After piling up CVs of a dozen protestant priests in the ancestry of Helene Kauer (see the list at the bottom of last week's entry), I now feel I should have another look elsewhere in the family tree. So far I only know of one (and he's also a fairly recent addition, from November 2021), namely Adam Getrost who was the vicar of Rimbach in the Odenwald. Here is what we know about him so far:
Adam Getrost
He was born 18.12.1627 in Creuzburg, Thuringia. The place is in the Wartburgkreis (district) so presumably close to the historically extremely important Wartburg castle, where Martin Luther took refuge and translated the New Testament into German a century earlier.
His parents were Adam Getrost (born 1600 at Creuzburg) and Elisabetha Herwig (born 1601 at Creuzburg), who had married in 1623. Beyond that, there are different versions of Adam's ancestry online. In one, his paternal grandmother is Anna Guthen, in another we find Margerita Assmus in that spot. The Guthen ancestry has a generation more and also more details of ancestors, while the Assmus version has a very comprehensive list of descendants and is also represented in geneanet.
The name Getrost is an interesting and rare one, related to the verb trösten (to comfort), so pointing to a supportive and comforting person. The name distribution today is centered on the Odenwald with nothing in Thuringia, so this seems to suggest that Adam had good reasons to flee from there, and horrible things may have happened to his name line relatives there. In line with that:
On 4.8.1637 his father died at Creuzburg aged only 37, when his youngest son was only seven months old, as the church records note, without revealing the name of that child (Guthen version).
His mother died 17.9.1654 also at Creuzburg, recorded under the name Getrost, so obviously she hadn't married again.
On 28.11.1654, just two months after his mother died, he married Maria Elisabetha Rodenhausen from Eschau in her home town. Eschau is near Aschaffenburg and today part of Bavaria, but back then it had nothing to do with Bavaria. It was ruled by the counts of Erbach, who also ruled the Odenwald region where the newly wedded couple settled down.
Their daughter, Susanna Getrost, was born 12.2.1656 at Zotzenbach, Odenwald.
Further children listed on GedBas (the Assmus version):
12.04.1664 Abraham
15.09.1667 Eva
about 1669 Philipp
about 1670 Heinrich
05.12.1671 Maria Salome
about 28.09.1674 Michael
until 1662 he was Präzeptor (elementary school teacher) at Michelstadt, Odenwald.
Michelstadt (Odenwald)
Source: Von User: Bgabel auf wikivoyage shared, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23023847
In 1665, he became the vicar of Rimbach, Odenwald, and initially also served as a schoolteacher there. Daughter Susanna married Sebastian Schütz in around 1678. Both my Odenwald great-grandparents (who ran the bakery at Lorsch and were first cousins) descend from this couple.
In 1686, a the first school house was built and Nikolaus Ludwig Hof became the first teacher.
He died 24.9.1704 in Rimbach so may well have stayed as vicar until his death.
His son Johann Michael Getrost, served as a teacher at nearby Zotzenbach 1710-1722 (elsewhere in the source it says that the school in Zotzenbach only started operating in 1729, so he may have taught at Rimbach). Gedbas suggests that he was a shoemaker as well as a teacher. After him, three generations of Getrost descendants were teachers at Zotzenbach from 1729 through to 1826, but also agricultural workers during the summer season. As reported by local historian Jakob Getrost in 1960.
Sources:
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