an excuse for being nosy

I recently heard a very interesting presentation from Anne Sebba about her book The women's orchestra of Auschwitz hosted by the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. I feel reasonably well-informed about the topic, after reading Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's memoir as well as her daughter's, and the book Cello by Kate Kennedy (who hosted the event at Wolfson College), so I didn't rush to buy the book, although I will pick it up if it crosses my path again. As I understand from the presentation it interweaves biographies of several of the women who were involved with the orchestra. (I am told a recording of the event is due to be posted on the OCLW website soon.)

One new insight I took away from the event arises from the author's insistence that she felt her father's involvement as a young soldier in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where the surviving members of the Auschwitz orchestra had ended up, gave her permission to write about their lives. Even though she never found positive confirmation whether her father had specifically met any of the women in the orchestra, she felt that in such a highly sensitive and much debated field as the Holocaust, writing about the lives of the victims and survivors would be an intrusion, and that her very marginal family connection gave her an excuse for being nosy.

Hearing her making this argument both in the presentation and in the discussion afterwards made me feel that I use family history in a similar way, as an excuse for being nosy about ordinary people of the distant past, most of whom weren't important enough to justify specific historical interest. When I am writing biographies of clergymen in the 9th to 16th generation of our family tree, as I have done in the first half of this year, there is the obvious risk that some of the connections may be erroneous. However, the assumed, and sometimes quite speculative family connection gives me an excuse to take interest in their lives and write about them, which is great fun and always enlightening.

Also, even if some of them may be the wrong person for a specific position in the family tree, they are quite likely to share similarities with the genetically correct ancestor, so the lessons I learn about the lives of my ancestors still broadly hold, even if the details may in some cases be misattributed. And as I get to know these people, they become family, even if I cannot prove with certainty that they are genetically related.

Some of the more general themes emerging from this research include:

• migration (mainly in the 17th century), listed here
• family networks of protestant clergymen since the Reformation, tagged Eckweiler
• musical traditions, as explored in my cello memoir
• sense of place, as highlighted in the lost cities series.
• origins of namelines, see the list at the end of this entry

a station lost

Update on the railway families:

I just learned that the small railway station of Adamsweiler (Adamswiller), where Christoph Gottlieb Kauer (1845-1909) spent the last 15 years of his life and career as a station master with his wife and five daughters, no longer exists. It was still standing on September 21st, 1989 when I visited the village, and it looked like this:

Own photo

We found the door where the Kauer family had posed for a family portrait around 1900, so here's my grandmother and myself in front of that door (I think it's the street side entrance, the platform side one doesn't have the extra wings on the sides):

Photo by Jörg Groß.

compare and contrast 90 years earlier:

The station master's family outside the station at Adamsweiler, around 1900. The daughters, left to right: Helene, Kätha, Johanna, Auguste, Anna. See also this postcard where family and staff stand between the tracks.

There was even a train stopping there (on the line from Sarregemuines to Strasbourg), although I'm not sure whether that was a regular service. The station building was up for sale at the time, so there definitely weren't any services happening there, but it may have functioned as an unmanned halt.

Own photo

Another descendent of the Kauer family happened to visit the station that same year in June, and even managed to get inside.

Photos by Lothar Bladt.

He told me later that he met a group of young folks from Berlin who wanted to restore the building but ran into a structural problem with the roof which they couldn't fix. So this may well have been why it disappeared.

Checking google streetview on 25.6.2026 I see lots of big lumps of stone by the roadside, ready to be removed. Apparently they belong to the quarry at the end of the station road, Carrières Rauscher.

I found some other photos online, most recent first:

In 2022, a train passes the site of the former station, some lumps of stone from the quarry also visible on the left.

In 2007, the station is still standing but the roof missing.

On this page, if you hover on the railway line next to the name of Adamswiller, a photo of the station will magically appear. The vehicles look like they may be from the 1960s/70s.

A postcard dated 1905 may well be showing Christoph Gottlieb Kauer on the right. The flirtatious messages from several writers are a mix of German, French and atrocious spelling mistakes.

Adding insult to injury, the French Wikipedia entry of Adamswiller lists the stations of Diemeringen and Tieffenbach-Struth as transport options, showing a photo of the latter which looks quite similar to the one that Adamswiller had. It doesn't even mention the station the village lost.

One reason why this little railway station was a bit more important than other properties where people lived at the time is that significant parts of the household contents are still with us, including the 20 volume encyclopedia from the 1870s, the Schiller edition from the early 19th century, and some pieces of furniture and kitchen gadgets. The house that Johanna Kauer built for her retirement has been useful for the preservation of the spirit of her childhood home.

 

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

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

All things Alsatian are tagged alsace. Note that there are four separate strands of Alsatian stories in my family history (most recent first):

Heinrich the cellist meeting Maria at Strasbourg.

The family of the stationmaster of Adamsweiler (above, also tagged kauer).

The migrating miners and the Trimbachs These two strands converge in the supremely unsearchable Paul Simon (1740-1813), who left Alsace to settle in Böchingen, Palatinate, where he got married in 1768.

The goldsmith of Strasbourg, Franz Bolion von der Rosen (ca. 1552 - ca. 1620). While the von der Rosen nameline only passes through Strasbourg, his wife, Ottilia Flach appears to be from a resident Alsatian family that also turns up in the ancestry of Albert Schweitzer.

PS I had a vague memory that my Bondam / Bonnedame huguenots had an Alsatian connection, but that turns out to be Phalsbourg in Lorraine, a town in a German-ruled enclave founded in 1570 specifically to offer refuge to Huguenots persecuted in France. Then again, I read that after the town fell under catholic rule in 1608, many of the protestants fled to Bischwiller in Alsace. So there could be fifth Alsatian connection waiting to be discovered.

Update 16.7.2026: I nearly forgot to mention that four of the clergymen studied in Strasbourg, so that calls for a new blog entry with all the Alsatian connections!

missing megafauna

There is so much exciting research based on sequencing of ancient DNA coming out now that it's easy to lose track of the historic and prehistoric humans and hominins getting sequenced and sorted into family trees. Not quite as much ancient DNA work targets animals, if only because they are more likely to get eaten after death, rather than being buried in a form that benefits genome analysis.

A recent paper on a dozen well-preserved cave lions found in permafrost soil and sequenced in comparison to modern lions caught my eye, however. I used it as an excuse to revisit megafauna extinctions, this time through the lense of genomic studies. It's always useful to have a mascot to remember a feature by, so this is now the cave lion feature, although other species of Pleistocene megafauna also appear, including elephants, ground squirrels and giant echidnas.

The resulting feature is out now:

Charting the missing megafauna

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 13, 6 July 2026, Pages R729--R731

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

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

This exceptionally well-preserved female cave lion cub named Sparta was discovered in 2018 in Belaya Gora, near the Indigirka River in northeastern Siberia. Her genome was one of the twelve studied by David Stanton and colleagues. (Photo by Love Dalén.)

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.

a posthumous strad

Pirate Luthier update

A friendly freegler who had already donated a violin previously, came back with one she rescued from a skip, which is now violin number 37 on my logs. It had a crack in the belly so I had to open it up. The inside was very dirty so I had to clean it out quite thoroughly with a wet rag. This revealed a very beautiful flaming, showing up more nicely on the inside than on the outside:

It also gave a better view of the label which is one of those referring back to a Stradivarius model of which the violin was meant to be a copy. This one is strange though as it reads 1758. Antonio Stradivari died in 1737.

Looking even closer, just below the label I think I can read "Aug. 1899" written in pencil. It's not obvious in the photo, but turning the open violin to find the best angle for the light on the writing, I am quite confident that I can read that. Which also makes sense for a slightly dubious Strad copy.

I've now closed it again but haven't finished the setup yet, so I will update this entry once I know what it sounds like.

 

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

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.

news from the publishing world

News this week is that Springer Nature is selling off both Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft - and to different buyers as well. Spektrum goes to GeraNova Bruckmann, a media holding that has magazines for pet owners among other things, so I'm not quite sure about this move. The most scientific magazine I can spot in their portfolio is the German edition of National Geographic.

I started translating for Spektrum in 1991 and writing my own articles soon after, but somehow petered out in the 2010s as I got more work from Current Biology and the Spektrum pieces tended to take too long to come out. It looks like my most recent item in Spektrum appeared in January 2020.

So a loss more at the nostalgia front and not a business problem, but still ...

Speaking of nostalgia, I still have all the print issues from the 1980s through to the 2020s (they stopped sending me complimentary copies a few years ago). These issues may soon become another relic of a bygone era.

Here's an astrobiology-themed cover from 2015:

And here's a photo of multiple issues of Spektrum prepared for this article about my writing career:

our less famous microbiomes

I attended a Cell Press symposium about microbiomes and their interactions with the host organism at Bruges in May. It was mostly about the one in the human gut and its interaction with the immune system, but for my feature I chose the road less travelled and focused on the microbiomes of other body parts, including vagina, skin and nose. I was really most inspired by the Belgian project Isala, which due to the lack of an animal model for the vaginal microbiome, relied on actual humans sending in their samples.

The resulting feature is out now:

Know your microbiomes inside and out

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 12, 22 June 2026, Pages R677--R679

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

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

The Isala project studying the vaginal microbiome was launched as a citizen science project and has received overwhelming support from thousands of participants. Symbolic picture on the theme of sisterhood, not actual participants of the project as far as I know. (Photo: Colin Anderson Productions pty ltd/Getty Images.)

The view from the top floor of the (otherwise horrible) conference venue was ok.

reading classics

I've been reading some classics in Latin the last two weeks, even if it's only classic comics ...

I recently spotted two Asterix albums in the excellent Latin translation of Rubricastellanus (1934-2019) at a charity shop, and took that as a sign to reread the others I have, including one I quickly ordered, now adding up to seven albums (no point in using the numbers as the numbering of the Latin editions is all over the place):

• Falx aurea - I had since my school years, can't remember how I got it.
• Cleopatra -
• Laurea Caesaris - we bought these two for Latin-learning children.
• Papyrus Caesaris - I bought this one when it came out because I loved the original so much and given the topic (the history of Caesar's famous book De bello gallico) I felt I needed the Latin version.
• Gladiator
• Clipeus Arvernus - these two I discovered last month.
• Gallus - this I ordered this month, the only one I found online at a reasonable price.

Well, after reading all seven in a couple of months, I feel I know the translator's style well enough to read anything by him (18 volumes to go, and I also have a comic adaptation of Bellum helveticum for which he prepared the text). It's not Cicero, obviously, so much easier than the proper classics, as he aims for a colloquial tone realistically reflecting how people might have spoken in the street. Classical rhetoric only occurs in quotes from the classics and occasionally to make fun of speakers. Each album comes with a vocabulary prepared by the translator - in some I have each word is translated into five languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian), in others it's only German.

Given the obvious issues with the early albums (absence of women, racist stereotypes), I would tend to recommend Papyrus Caesaris for the modern reader (and classics student):

available eg from Abe Books

PS searching for individual titles rather than for the name Rubricastellanus I now ordered a copy of

Apud Britannos

Completing the translations of the classical series until the death of Goscinny seems like an achievable goal. Only 17 of the 24 have been published in Latin.

PPS: I can partially blame it on all those clergymen and Latin teachers who popped up in my family history, including several called Caesar ...

clerical connections

Now to the task of organising that family network of Lutheran clergymen. I did publish an alphabetical list of the ancestors at the bottom of this entry.

Not my family tree but that of composer Georg Friedrich Händel, who also had a few priests in his ancestry.
Source: Von unbekannt - unbekannt, Bild-PD-alt, https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=922022

I'll draw a nice family tree one day, but for now I'm most interested in the order of discovery, because that may help with the storytelling

None of the clergymen in our family tree overlapped with anybody overlapping with me, so they all had to be rediscovered in the documents.

The first two appeared in the Weiß Chronicles written in 1891 and discovered by my great-great aunt Johanna Kauer in the 1930s, which count as the gospel of our family history.

Johannes Weiß (1704-1772) - the vicar of Eckweiler (see generation 9 in the Weiss chronicles); together with his father-in-law:

Philipp Nicolaus Ebner, teacher at the Lateinschule in Trarbach and vicar of Alterkülz. (Note that his father, whose CV is in the same entry, must have studied theology too, but we don't know what he did before he became Konrektor at the Lateinschule Trarbach, so he may or may not have held a church position but I'm not counting him, if only because people typically held teaching jobs before they found a position as a parish priest.)

In 2013, a professional genealogist established the likely connection to:

Nicolaus Andreae (died before 1643), vicar of Gebroth since 1632, likely ancestor of all Andrae people in Gebroth.

In 2014, our research into the ecosystem of Kirn tradesmen uncovered the connection to the valiant vicar:

Peter Siegel (1485-1560), first Lutheran vicar of Kirn, who studied with Martin Luther (Wikipedia.de).

In November 2021, a new upload on GedBas added the first clergyman in our Odenwald ancestry:

Adam Getrost, vicar of Rimbach in the Odenwald and ancestor of a long line of teachers in the neighbouring village of Zotzenbach.

At which point the total stood at five clergyman ancestors. The other eleven (including three highly speculative ones) showed up this year when I looked into the Weiß Chronicles and Eckweiler story again, after many years of leaving that part of the familytree untouched. Most of the new connections came through new online resources such as the Monatshefte fuer Rheinische Kirchengeschichte. I put them on the blog roughly in the same order in which I discovered them:

Johannes Andreae (1532-1613), vicar of Altenkirchen and Kastellaun, fierce anti-Calvinist. (He's the one with a more speculative connection to Nicolaus Andreae, below.)

Another two Andreae vicars, Johannes Andreae's father and his son Emmerich Andreae, might be ancestors but we know nothing more about them, so no material for a biography. Johannes's father (also called Johannes) is interesting because he was active at the time of the Reformation and likely implemented the Lutheran creed in his parish of Schönbach, which became protestant in 1536. More speculatively still, Johannes junior had a son who was also a priest. If he turns out to be the missing link from Johannes junior to Nicolaus, we end up with a total of four Andreae vicars in a line.

Johann Conon, Diakon at Trarbach, court preacher and church inspector at Birkenfeld.

Georg Christian Nesselius, Diakon at Birkenfeld 1603-1616, later vicar of Winterburg.

Johannes Keyser / Caesar (died 1543), theologian at the time of the Reformation, served first as a Catholic then as a Lutheran priest in Harburg and Nördlingen.

Sixtus Caesar, clergyman in Thuringia, son of Johannes and father of Konstantin Caesar.

Valentin Konstantin Caesar, vicar of Sien, Enkirch and Dill.

Johann Balthasar Orth, second Lutheran vicar of Kirn, successor to Peter Siegel. (This blog entry was delayed because I was hoping to find something about him in Hauth's book about the parish of Kirn but there wasn't anything I didn't know already.

In the Ebner ancestry on the river Mosel I got lucky with:

Johann Conrad Arnoldi I, vicar of Traben from 1670 until his death in 1711. Not to be confused with his eponymous, more famous nephew.

And in a last hurrah I added a CV of Johann Peter Metzler from Trarbach even though in this case we have nothing more than his last name to cling to.

Note that three of them (Peter Siegel, Johannes Andreae and Johannes Keyser / Caesar) were the first protestant priests in their respective parishes.

Protestants priests who were brothers of direct ancestors include:

Caesar - lots of them, as five of the six brothers of Sixtus Caesar became clergymen. The odd one out was a school teacher. And all three sisters married clergymen too.

Jacob Orth, son of Johann Balthasar Orth, above, and also a vicar of Kirn.

Hans Konrad Roos, the vicar of Gebroth from 1693 until his death in 1711, was the brother of Maria Ottilia von der Rosen. Technically half-brother, but their mothers were sisters, so they still share the same set of grandparents. The maternal grandfather was the vicar Georg Christian Nesselius.

cousins:

Martin Caesar, vicar of Traben. Cousin of Konstantin Caesar - he had a somewhat troubled life.

Johann Peter Hebel studied theology as well but didn't quite make it to become a parish priest.

Further clergymen in the Hunsrück area are listed in this wiki.

 

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

a famous cousin

One of the nuggets of family history information that have been handed down the generations ever since Christoph Gottlieb Kauer and Margaretha Imig brought up their five daughters in the railway station of Adamsweiler is the fact that the writer Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) was a first cousin of Christoph Gottlieb's maternal great-grandmother Maria Magdalena Hebel, born 1747 in Simmern.

Given what we know now, I am particularly intrigued by this information transfer, because our most recent Jewish ancestor, Karl Henrich Weyland, born around 1745 in Idstein, sits directly below Maria Magdalena in the Kekule list. (They both died long before Karl Henrich's daughter married Maria Magdalena's son, so they wouldn't have met each other even though they share lots of grandchildren.) Whereas everybody knew about the Hebel connection, allegedly nobody knew that Karl Henrich was Jewish.

Anyhow, the Hebel lineage has always been from Simmern, but Johann Peter's father migrated to Basel (Swiss Confederacy), so I assume Maria Magdalena may not have seen him all that often. I'll put a potted biography below. Note that he, too, like a dozen ancestors of the Kauer household and innumerable relatives, studied theology. He never quite managed to become a parish priest, but somehow found himself presiding over the protestant church of the Grand Duchy of Baden (that last bit wasn't part of the orally transmitted story).

As the story of our link to fame was handed down the generations, so were the books. I have one from my childhood, so had my father and I believe the one here on the left is from my grandmother:

And this one is signed by my father:

Johann Peter Hebel

His parents, Johann Jacob Hebel (born at Simmern, baptised 29.1.1720) and Ursula Oertlin (born 10.11.1726 Schopfheim) married on 30.7.1759 at Hauingen (Lörrach).

He was born on 10.5.1760 in Basel, where his parents worked during as servants to the Iselin family during the summer season. Their permanent residence was in the village of Hausen in the Wiesental, the home of the mother's family, where Johann Jakob worked as a weaver during the winter. His paternal grandparents from Simmern, who are also my ancestors, were no longer alive by this time: Johann Nikolaus Hebel (1677-1739) and Maria Magdalena Müller (1687-1752).

On 25.7.1761, his father died of typhoid fever, as did his younger sister Susanna, who was only a few weeks old.

His cousin and my ancestor Maria Magdalena Hebel married Christian Kauer at Simmern on 2.9.1773. I suspect that given the early death of his father and considering the distance, he may not have come to the wedding.

His mother died when he was 13. Benefactors enabled him to attend the Gymnasium Illustre at Karlsruhe from 1774 until graduation in 1778.

His oldest uncle and my ancestor Johann Georg Hebel (1708-1785), a linnen weaver at Simmern, was alive at that point, but Simmern and the entire Hunsrück area never quite recovered from the wars of the 17th century and were by that time a major source of migration to the New World, so going back to his paternal family probably wouldn't have improved his prospects.

1778-1780 he studied theology at the University of Erlangen.

From 1780 he worked as a teacher in Hertingen, and from 1783 at the Paedagogium in Loerrach.

In 1791 he moved to the Gymnasium at Karlsruhe, where he became head teacher in 1808. He remained at Karlsruhe for the rest of his life, as his wish to become the vicar of a parish in his native Wiesental area did not come to fruition.

His literary work started in 1799 when he wrote the 32 "Allemannische Gedichte" in the dialect of the Wiesental after a visit to that region. They were published in 1803 and favourably reviewed by luminaries including Goethe.

From 1807 he was in charge of saving the publication that became the "Rheinischer Hausfreund" for which he wrote the widely known Kalendergeschichten in an effort to boost its circulation. The first book version of these stories appeared in 1811 as the Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreunds (see the somewhat later editions above).

In 1819, he became the first prelate of the Lutheran state church of the Grand Duchy of Baden.

In 1821, when the Lutheran and Reformed churches of the Grand Duchy of Baden united to become the Evangelische Landeskirche, he became the first prelate of the new organisation.

He died on 22.9.1826 in Schwetzingen during a business trip undertaken in this function.

 

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

PS Since I started visiting the street libraries of Düsseldorf, I also discovered a few more editions, including:

... and this one with a dedication dating from 1925 and some intriguing illustrations:

preventing pandemics

In mid-May, at the tail end of my recent travel, the hantavirus outbreak on board the cruiseship Hondius dominated the news for a few days to be swiftly replaced by news from the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So I decided to do another feature on infectious diseases and what we can do to stop them from becoming pandemics.

Thankfully, the hantavirus hasn't spread further beyond the people already known to be infected at the time when it made the headlines. Meanwhile, the Ebola problem is still with us and growing, with various issues including deforestation and the cutting of aid budgets making it worse and more dangerous for the rest of the world.

My feature is out now:

Preparedness prevents pandemics

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 11, 8 June 2026, Pages R465--R467

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

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky.

Last year's thread is here .

The MV Hondius anchored in the port of Granadilla de Abona, during the outbreak of hantavirus disease. (Image: AcfiPress Noticias Canarias/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).)

PS: Note also that today's issue is a special issue about plant evolution, with lots of reviews, articles, primers and quick guides on that field. All looks very exciting.