Prose and Passion: cities, towns and villages that got away

Thursday, January 30, 2025

cities, towns and villages that got away

Lost cities season 2: epilogue

In the lost cities series I have been introducing 22 towns and cities where some of my ancestors (and one set of inlaws) used to live for extended periods of time. In 20 cases the relevant people were resident in the 20th century, only two of these places were already "lost" in the 19th. Twelve of the places were then or are now "big cities" in the sense that a "Großstadt" in Germany is defined as a city of more than 100,000 residents. The series was somewhat biased towards places I find interesting in the respective time and/or in the shape I can visit today.

There are of course many other places popping up in my family tree that may not meet these arbitrary selection criteria - they may be too small, too distant in time, too uninspiring or maybe I just haven't quite figured out yet what their attraction is. The lost cities I selected are often tinged with a tiny bit of nostalgia for a place & time combination that was right for at least some time.

Here are some other places that didn't make the cut. First some that I have introduced before in a different context, and perhaps they weren't quite interesting enough to motivate a repeat appearance. Come to think of it, this list may well evolve into a third series of past places, perhaps dropping the "cities" label (most recent stays first, end years bold):

Peter and Frieda lived at Gronau from 1926-1932. I've shared a photo of Peter at the relevant border crossing here. Their second daughter was born on the Dutch side of that border.
Julius and Helene lived in many places - I've shown their shop in Luisenthal (Saar) here. The family stayed there from 1911 to 1918. After which they made the fundamental error of moving to the countryside. It didn't last long.
Adamsweiler, where our old station master Christoph Kauer worked until his death in 1909, was a cute little station but it is sadly in the middle of nowhere. I visited the station once in the 1980s and have no memory of the village, I think it is essentially a through road with a dozen houses. Among the previous stations where he worked, Mülhausen/Mulhouse is the biggest and most interesting city (just over 100,000 now), and the village of Fontoy/Fentsch may also be worth looking at, as it's the birthplace of Helene.
Simmern must have been a great place before 1689, but never recovered from the attention of Louis XIV, as I have written previously. 3/16 of my DNA comes from the town and the surrounding villages since the dawn of time (ie at least since the 15th century), see the map below. In the 1870s, the Kauer and the Imig Clan left Simmern behind in the name of progress, and I am sure that was a good move. (As mentioned in the Imig Clan entry, some Imigs were among the families who tried to emigrate to the New World in the 18th century and only got as far as the lower Rhine area, I just love that story, need to do a dedicated blog entry for that some time.) Shoemaker Matthias Kauer was the last ancestor to die in Simmern, in 1885. He's also the second oldest one of whom we have a photo.

Map of the villages around Simmern where just under a quarter of my ancestry has been living for centuries. The numbers on the red dots indicate how many ancestors are known to have been born in a given location. Not sure where the original map came from, I only have a colour photocopy or printout of what must have been a much larger map probably dating from the late 20th century.
Steel workers from Wallonia moved to Fachbach on the river Lahn in 1672 - they stayed there for several generations and form a significant part of the ancestry of the de la Strada family that settled in Krefeld after 1776. I wrote about their migration history here.
I wrote about the miners migrating to Sainte Marie aux Mines (Markirch) before 1732 here. The notoriously un-googlable Paul Simon moved on to get married in Böchingen in 1768.
I mentioned the high school at Trarbach (Mosel) here, where two generations of Ebner ancestors were teachers in the late 17th / early 18th century. The older teacher was born at Trarbach in 1646 in a family of refugees from Hungary - not clear from when they were resident in Trarbach. The younger of the pair died 1734, but his wife survived him and remarried, so it is unclear how long she remained present at Trarbach. His daughter married a pastor who ended his career as the vicar of the small village of Eckweiler (157 residents then, wiped out in 1979), leading to a descent of our lineage into a more rural environment in the following generations. The Ebners had at least seven children, so it may be worth checking the others and setting up a Trarbach Clan (in the meantime, see this GedBas file). So very roughly, we're looking at 1646 to 1734, just because these are the data points we have. In 1904 Trarbach on the right bank of the Mosel was merged with Traben on the left bank to form Traben-Trarbach which today has just under 6,000 residents. OK, having said all this, Trarbach may be a candidate for a third series with smaller towns hidden deeper in the past.

Some make too transient an appearance to leave a permanent impression

Richard studied at Vienna and Göttingen before arriving at Bonn. I don't recall any Viennese memories but he did talk about famous Göttingen profs such as David Hilbert (1862-1943).
Peter and Frieda also lived at Hamm for a year around 1933. I know nothing about Hamm, but it is very well connected on the railway network. It also has a direct Regional Express connection to Düsseldorf-Bilk (the RE6 to Minden). That brings the total to seven. Good enough reason to visit the place?
Zella St. Blasii, today part of Zella Mehlis, population 12,400, was the birth place of Heinrich the cellist, but it was only a stepping stone in the itinerary of his father Richard the railway man. Although Heinrich spent the rest of his life being labeled a Thuringian because of his birthplace, to the best of my knowledge nobody ever shed a tear for the memories of Zella St. Blasii.
Maria Luise Mentzel, Heinrich's mother, died at Magdeburg in 1916, three years after her husband died at Tangermünde where they had lived since 1888. I'm guessing she may have moved to Magdeburg to live with her daughter Gertrud, but I'm not sure as I have no evidence either way.

Many of the places (especially in the earlier family history) were simply too small for my tastes

Dieuze is Richard's birthplace but we have to remember that his father's regiment was sent there as a punishment for unspecified misbehaviour while they were stationed in Strasbourg. It was a tiny village with absolutely no claim to fame.
Schwaney has an amazing musical tradition but has never been more than a village (current population 2000). Frieda's grandfather from Schwaney died before she was born, so there wasn't any chance of a transfer of that musical culture. Unless they have it in their DNA ...
Münzesheim isn't much bigger and became part of the new town of Kraichtal. Similarly, many other relevant places around that area are just villages, such as Elsenz, which is now part of Eppingen. The most interesting thing about them is that the area was comprehensively depopulated in the Thirty Years War and resettled in the second half of the 17th century by immigrants from Switzerland (my immigrant ancestors are listed here), which due to its long lasting peace and prosperity had a relative population overload.
Similarly, the ancestry of the Lorsch family is scattered around Odenwald villages which are all too small to be featured here. Some have a long history, such as Zotzenbach, which was first mentioned in 877, so is due to celebrate its 1250th birthday soon. It is now part of Rimbach. Maybe I should pick one representative out of the crowd of small places. The area also had a population bottleneck after the 30 Years War, meaning that everybody with ancestry in that region is probably related to my mother and to Grace Kelly.

Your guide to the complete #lostcities series: