fiancee appears to have entered the violin, speaks to us as the voice of the instrument, and seems to have a magical influence on the romantic lives of the people who come near it.

Most of the plot is set in the present day (2025), however, with dramatic events unfolding after criminals steal the violin from an auction house but leave it at Heathrow airport where a baggage handler finds it and takes it home. A lot of the novel is also about personal baggage, so the protagonist's job is kind of an early hint to where we're going.

I've read this fairly swiftly and enjoyed it thanks to the subject matter matching my current interest in lutherie. I also happen to agree with the romantic statement being made here that string instruments can change lives (magically or otherwise) - can happen to all of us. I would also consider the author's earlier work The lost bookshop, for similar reasons (is it nominative determinism that she's drawn to objects made from trees?), but might skip the one about a bakery.

PS Among the real life violins / violinists mentioned in the novel we find Min Kym and the Stradivarius that was stolen outside Euston Station in London a few years ago.

languages: the rise and fall

Languages evolve, diversify and become extinct, so they count as biology, right? A recent paper modelling the rise and fall of language diversity gave me a welcome excuse to revisit languages from an evolutionary perspective:

How languages evolve and die

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 17, 7 September 2026, Pages R925--R927

Restricted access to full text and PDF download

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

(Unfortunately, this year's features will no longer become open access one year after publication - do contact me if you would like a PDF and the magic link has expired.)

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 7,500 languages known today represent only a fraction of the language diversity that existed as recently as 2,000 years ago. (Photo: mrpbps/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).)

naming names

Reading (most of) a book about German family names I got inspired to update the list of names I had left unattended in the depths of my family history file for many years. The version I started from had 162 names, and the one I ended up with now (see this page) has 326 names, so yes, it's been neglected for too long.

Some of the most common German surnames.
Source: RossiLeone, Wikimedia Commons.

To give a rough indication of how close or distant in history these names are, I included the Kekule number of the last carrier (except for the immediate family up to the generation of my grandparents). By default, these carriers are all women. There are only a couple of cases where a male line took on a new name (eg after marrying into a farm and adopting the name of the farm, see Wolff). I've ignored the previous names in these cases as we typically don't know much about them. Similarly, I have also ignored the (speculative) previous life of Johann Dopheide, who may or may not have been identical with Jean d'Oppède. If he was, the family tree wins dozens of additional ancestors in the French nobility going back to the crusades, but that would be an entirely different story to the rest of my family history, so I'm tending to ignore that.

After adding the numbers for multiple occurrences of the same name, we end up with around 375 name lines ending in a woman, or 375 female ancestors whose maiden name we know. There are probably as many with only a first name and no known family name, and many more males, so these named women are a minority and it was an interesting experience to go through the list and acknowledge their existence one by one by copying over their number into the names list.

I also spotted quite a few cases where the same name occurs several times in the same geographic area without being a very common name like Schmidt or Mayer. I am planning to look at these cases again to find out if I can find evidence of shared ancestry between the women sharing those names.

The page serves as an index to blog entries where I have explored the origins of specific names (like eg Bitsch) and/or the biographies of several generations in an extended name line.

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events

a village called Weiler

The German word "Weiler" means small village (or hamlet) and is often included in the names of villages such as Adamsweiler, Annweiler, Belgweiler, Birkweiler, Eckweiler, Nickweiler, Ohlweiler, Rießweiler, Sensweiler, etc. - all these place names actually occur in my family tree.

There are also quite a few villages just called Weiler. One of those is on the river Nahe, downstream from Kirn, between Martinstein and Monzingen, and on the opposite bank to Merxheim. It used to be one of the places that I knew nothing about even though they pop up several times in my family history. A helpful reader of my blog who has an ancestor from Weiler pointed out to me that it is missing in my list of places. Here I am compiling all references to Weiler, so I have something to link to when I add it to the list.

So far, I have no known direct ancestors with biographical dates located at Weiler, but I have found three instances concerning siblings of my direct ancestors, one more remote link, and one relating to the Fuchs family tree which I researched for somebody else.

The historic Sponheim vineyard at Weiler.
Source: Wikimedia, photo by giggel.

In 1749, Anna Maria Ebner, daughter of the vicar of Alterkülz Philipp Nikolaus Ebner, married Carl Morlang from Weiler and had four children with him. The family settled at Pfalzdorf in the Lower Rhine area, together with a whole group of would-be migrants who had wanted to go to America via Rotterdam but only got that far as the Netherlands refused to let them pass. Carl Morlang's father came from Dhronecken (Hunsrück), but his mother, Anna Sophie Cullmann was a Weiler native.

In 1758, Marianne (Maria Anna Dorothea) Weiß, daughter of the vicar of Eckweiler, married Johann Georg Orth from Weiler near Martinstein, on the river Nahe. He is number IX-59 in the Orth genealogy. This means that he is a 3xgreat-grandson of Baltahasar Orth, the second protestant vicar of Kirn, and the nameline goes via Jakob junior, born at Kirn, then Hans born at Merxheim, and another three generations born at Weiler. There are dozens of Orth people listed in the residents book. Note that Marianne Weiss and Johann Georg Orth, although both related to me, were not related to each other as far as we know. (Their lineages in my family tree only meet in the next generation, when the mayor of Pferdsfeld Johann Gottlieb Weiss marries Anna Katharina Andrae from Gebroth, who has Orth ancestry.) They have six children and 17 grandchildren according to the Orth page. Note also that our Weiss Chronicles state that Marianne's husband was called Philipp Orth, but I tend to trust the modern research over our cherished old document in this case. Johann Georg in the Orth genealogy did have a younger brother called Philipp, so it isn't completely ruled out that she could have married one after the other.

One generation further down in the Weiß chronicles we have Johann Philipp Weiß,the firstborn son of the mayor of Pferdsfeld Johann Gottlieb Weiß and Anna Katharina Andrae from Gebroth. He became a teacher at Weiler and married Anna Margaretha Kaiser from Merxheim (on the opposite side of the river Nahe). I still need to find out whether she was related to our Caesar / Kaiser ancestors.

These three siblings of ancestors moving to Weiler are all linked to the lineage described in the Weiß Chronicles. More surprisingly, they are all closely connected to one person, Katharina Elisabeth Ebner (1712-1750), who married the vicar Johannes Weiß, in a kind of matrilinear way (Katharina Elisabeth is also at the centre of my matriline of Lutheran vicar's families!). They are, respectively, Katharina Elisabeth's sister, daughter, and grandson. When this penny dropped late at night, I had visions of Katharina Elisabeth conspiring with her sister to arrange the marriages of her daughter and her grandson, but sadly she didn't live long enough to do this. And Anna Maria migrated to the Lower Rhine anyways, so the accumulation of Weiler links may in fact be a coincidence. Also, it's not that far from Eckweiler and Pferdsfeld to Weiler and Merxheim, maybe around 10 km for the shortest link (Pferdsfeld to Weiler) and no more than 15 km for the longest (Eckweiler to Merxheim).

Separately, one of the vicars of Eckweiler (1674-1690), an ancestor in the Fuchs family tree, Johann Justus Leyendecker. Born ca. 1642 in Trarbach, he was the vicar of Eckweiler 1674-1690, was then moved to the parish of Weiler, where he died 28.11.1699, aged 57. (The regionally common name Leyendecker describes a roofer specialising in slate roofs.)

 

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There is a book of residents of Weiler (1667-1900) available online here. I'm struggling to get much info out of it because by the time I've located the page I want the site starts blocking me for making too many requests. It also contains a short history of the village, which appears to have been the source for the slightly shorter history here.

The village which today has around 450 residents is a prime location for wine growers in the Nahe region, which explains that all three feudal authorities that ruled the Sponheim territories over the years have set up a vineyard here. There is the Badische Weingut, the Sponheimer, and the Schmidtburger one. The brief history of the village here (and in the residents book) notes that the wine growing tradition may go back to Roman times as some Roman artifacts were found in the ground. This lovely video from the regional TV channel SWR presents the current family businesses residing in the three feudal vineyards.

Note also that it is close to the upper end of the Nahe wine region, travel further up to Kirn you'll find hops and the brewery.

 

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My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events