a sparkly violin

Pirate Luthier update

This month it's been three years since I repaired my first violin, and violins 39 and 40 have just come in on the last days of October, so I'm beginning to feel that this new hobby is actually working.

Violin 39 is a full-sized nearly new one painted black with subtle sparkles, which I've tried to bring out by shining a torch at the central region of the belly in addition to the natural light:

It isn't labelled at all, but I have a strong suspicion that it comes from gear 4 music or some similar outlet. What I am beginning to realis is that these companies stick together the bits and pieces without checking if they actually work. Thus I find pegs that slip because they don't fit right across the peg hole and have too little surface to grip on. That's easily fixed with a bit of sandpaper wrapped around the handle of a thin paintbrush, but novice players who naively buy these instruments may never be able to tune them up.

On this one I had to widen two peg holes and also to lower the bridge and the nut. After these interventions, it is now playable, and sounds surprisingly good for a cheap violin covered in black paint. I played it at this month's slow session and have nothing more to moan about (other than that I might put the strings half a millimetre lower still).

Next up, violin 40, which has the same sort of problems, and the additional complication that it is electrified. Must dig out my little amp and cable and see if the electric stuff works at all.

 

---

 

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.

all felines great and small

The internet always wants more cat content, so here comes my latest feature on cats of various sizes, from the newly described tiny species to jaguars and tigers.

Conservation for cats of all sizes

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 21, 2 November 2026, Pages R1203--R1205

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 .

Jaguars are unique among the surviving big cats in that they benefit from a continent-wide network of habitats, which has now been mapped in detail. (Photo: Wesley Fernandes/Unsplash.)

the shape of the Earth

I was planning to do a post on the 50th birthday of my globe a couple of years ago, but didn't quite get round to it, so here comes in time for its 52nd birthday, a view of the Earth as it looked in 1974:

The globe has served me well this half century, keeping me aware of the fact that the Earth is round and that Greenland is in fact smaller than South America, and Africa is huge. Which is more than can be said about all those maps needlessly based on the Mercator projection that we see just about everywhere (not Mercator's fault but due to the map apps). I'm not starting another rant about this, but it was a relief to hear earlier this year that the UN has recognised the problem too.

The globe is still with me, in this room actually as I write this, and I took a photo of it a while ago - STOP PRESS: I found it, it's even on flickr:

I also have a globe of the night sky in the same size - received a couple of years later I think.

If I ever wanted to upgrade to a handpainted model, I'd visit Bellerby & Co Globemakers at London. I used to follow them on tumblr back in the 2010s but they haven't posted there since 2021.

PS: the every picture series has been on hiatus this year, might bring it back next year.

a famous brandy

We have brewers, wine makers and also a distiller in the extended family. In the cases where the businesses were successful over several generations, there tends to be some information available about these families. So conversely, I am also looking into other famous names in the drinks industries from the relevant geographical areas that are not related to us (yet) to look for parallels, inspiration, and possible connections.

After writing about our old distiller, I felt inspired to look into the Asbach brand, which comes with a nice old-fashioned typography, using the letter A in a shape suggestive of Gutenberg era printing, as well as the adjective "uralt" (ancient). Sadly, the company isn't nearly as ancient as one might think, dating back only to the empire of Wilhelm II.

A bottle of Asbach Uralt filtering autumn sunlight. Own photo.

Hugo Asbach (1868-1935) trained as a merchant at Cologne and got interested in the distillation of brandy. He went to France to learn more about the making of Cognac. After his return in 1892 he set up his own brandy making business in the picturesque town of Rüdesheim on the very romantic middle section of the river Rhine, strategically placed in midst of different wine growing areas on all sides with easy delivery by ship. In times of continuing rivalry with France, the idea was to make something comparable to Cognac to be independent of imports. Initially, it could even be referred to as cognac. Reportedly, Asbach coined the word Weinbrand in 1907 as a German translation for cognac. Only after the Versailles Treaty of 1919 did the name cognac become protected as a designation of geographic origin, along with champagne. Hence we now call the brandy Weinbrand - or simply Asbach. Beyond the drink itself, Asbach also introduced chocolate beans filled with brandy, the Weinbrandbohnen.

All of which is fascinating in terms of the origins of products we still buy today, but not much use for deeper incursions into family history or indeed the history of distilleries and spirits. There is only a tiny little family tree known with no hint of wine, beer or spirit connections in Hugo's ancestry (source: NDB):

2. Albert Hugo Asbach, carpenter at Cologne
3. Helena Schmitz
4. Hermann Asbach, Privatsekretär
5. Agathe Heinen (Heiden)
6. Theodor Schmitz, Tagelöhner in Kierdorf (Kreis Euskirchen)
7. Anna Maria Liesenberg

For reference, Hugo Asbach's birth year of 1868 fits in the generation of my great-grandparents, which to me is just yesterday. He is younger than Adam the baker of Lorsch and his wife but older than the other six. The distiller in my family tree was four generations further back: Johann Gottlieb Weiß (1736-1800).

One interesting aspect, however, is the name Asbach, which the family shares with a village not so far from Cologne and Rüdesheim. The name does not, as one might think, reference a small watercourse (Bach). Instead it derives from a Franconian word indicating a type of small village. So the village is indeed ancient, even if the eponymous distillery business isn't.

feeling lucky

I read a piece about the neuroscience and self-fulfilling prophecy of "feeling lucky" by Nobuko Nakano in the Guardian earlier this year and liked it so much that I suggested the author's book for a review in C & I.

Lucky people: A neuroscientist's guide to attracting luck, cultivating success and leading a happier life
Nobuko Nakano
Gallery Books 2026
ISBN 978-1-3985-5118-3

My review of the book is now out in the October issue of Chemistry & Industry:

As luck would have it

Chemistry & Industry Volume 90, Issue 10, October 2026, Page 36

access via:

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

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

The book is really slim and doesn't have a lot more to offer beyond the content of the Guardian piece, so the recommendation would be to read that. Here's my thumbs down paragraph which didn't quite make it into print:

She loses me (and probably many scientist readers) completely in the last chapter, when she extorts the benefits of prayer as a neuropsychological path to self-improvement (without proscribing which deity you should pray to). Meditation I could have handled, but the insistence on prayer made me feel my luck just deserted me.

 

---

 

My brand new list of book reviews is here.

nuns on the run

In the whole network of Lutheran clergymen I have been unpicking this year, three separate lineages lead back to clergymen who were contemporaries of Martin Luther. Peter Siegel studied with Luther, the other two may or may not have met him. In the case of Johannes Andreae senior we know that his son, Johannes junior, studied at Wittenberg in the 1550s (after Luther died) and worked as Melanchthon's assistant. Obviously this could have been facilitated if his dad already had a connection to Wittenberg.

Church historians have recorded the employment histories of these clergymen, which enabled me to write their CVs, but the women of the time only appear on the record if they marry another priest. This is unfortunate, because the novelty of clergymen having wives and children, setting the image of a "model family" was arguably a major factor in the spread of the Reformation and the emergence of a new educated middle class. The culture of the Pfarrhaus family was in many cases handed down in matrilinear succession, i.e. vicars' daughters became vicars' wives - but where do the matrilines start? In this context, a comment under this blog post drew my attention to the nuns who escaped from convents after hearing of Luther's Reformation.

In the most famous case, 12 nuns left the convent of Nimbschen (Marienthron) in 1523. Only three were accepted back by their families, the other nine took refuge at Wittenberg under Luther's protection. He ended up finding husbands for all of them except for Katharina von Bora, who then suggested marriage to him.

Ruins of the convent of Nimbschen.
Source: Wikipedia: Von Dguendel - Eigenes Werk, CC BY 3.0

As we know virtually nothing of the wives of our protestant priests in the time of the Reformation, there is the intriguing possibility that there might be an escapee nun among them too. So I tried to find the names of the nine nuns of the first group (other breakouts followed later), but haven't found all of them yet. Here's my list in case anybody knows more than I do:

Katharina von Bora first lodged with the family of Lucas Cranach and then married Martin Luther. Her aunt Magdalena von Bora later also left the convent to join the Luther household. Katharina and Luther had three daughters and three sons. Two of the daughters died young. Descendants of the surviving children are listed eg in GedBas.

Ave von Schönfeld married the physician Basilius Axt. They had three sons and a daughter. The daughter married the Lithuanian writer and Reformator Stanislovas Rapolionis. In a letter, Luther later admits that if he had been inclined to pick a wife for himself out of the nine refugees he would have chosen Ave.

Margaretha von Schönfeld (Ave's sister)

Magdalena von Staupitz married Tiburtius Geuder and settled at Grimma, where she became the teacher of the town's first elementary school for girls. The couple didn't have any children.

So that's four out of nine.

 

---

 

While I'm rounding up women of the Reformation, other women mentioned in Katharina's biography (by Lisbeth Haase) include:

Katharina Schütz, wife of Matthäus Zell, priest at Strasbourg. The couple visited the Luthers at Wittenberg in the 1530s.

Argula von Grumbach (nee von Stauff) championed the Reformation at the expense of her wealth and status, met Martin Luther at Coburg in 1530, from where he followed the developments at the Reichstag of the Augsburg.

Elisabeth Cruciger (nee von Meseritz) escaped from a convent in Pomerania to follow a priest Johannes Bugenhagen who moved from there to Wittenberg. Married one of his disciples, had a son and a daughter. Famous as a poet and hymnwriter.

The book by Sonja Domröse: Frauen der Reformationszeit, Gelehrt, mutig und glaubensfest. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-525-55012-0 (which I haven't got) includes biographies of:

Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Calenberg-Göttingen, Ursula Weyda, Wibrandis Rosenblatt, Olympia Fulvia Morata, Ursula von Münsterberg (another runaway nun, from a Freiberg convent) as well as the above-named Katharina Zell, Elisabeth Cruciger, Argula von Grumbach,

There is also a list of women of the Reformation in the German edition of Wikipedia.

 

---

 

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

two spotted violas

Pirate Luthier update

Back in July I had a lucky day finding two violas and a violin at Gloucester Green market. All of them have red paint splattered on them but I can live with that. May have served in some kind of art project. I've now set up one viola (number 3) and am working on the other. The one I have set up turned out sounding very nice, so I immediately took it to a session and played it quite a bit and I'm very happy with it. It is an interesting mental exercise to transpose the tunes I play on the violin to fit them into the lower register of the viola.

So here's the one I set up and the other one in the state I found it, kind of a before and after photo.

It looks a little bit disproportioned because I set it up with a violin bridge. The viola bridges I ordered turned out to be much too big for these, so I preferred having a bridge on the small side rather than one where I have to throw away lots of material and still end up with too much. I may have been lucky with the one I randomly picked to set up first, because so far I haven't been able to get equally nice sounds out of the other one, and the pegs are causing me a bit of trouble. But I'm still hopeful it will be playable some time soon.

It would be weird if they really sounded so different, because they are the same size (15 1/2 inches), have the same provenance, and the same label, saying Berini with the drawing of a cat playing fiddle:

According to this post about a similar Berini viola with the cat label, they may have been made in Czechoslovakia.

Since the last pirate luthier post, I've also made the half-size cello 4) playable and handed it back to the youth orchestra folks who are keen on using it. Oh, and in the process of sorting out that cello, I also gave the lovely old cello number 3) a brand new tailpiece.

 

---

 

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.

how life shapes our planet

Today's issue of Current Biology has a special section on Life and Earth. My contribution is a feature on how (microbial) life produces mineral structures. The general (astrobiology-flavoured) theme that our planet is special and habitable because it was shaped by life is one I keep coming back to. I have previously had features on how insects build their own environment and how the collaboration of plants and fungi made the continents habitable, and there is also a lot about this in our astrobiology book. This time you'll find new research about stromatolites, microbialites and polymetallic nodules.

A planet shaped by life

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 20, 19 October 2026, Pages R1085--R1087

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 cover of the special issue shows a section of the Banded Iron Formation from Pilbara, Western Australia, with alternating stripes of iron oxides and chert (microcrystalline silica). Around 2.5 billion years of age, these rock layers are believed to result from shallow-water oxidation of iron that precipitated and sedimented in deeper, still anoxic ocean layers. They are testament to the first increase in oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere, caused by the advent of oxygenic photosysthesis by cyanobacteria, and thus to one of the many ways that Life and Earth have influenced and shaped each other—the focus of our special issue (pages R1079–R1129).
(Image © Australian Museum, photographed by Abram Powell.)

quinces baked and frozen

a special treat:

Baked and frozen quinces. Own photo.

It's quince season and my little tree has produced a record harvest of around 80 kg, so I have quinces on my mind quite a bit. I've given away just under half the load to around seven people via freegle and I think I now have the rest reasonably well under control. I've spread out the quinces on four pallets in an unheated space so I can use them up through the winter without too many of them starting to rot.

One full pallet like this is between 15 and 20 kg of quinces, so this ia less than a quarter of the harvest in this photo. Own photo.

Way back when I started using a complex recipe for a baked quince dessert, with sweet wine (vin santo), cinnamon and cloves and whathaveyou (by Rowley Leigh in the Guardian in 1997, before the start of their current website), and over the years I simplified it more and more, such that now I just cut the quinces in quarters (or eighth if they are huge), cut out the core, wipe them off with a quarter of a lemon, and bake them at 170 deg (fan oven) for just under an hour, rotating the tray by 180 deg after half an hour, also turning the quince wedges in the corners as they tend to burn quite quickly. If I have untreated lemons, I also add shavings of the peel before baking.

These days I like to eat them cold, with some half-defrosted blackberries, and I've also discovered that they can be frozen - as they naturally have the texture of a fruit sorbet, they come out of the freezer as a quince sorbet snack you can eat with your fingers (see photo at the top). One could present six wedges as a star with a scoop of something in the middle (whipped cream, custard, ice cream?). That's my desserts sorted through to February ...

One tray like this takes around 600 - 700 g of cored and quartered quinces, after baking they're reduced to just over half the weight. Own photo.

Will have to work on my food photography skills. Also, revive the quince tag, which I hadn't used in the last 15 years ...

the first Caesar

From correspondence following my earlier blog entry on the lives of the Caesars, I learned that the use of the Latinised name goes back even further than the first Lutheran vicar in the lineage, Johannes Keyser / Caesar (ca. 1480-1543). According to a newspaper piece from 1925 referring to documents in the town archives of Nördlingen, Johannes's grandfather Jacob Keyser used the name Caesar as his scholarly name (Gelehrtenname) when he published a book about herbs. The paper did not approve of the fad of taking Latinised names.

After I posted the original "lives of the Caesars" entry, the next street library I visited at Düsseldorf had the matching book ready for me. The background is formed by two copies of my favourite Latin dictionary, Stowasser, in the Hundertwasser edition (it came in four colours but I have only got two of them so far).
Own photo.

 

Based on this information, we have another little CV to write:

 

---

 

Jacob Caesar (14th/15th century)

If Jacob really was the grandfather of Johannes (estimated birth year 1480) we have to stack up two rather late fatherhoods, say each at age 45 to arrive at an estimated birth year of 1390, which would fit the first thing we actually know about him:

Jacob Keyser came to Nördlingen from Ulm and swore the oath (Bürgereid) to become a citizen of the free city in 1409. The 1925 article claims that the relevant document was still in the city's archives at that point. I understand the archive survived WW2 unscathed so I assume it's still there. At the time, there were an average of 23-24 new citizens coming in per year, with nearly half of them arriving from other cities, like Jacob. Becoming a citizen invoked a fee, and moving away again was also taxed.

Later on he received money from the city council for the writing of a book about herbs. We don't know when. And I haven't been able to find the book (yet).

Nördlingen had been a Free Imperial City since 1215. Note that in 1409, many of the major historic buildings were yet to be built. With around 6,000-8,000 residents in the 15th century (extrapolated from the number of tax payers, which was 1294 in 1404), the town was smaller than regional cities Augsburg, Nürnberg and Ulm, but it was located at an important crossroads and became a significant location for trade especially for the locally produced fustian fabrics.

Construction of the gothic St. Georgskirche began in 1427. Jacob can't have lived to see it completed in 1505.

Nördlingen saw a rise in population until 1437, when harvest failure led to a regional famine. At the end of the 1440s, regional wars between cities led to further population losses. It took until 1480 to recover the population strength it had in 1430. In 1494, there was an epidemic (possibly the plague), which again led to a fall back in population.

For our grandfather connection to work, Jacob must have had a family in the 1430s and at least one son must have survived the famine. Unfortunately, there were no church records for Nördlingen at that time, as they only started in 1579 (still quite early compared to most places).

The only thing one could probably find in the city archives is his tax record and those of his sons and grandsons. Tax records are nearly complete from 1404 onwards.

Sources:

Ingrid Bátori: Herren, Meister, Habenichtse. Die Bürgerschaft der Reichsstadt Nördlingen um 1500. In: Rieser Kulturtage Bd. VI/1, Nördlingen 1986. S. 252–269

Ingrid Bátori Daily life and culture of an urban Elite: The imperial city of Nördlingen in the 15th and 16th century History of European Ideas 1989, 11, 621-627

 

---

 

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

a moral minefield

Some thoughts on

Children of radium: A buried inheritance
Joe Dunthorne
Hamish Hamilton 2025

Waterstones

Carl Auer von Welsbach (1858-1929) was an Austrian chemist who discovered several elements and patented a new kind of gas light using a fabric mantle known as the Welsbach mantle (Auerstrumpf in German). The Auergesellschaft (originally called Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG, DGA or, as if to sound out the letters: Degea) was set up in 1892 to market this innovation in Germany. Osram was a later spinout from it.

The mantle in the original Auer gaslight typically contained thorium dioxide, and there are many other aspects of the company history that are a bit radioactive. During the Weimar Republic, it became a leading manufacturer of gas masks, which defined the company's identity to the extent that its in-house magazine was called Die Gasmaske. As research into the effectiveness of gas masks required the handling of all of the dangerous substances that the mask was meant to filter out of the air, the company had a good excuse to handle dangerous gases including those that had been used as chemical weapons in World War I and whose use was banned in Germany under the Versailles Treaty.

Under Nazi rule, the company was “aryanised” and affiliated with Degussa. Together with Goldschmidt AG, it set up a new company called Orgacid at Ammendorf near Halle in 1934, which produced chemical weapons including mustard gas “just in case”. Although Hitler famously rejected the use of chemical weapons at the front, there were some in the military who wanted to have the option if needed. And the research also fed into the mass murder conducted in the gas chambers of the concentration camps.

Meanwhile, at a separate site in Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, the company hoarded uranium for nuclear fission research. We now know that it was insufficient for atomic bombs, but during World War II, its presence earned the town a massive bombardment leaving it one of the most contaminated places to this day. (There's a brand new paper in PNAS Nexus showing the German atomic bomb project couldn't succeed, but I recall others reaching the same conclusion a few years ago when I wrote a feature about nuclear forensics.)

As if to put a bright smile on all these dealings with death, the Auergesellschaft also developed a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad, which was sold from 1940 until the end of the war. The news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki presumably along with the emerging fate of the "radium girls" dying horrific deaths from chronic radiation exposure made it sufficiently clear that this product wasn’t such a bright idea.

The toothpaste is also where Joe Dunthorne starts his exploration into his Jewish-German family’s involvement in this history. He knew that his grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with Doramad, and that her father had been in charge of developing it. Apparently, the family took stacks of the radioactive material with them as they emigrated to Turkey in time to avoid persecution for being Jewish. At the start, the author seems to have expected to find a romantic story of a lucky escape from the Holocaust, maybe like “When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit.” It turned out to be a very different story.

Siegfried Merzbacher (1883 - 1971), the author’s great-grandfather, left a memoir of several thousand pages which nobody had read. Hidden behind endless pages of irrelevant memories and information copied from encyclopaedias, Dunthorne discovered the admission that Merzbacher had taken part in chemical weapons research at Auergesellschaft and was also closely connected to the colleague Karl Quasebart who set up the production facility near Halle.

The presumed escape to Turkey, it turned out, was a relocation paid by Auergesellschaft, which also continued to pay part of his salary while he continued to work on chemical weapons in Ankara, and regularly corresponded with Quasebart. The notorious massacre conducted by Turkish authorities against the Kurdish village of Dersim in 1937-38 may well have been the result of this German-Turkish co-operation on chemical weapons, as the author finds out on visiting the location.

After the beginning of World War II, the contact was lost (Turkey remained neutral for most of the duration) and the Merzbachers were stripped of their German citizenship for being Jewish. Nevertheless, Siegfried Merzbacher helped out his old friend Quasebart after the war by testifying that he had always supported Jewish colleagues. It was just a bit unfortunate that he also helped to develop Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust. Quasebart died before his denazification procedure was completed.

Although Siegfried Merzbacher and both his sisters got out of Germany in time, there are also Holocaust impacts on the family which the author reveals in the final part of the book. Siegfried’s sister, Elisabeth Kitzinger, ran a Jewish orphanage in Munich, which was so successful it eventually cared for children of all ages and even young adults, eventually accommodated in its own building with 20 rooms from 1926. After it was closed by Nazi authorities, Elisabeth’s close friends and long-term coworkers Alice Bendix and Hedwig Jacobi were deported with the last 12 children in their care and presumably murdered at Auschwitz.

The author stumbles through this minefield of moral complexity like an inquisitive but endearingly clueless family history researcher depending on luck more than on expertise, accompanied by snarky comments from his mother who, he writes, insisted on remaining anonymous. While the resulting book is a gripping read I feel the material deserves a more academic treatment. At the time of this writing, Siegfried Merzbacher does not even have a Wikipedia entry in German or in English. The genealogy is online, however, and his son, physicist Eugen Merzbacher (1921-2013) is in Wikipedia in nine languages. Heck, even Siegfried's father Eugen Merzbacher, his grandfather Abraham Merzbacher, and his nephew Ernst Kitzinger are in Wikipedia so I'm beginning to find it suspicious that Siegfried isn't.

I am sure Siegfried's life straddling the moral divides of the Holocaust would make a fascinating PhD project for a more expert historian.

PS I'm intrigued to see that a German translation has appeared the same year as the English original:

Kinder des Radiums: Auf den Spuren meiner jüdischen Familie Piper Verlag 2025

 

---

 

My brand new list of book reviews is here.

the joy of tsundoku

I have difficulties remembering Japanese words (because they're not related to any language I know) so I have to write about tsundoku, to finally inscribe it into my memory as well as in the blog.

Tsundoku is of course the art of collecting more books than you can conceivably read, or growing an ever expanding to-be-read pile. As this excellent piece in The Conversation explains very succinctly, it's all about the pleasure of anticipation, which is actually measurable with the methods of modern neuroscience. Thus, looking forward to potentially reading an interesting book in the future is almost as satisfying as the reading experience itself. According to the piece, the words involved in the neologism tsundoku are about stacking things up (tsunde), leaving something for later (oku) and reading (doku).

To me personally it is also important that I can arrange physical manifestations of knowledge in an order of my choice, such that I can find it whenever I need it. Especially now that AI is eating the internet and it is getting harder every day to find anything. meaningful online. Stockpiling books is also a way of prepping for the coming information apocalypse.

While I've always had tsundoku tendencies (also extending to other activities beyond reading), the availability of free books from street libraries and house clearances in the neighbourhood have recently been a major boost, enabling me to start collections of early rororo paperbacks and Bloomsbury related biographies, respectively at zero cost.

Here's one of my tsundoku shelves ... fittingly including the book Spillover, because it is also kind of a spillover shelf.

For the books I have actually read, see my new page on bookreviews.

when one in three brides were pregnant

In her book The female line, which I read and reviewed recently, Margaret Ward mentions that (in Britain)

"in the first half of the 19th century, about one third of first children were born within eight months of marriage. It was a 'custom' in some areas (particularly when children were valued for their earning capacity) for marriage only to take place when a woman was pregnant, the idea being that she had thus proved her fertility."

Well,this was news to me, but around the same time I realised that we have a blatant example of a very pregnant bride in the September 1826 wedding in Krefeld. Ward's remark made me wonder if I can back up this observation with statistics from my family tree. So let's see.

Trouble is there weren't many wedding photographers in the first half of the 19th century (with photography only having been invented in 1824), so here's a Victorian wax model instead, from an exhibition on medical illustrations I saw in the Science Museum London in 2012. Own photo.

Among my own great-great-grandparents, we have eight weddings happening between 1850 and 1880, including:
3 cases where the gap to the first birth is less than eight months,
3 where it's more than 9 months, and
2 cases where we're data deficient.

Of the three pregnant brides, one must have been quite obvious, with the child born two months and four days after the wedding, one was intermediate with five months two days to go, and the last had six and a half months till giving birth. Note that if the oldest child we know about was born several years after the wedding, that counts as data deficient, as there may well have been a pregnancy before that one.

One generation back, we have 14 happy couples (16 minus two serving duplicate functions because of cousin marriages two generations down) getting married between 1820 and 1852. Here we have:
4 cases including 3 pregnant and one with a child born before marriage
6 not pregnant
4 data deficient

Among the pregnant brides, the record keeper is the very fertile mother of the Krefeld clan, who gave birth eight weeks and two days after her wedding. Close behind follow my Silesian name line ancestors with three months and eight days gap. The third pregnant bride gave birth seven months and three weeks after her wedding.

One generation further back we have 28 weddings between 1788 and 1823, of which:
2 pregnant
3 not pregnant
23 data deficient

One pregnant bride was the mother of the Krefeld one above, and similarly advanced, giving birth exactly two months after the wedding. Those Catholics at Krefeld appear to have had a special take on the moral norms of their time ... The other had 5 months and 23 days between marrying and giving birth.

So overall, we have data for 21 brides, of whom eight were pregnant (38%), one had an extramarital child. So yes, I can confirm the statistic. I realise that this calculation excludes the married couples who turned out to be infertile, but there is plenty of space left to support my headline claim of one in three. Searching for this online, I also found claims of 40% of first children being born suspiciously early. Also, if premarital sex was used systematically to avoid infertility, it must have had a significant effect on bringing the risk down, so I feel this all fits together quite nicely.

Note that these ancestors are spread out over five different regions (all except Hunsrück and Palatinate). We have two couples from Krefeld, three from three different places in East Westphalia, and one each from Odenwald, Baden and Silesia. There were Catholics involved in four of the marriages, two mixed, and two purely Catholic, all others were Protestants.

So this small sample is geographically representative. For a larger sample specific to one place, one could look at the residents books listing all the births/baptisms of each resident family, ideally together with the wedding date, so from these one could get a lot of datapoints very quickly.

 

---

 

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

plastic pollution problems

One of the major problems we (humanity) have miserably failed to address in the last few decades is plastic pollution. Last time I wrote about it (in April 2024), there was an active attempt to come up with an international treaty on reducing plastic waste, but this process failed to deliver and is now considered stuck. As the waste keeps piling up and we keep discovering new ways in which it harms our planetary environment, it's unfortunately time for another feature on this topic. This time the focus is on the ecological role of microplastics acting as a vector for all kinds of unwanted things.

The feature is out now:

Persistent plastic problems

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 19, 5 October 2026, Pages R1005--R1007

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 .

Plastic nanoparticles are known to penetrate into living cells.
(Image: Karimov Denis and Valova Iana/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).)

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.

 

---

 

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 (1810-1880), had two sons and two daughters. He is the author of the Weiß Chronicles written in Eckweiler in 1891. His daughter Sophie Weiß married Franz Philipp Kehrein at Eckweiler in 1875. Their son Karl Kehrein (1880-1942) married Lina Martin. According to Johanna's version of the Weiss Chronicles, she was his second cousin also a great-grandchild of the teacher C. G. Weiß (via his 5th child, Sophie, see here), but the Kehrein descendants have a different Lina Martin. Given that Johanna knew both Karl and Lina personally and talked about family history with them, I tend to stick with her version. Anyhow, 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.)

 

---

 

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):

 

---

 

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).

 

---

 

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).

 

---

 

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.

 

---

 

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