After revisiting the Weiß Chronicles including the biography of Johannes Weiß, the vicar of Eckweiler from 1740 to 1772, I had another look at the history of the village, which unfortunately disappeared from the surface of the Earth in the 1980s, leaving nothing but the little church and an old chestnut tree.
It reminded me that the Lutheran village clergymen in that area formed an interesting kind of network between neighbouring parishes and across generations. For instance, the next vicar of Eckweiler taking over from Johannes Weiß, was his son in law. Four of my direct ancestors played parts in that game regionally. Johannes Weiß at Eckweiler was the most recent one, then there's his father-in-law Philipp Nicolaus Ebner at Alterkülz, then the great-great-grandfather of his daughter-in-law at Gebroth, and finally Peter Siegel, who studied with Martin Luther and brought the Reformation to Kirn, was the earliest.
In an effort to better understand the culture of these networks, I'll list all the vicars who held the parish of Eckweiler in a timeline from the Reformation through to its dissolution, to see if there are any further connections with people we know (names of interest in bold).
My main source for this endeavour is the book:
Eckweiler: Eine Kirche ohne Dorf
Monika Kirschner, Hans Werner Ziemer
2005 (printed privately, no ISBN number
referred to as "the book" below, but in an earlier effort to draw up a family tree of an Eckweiler person not (yet) related to me, I also used the Einwohnerbuch Eckweiler-Daubach, which I don't have at hand right now. That ancestry of Johann Nikolaus Fuchs also includes several of the clergymen listed below.
timeline
1557 16.7. official date of the Reformation in the Hintere Grafschaft Sponheim, the microstate to which Eckweiler then belonged. (While the book says it belonged to Hintere (Eastern) Grafschaft Sponheim, Wikipedia says at least in the initial partitioning it was part of the Vordere (Western) Grafschaft Sponheim. It may have been reshuffled to the other part at some point, but the Reformation came to both parts simultaneously, which were otherwise surrounded by mostly catholic areas.)
1557-1586 Remigius Thiel is the first Lutheran vicar of Eckweiler. He died at Eckweiler 9.1.1602 aged over 80.
1586-1593 Johannes Ries, then moved on to Gebroth.
1593-1599 Melchior Beerwein. He ran into trouble and disappeared without a trace.
1599-1621 Johann Valentin Faber. He died in Eckweiler January 1621. His son and grandson also were vicars, more info about the family here. According to that forum contribution, his wife, Juliane Teutchag, was the daughter of the vicar of Wallhausen, from a long line of clergymen in Hessen. The unusual name may be a misreading of Tautphoeus, which originated from a latinised version of the village name Dautphe (near Biedenkopf, Hessen) where that lineage came from.
1621-1635 Nicolaus Mohr Now that's interesting because I think he may very well be related to our Landschreiber Mohr in the same generation. Both are believed to have died from the plague which hit the area in 1635-36. The village of Daubach near Eckweiler was reported to have no residents left for about a decade.
until 1663 Johann Jakob Faber, grandson of Johann Valentin Faber, listed above, was the vicar. Not sure when his tenure started as the 30-years-war and the plague may have interrupted village life and church services. The earliest mention in the book is from 1650. From 1663 until 1677 he was the vicar in nearby Pferdsfeld, which meant he oversaw the burial of the next vicar of Eckweiler:
1663-1674 Johann Michael Becker who died 30.4.1674 aged only 37. According to Gedbas he married Anna Katharina Hauth (from a long lineage of clergymen, who married two other colleagues before and after this one) and had a son called Johann Friedrich Becker born 28. May 1673 in Eckweiler. NB I have an ancestor Anna Eva Becker from Laubenheim who married in 1671 at Horn. Her father was Wendel Becker from Laubenheim.
1674-1690 Johann Justus Leyendecker. Born ca. 1642 in Trarbach, died 28.11.1699 in Weiler. That is funny - he appears in a family tree we once drew up for somebody else who's not related to me (yet) but whose ancestors in the Hunsrück area moved very much in the same kind of social circles as mine. (That's the ancestry of Johann Nikolaus Fuchs, born 24.8.1820 in Eckweiler.) And oops, the Fabers mentioned above are also part of this family tree, as are the Schauss family who held the post station and inn in the village.
1691-1697 Johann Heinrich Brach
1697-1740 Johann Philipp Forst. According to this page, he married Elisabetha Margaretha Liernur from a family that produced multiple clergymen. Her Father was Johann Albert Liernur, who was the vicar of Bergen from 1678 to his death 31 Mar 1707. Johann Philipp Forst died 30.1.1752 at Eckweiler aged 77.
1740-1772 Johannes Weiß (1704-1772). My ancestor - see the Weiß Chronicles for his short biography. Note that his wife, Katharina Elisabeth Ebner (1712-1790), was the daughter of a Lutheran priest as well. She came from Trarbach, where her father and grandfather hat taught at the grammar school (Lateinschule) which still exists today.
1773-1818 Philipp Jacob Bauer, who was married to Maria Elisabeth Weiß (-1819), the daughter of his predecessor, so he also appears in the Weiß Chronicles, with the claim that they had no children. The residents register of Eckweiler notes two children, however, who both died before reaching school age. According to the book, Philipp Jakob Bauer died 27.7.1818 aged 85, having retired from the vicar's job earlier that year. According to GedBas, however, he was born 24.11.1734 at Enkirch (on the river Mosel, just downstream of Trarbach) and died 29.8.1818 in Eckweiler which would make him 83. He is part of a very extensive family network on GedBas, with a complete set of eight great-grandparents and name line ancestry (wine growers at Enkirch) going back to the 16th century, but no obvious link to any of my Bauer ancestors in the area. Funnily enough, I have another protestant priest from Enkirch among my direct ancestors, Nikolaus Andreae, who became vicar of Gebroth (not far from Eckweiler) in 1632. And his great-great-granddaughter married a son of Johannes Weiß. It's all one big network, I'm telling you.
1818-1822 The vicar of nearby Pferdsfeld, Markus Mitscher, also serves Eckweiler, but the parish resists being permanently merged into that of Pferdsfeld and having to commute for services.
1822-1827 Georg August Ludwig Schmidtborn, who moved on to Kirn after his brief tenure. He went on to have a rather stellar career in the church administration, see his Wikipedia entry.
1827-1829 Georg Röbenacke, who followed a call to Wetzlar after only two years in office. There he drowned in the river Lahn. Could have lived a long and happy life in Eckweiler ...
In 1828 Regina Katharina Weiss (born 10.9.1779), granddaughter of the vicar Johannes Weiss, and daughter of the mayor of Pferdsfeld, married Johannes Fuchs in Eckweiler. She was 49 years old at that point, so probably married to somebody else before?
1829-1844 Johann Wilhelm Arnold Mebus He died 25.3.1844 freezing to death at age 81 when travelling on foot from Winterburg to Eckweiler and caught in an unseasonal snowdrift.
1845-1847 Konrad Cörper Died 28.9.1847 aged only 39.
1848-1859 Gustav Adolf Lang, moved on to Hottenbach
1859-1862 Karl Heinrich Noel. Died 22.11.1862 at Eckweiler, aged 44.
1864-1888 Gustav Heinrich Roffhack. Died at Eckweiler 15.4.1888 aged 76. During his tenure, in 1881, the teacher Valentin Klee took office in the village, who left detailed comments about many aspects of village life. He was not impressed with Roffhack's work but liked the work of his successor better:
1889-1900 Johann Wilhelm Vogelsang. He moved on to Kirn. First to be represented with a portrait photo in the book.
On 28.8. 1891 Christian Gottlieb Weiß (* 29.5.1819), great-grandson of our vicar Johannes Weiß, wrote down the Weiß Chronicles, stating explicitly that he was living at Eckweiler at that time. Based on that date, our family connection with Eckweiler lasted for at least 150 years, from 1740-1891. However, his daughter Sophie married Franz Philipp Kehrein in Eckweiler (his family seems to have had a farm in Pferdsfeld). Their older son (born before 1880) appears to have stayed in Eckweiler had five children there (and Christian Gottlieb may have been living with them when he wrote down the family history, seeing his wife had died in 1886), so for all we know there may have been descendants right through to the time the place was evacuated. Their younger son Karl Kehrein (1880-1942) was a baker at Kirn, where my great-great aunt Johanna borrowed the Weiß Chronicles from him and made the copy we still have today (the original has gone missing). Incidentally, Karl Kehrein was married to Lina Martin, who according to our records was also a cousin of Johanna's via the Kauer family (Gedbas disagrees though). According to this newspaper clipping, Artur and Else Kehrein refused to leave Pferdsfeld when the villages were cleared in the 1980s. Artur died in 1994 and Else eventually moved to a care home in Sobernheim where she died in 2014, but their house was only demolished in 2022, long after the military airfield ceased to exist. So between the two villages we easily get to 250 years of family presence.
1900-1906 Wilhelm Rheingans. In 1906, he published a short history of the parish of Eckweiler which I haven't got. Then he moved on to the new industrial city Oberhausen in the Ruhr area (not to be confused with the eponymous village in the Hunsrück). According to Gedbas he had four children and died 7.2.1914 in Elberfeld, aged 43.
1907-1934 Otto Jungjohann. Building work on the church that was planned under his two predecessors finally started happening in 1908, always accompanied by the critical remarks of teacher Valentin Klee in his school chronicles. Both his predecessors came for the grand inauguration ceremony on 2.12.1908. On 9.2.1915, the village was connected to the electricity network.
1935-1942 Eduard Jungjohann, son of the predecessor. Retired for health reasons and died the same year at Ulm.
1943-1952 Ernst Altenpohl
1952-1952 Eduard Otto Heinz Hinnemann (GedBas entry) Died suddenly on 16.11.1952 while the bells were ringing for a service he was due to hold.
1954-1956 Erich Lotze. Moved to Wuppertal.
1956-1957 NN Theunert. Died 26.9.1957. Didn't even leave a record of his first name.
1959-1976 Peter Schumacher. The last one officially appointed to this parish. As the increasing problems with the nearby airfield made people move away, the remaining residents were served by priests from neighbouring parishes until the evacuation.
10.6.1979 the villages of Pferdsfeld and Eckweiler officially cease to exist. In Eckweiler alone, the last 302 residents were resettled and 51 houses demolished, leaving only the church standing.
Other Eckweiler-related VIPs include Friedrich Wilhelm Utsch, who may or may not have been the inspiration for the folk song "Ein Jäger aus Kurpfalz", and who used a hunting lodge at Entenpfuhl, which the book claims as Eckweiler territory. A later reincarnation was built on Pferdsfeld's land in an effort to save tax, apparently.
Leads for further study:
- This genealogy wiki has short biographies of many parsons (more than 50 family names) in the Hunsruck area in English - sadly not including any of my ancestors or in-laws. Although the Andreae person at the top of the list must be related to my ancestor Nicolaus Andrae who was vicar of Gödenroth and Gebroth (Gedbas), who is mentioned under Corvinus, see below.
- Stop Press, clicking through from that Gedbas entry I found another clergymen in my family tree, Johann Balthasar Orth, vicar of Kirn from 1560-69, thus the direct successor of Peter Siegel. (Oh, and related to Goethe.) And another one, Valentin Konstantin Keiser. Basically both grandfathers of Nicolaus Andrae's wife were vicars too. And after his death, she married another one, Valentin Corvinus, who appears in that wiki list linked above. The Corvinus guy married three Orth women in succession, two sisters and their cousin. All of which calls for a separate blog entry or two.
- books I still have to find:
Eckweiler Geschichte eines Dorfes by Engelmann, Uwe Karlsruhe 1983
Die Geschichte der Gemeinde Eckweiler-Daubach by: Rheingans, Wilhelm, 1906
Who is who? - see my new name index for all things family history.
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