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