1664: something brewing in Strasbourg

After discovering various ancestors in 17th century Strasbourg (still a Free Imperial City at that point), it occurred to me that Kronenbourg, having named one of their beers "1664" might have been around at that time too. Unfortunately, the history of the brewery doesn't appear to be very well presented anywhere (it is extremely thin on the company website), so I will just have to compile the bits and pieces I find in this entry.

Von Florent from Paris, France - 1664, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10911888

In 1664 Geronimus Hatt IV (Jérôme Hatt in French; 1633-1675), son of a dyer, started brewing in a house called Zur Kanone (cannon) at the square Rabenplatz (now known as Place du Corbeau). It was named after the raven as in the Middle Ages this area was the place of executions and the birds came to consume the dead bodies. More recently though, this has become a very desirable address, just across the river Ill from the cathedral (reached via the raven's bridge). The brewery business stays in the possession of the Hatt name line until 1977, across more than three centuries and eight generations, which is very impressive. According to his French Wikipedia page (no other language versions available at this point), he had obtained his brewer's licence the same year, whereas this F1 fan page suggests a slightly different version.

According to the F1 page, his son Claude took over the brewery in 1683. However, this name and date doesn't appear in the Wikipedia overview of the family history. There, many different descendants are brewers in various places in Strasbourg and beyond, so to simplify things I'll try to pick out the lineage that leads to the last owner of the family business.

1) Jérôme Hatt IV (1633-1675) marries in 1664 Marguerite Hamm, daughter of the baker Johann Hamm. As described above, he starts brewing in 1664 at Rabenplatz (Place du Corbeau). The very amazing website Maisons de Strasbourg has info on the house numbers 1, 7, 8 and 9 and none of these had a Hatt person (nor a brewer) in the 1660s. The numbering around the square (see the map) only went up to 9, so that only leaves numbers 2-6. Number 5 is huge, so for the humble beginnings of a newly licensed brewer I'd imagine one of the smaller houses.

2) Jérôme Hatt V (1668-1734), brewer renting the house Zum Vogelgesang / Chant des Oiseaux in 1692 (7 quai des bateliers, just a few doors down from the Rabenplatz), marries Catherine Boch the same year. In 1713, he inherits the birdsong house from his mother, who had married the owner Hans Jacob Verius in 1675 and bought the house with him in 1689 when the previous owners filed for insolvency.In 1716 he marries Catherine Goll, mother of brewer number 3). She was previously married to a priest called Georges Frédéric Leonhard, and in 1736 marries Philippe Guillaume Milius In 1746 her son, the brewer Jean Daniel Hatt and his wife (oo 1740) Susanne Marie Kammerer inherit the house. It stays in the Hatt family until 1759. Search "Hieronymus" on the page about the house to find 25 entries relating to the Hatt family. For instance, in the 1730s they also buy neighbouring properties and apply for permission to knock through walls to expand their business space.

3) Jean Hatt (Strasbourg, 14 août 1720-Strasbourg, 29 octobre 1753), founder of the brewery l'Espérance en 1745 à Strasbourg then at Schiltigheim. Marries Marguerite Barbe Heyl 1746 at Strasbourg. Rents the basement of 6 rue de la Croix in 1747. (There are many more hits for Espérance on the website, probably enough info to reconstruct the history of the breweries operating under that name.)

4) Jean-Louis Hatt (Strasbourg 1752 - 1804), brewer at l'Espérance. Marries Anne Barbe Kellervitter in 1780 at Strasbourg.

5) Philippe Jacques Hatt (Strasbourg 1787 - 1862), brewer at l'Espérance, founder of the brewers' association of Strasbourg. Marries Marie Catherine Rothenbach (1791-1838) 1812 at Strasbourg.

6) Philippe Jacques Hatt (Strasbourg, 16 november 1813)

7) Frédéric Guillaume Hatt (Strasbourg 1849 - 1916), leads the brewery at the Kronenbourg quarter of Strasbourg. Marries Eugénie Boersch (1854-1883) 1874 at Strasbourg.

We have a bit of a consistency problem here, as the company website claims that Frédéric Guillaume Hatt moved the brewery to Kronenbourgh in 1850, at which point he would have been around one year old. Maybe he had an uncle with the same name who is missing in the wiki family history. That would also fit the counting of generations on the website as they say sixth generation. The reason for the move was the flood risk in the city centre. The Kronenbourg district is on hills and thus safe. Wikipedia gives 1862 as the date of the move (still inconsistent) and also mentions that hills enabled the use of cellars for cold storage during longer brewing procedures.

8) Maurice Jérôme Hatt (Strasbourg 1869 - 1958), acquires the brasserie du Tigre and creates the brand Tigre Bock. Marries Hélène Nessmann 1897 at Strasbourg, then after her death, Valérie Fischer 1911 à Strasbourg.

9) Jérôme Maurice Hatt (Strasbourg 1912 - Perthuis 1998). The last leader of the family business.

Production at the Kronenbourg site ceased in 2014. All brewing is now happening in Obernai.

Which is all very interesting but not much use for my family history. I need to find the first three bearers of the name Geronimus Hatt, as they would have overlapped with our goldsmith Franz Bolion von der Rosen and his wife Ottilia Flach.

 

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Stop Press: This Lutheran vicar Matern Hatten (1470-1546) moves from Speyer to Strasbourg and marries Barbara Hager from Regensburg has a son called Hieronymus, who marries Agnes Stock and again has a son of the same name, and he is a dyer. Now that looks very promising.

In the history of the birdsong house we find the marriage entry of Hieronymus Hatt IV with the name of his late father given as Hieronymus Hatten.

With the search term Hieronymus Hatt (as opposed to Geronimus which I had from the wiki page of the first brewer) I also found a family tree for the brewery founder in Geneanet. So, going backwards now, we have:

1. Hieronymus Hatt IV (1633-1675)

2. Hieronymus Hatt 1596-/1633 (this marriage in 1630 also in Gedbas)
3. Maria Gassner /1613-

4. Hieronymus Hatt 1573-
5. Susanna Jung 1575-/1625
6. Daniel Gassner †1631/
7. Anna Maria Mischler (according to GedBas)

8. Philipp Hatt /1550-/1611
9. Dorothea Windisch 1552-
10. Martins Damian Jung /1540-1595/
11. Margaretha Jud /1549-/1576

18. Matthes Windisch †/1577
19. Ursula Baldner †/1558
20. Martin Jung †1566/
22. Jacob Jud /1507-1566/
23. N Post /1510-

Sadly, Geneanet runs out of Hatt ancestors at this point, although we're still one Hieronymus short, if the one born 1633 is the fourth. I think this fits quite plausibly with the son of the vicar mentioned above though. So if we trust the numbering of the Hieronymuses, we could fill in Hieronymus I as number 16. and the vicar would be 32. Actually, Wikipedia says that Hieronymus (son of Matern Hatten) had sons called Hieronymus and Philipp. So that works. We then have, based on that Wiki entry:

16. Hieronymus Hatt + after 1566
17. Agnes Stock + before 20. Mai 1546

32. Matern Hatten * around 1470 Speyer + 14. März 1546
oo before July 1537
33. Barbara Hager * Regensburg

64. Matern von Hatten (from the place Hatten near Wissembourg?)
65. Margarethe Reuß (from a family with lots of clerics at Speyer)

While these brewers are not attached to my ancestry (yet), there are parallels to the history of the Kirner Pils brewery, where we have a known family connection, so I do have an excuse for being nosy.

 

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

There's also a nascent index of place names here.

And here's the index of migration events.

megalith mysteries

Some thoughts on

Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery

by Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Kate Welham.

Council for British Archaeology's Archaeology for All 2015

I didn't know much about Stonehenge before reading this and had only seen the monument from the roadside, but seeing that I sometimes get to cover ancient DNA work about various prehistoric populations and communities, I figured I should know something about it, so I picked up this book when I saw it at a charity shop.

I was surprised to learn that the site is a lot more complex and dynamic than I would have thought. It had been a major site even before those famous megaliths were installed, and there are five major phases of its development spanning more than a thousand years (2900-1600 BCE). Intriguing points I noticed include:

• The fundamentally egalitarian nature of pre-agricultural societies, which the authors seem to struggle to understand. They keep wondering about why we don't see the "elite" of stone age groups being marked in any obvious way. I would suggest that's simply because there was no elite, when you were hunting and gathering in a group of a few dozen people, you didn't have the resources to spare to feed a king and his entourage, even though you would still respect the experience of your seniors.
• The scientific challenges of finding out where those stones came from, how they were transported and erected etc.
• How it makes sense that populations that lived in wooden huts if they had any shelter at all spent all this effort to create stone monuments for their deceased. Apparently, an archaeologist visiting from Madagascar made that point clear based on his knowledge of similar megalith culture surviving in Madagascar to this day. The point is that life is transient but the afterlife is forever, so you want ephemeral structures for your lifetime but eternal ones for eternity. Makes sense, in a way. And we still use gravestones, too.
• Archaeologists also found related settlements nearby which may have housed the workers.
• Back in the days of megalith societies, the Orkney Islands were a major centre of excellence for building megalith sites. Part of the reason being that the settlers on those islands had used up all the trees and had to use stones for building by default, so they had more expertise in the use of stones.

don't create, evolve

I've taken the recent media attention around an effort to create "artificial cells" as an excuse to revisit the boundary between non-life and life, and how life emerges from non-living material. To me, evolution removes the entire question of "creating" complexity, as complexity tends to evolve from simpler forms all by itself. What we really need to find is the point where chemicals, instead of just sitting there, start to evolve.

Based on this philosophy, I was quite underwhelmed by those artificial cells, which, in the tradition spanning from Frankenstein to Craig Venter, represent another attempt to create something with dubious credentials as a living being but still much too complex to count as an origin of life. Luckily, there has been a significant breakthrough in self-replicating ribozymes recently, so I covered this as a positive example of what I would like to see instead of all the "creator" hybris.

Anyhow, the resulting feature is out now:

Making life from scratch

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 16, 17 August 2026, Pages R875--R877

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 .

Mythological and fictional accounts of the origins of life feature the creation of complexity (Prometheus producing humans, in this case). As we now know that complexity evolves, we only need to find the origin of evolution. (Image: marble relief by an unknown artist courtesy of the Louvre Museum.)

time flows slowly in Venice

Some thoughts on

The glassmaker
Tracy Chevalier
The Borough Press 2025

In her novel about the glassmaker families of Murano, which is next door to Venice in the same lagoon, Chevalier uses a slightly unusual technique of slowing down time for the main protagonists of her story. We follow the fates of one family across five generations, but it magically spans more than five centuries (1486 to the present), as time flows more slowly for them. The author uses the allegory of a stone skimming across the lagoon and touching the water several times to visualise the way her characters touch the normal timeline of world events at timepoints separated by decades, sometimes even a century.

As a chemist, I would rather describe the family as an experimental sensor dipped in to probe the times. One could easily rationalise this by prefacing the beginning of each chapter with "What if". What if Orsola Rosso's family had lived during the time when the Black Death first arrived in Venice? What if, only slightly older, they had still been around (minus one or two inevitable deaths) at the time Napoleon conquered the city and handed it over to the Austrians? What if the more mature Orsola Rosso and her grandchildren lived through the Covid-19 pandemic and to the present day?

The advantage of this approach for writer and reader is quite obvious to me - you can have a family history spanning five centuries, without the confusion of going through 15-20 generations of the family involved. It saves time, names, and dead bodies. And in this particular ecosystem, where families really have stayed in the glass making business for centuries, it kind of makes sense. Of course the same people can't be around 500 years later, but their descendants, pursuing the same trade and possibly sharing the same Christian names could be. So it may be less confusing to just use the same cast to dip into the flow of time at various points.

Although, on the other hand it reduces their humanity, as they remain aloof from the times they dip into. I vaguely remember getting a similar feeling in Simone de Beauvoir's novel Tous les hommes sont mortels, where the protagonist is immortal (read 40 years ago). We wouldn't want to do that to real people we're interested in eg from our family history.

Venice and Murano provide a unique test tube for this experiment, with the Venetian cityscape uniquely protected by the lagoon environment which rules out modern development and the Murano glass trade maintaining its traditions in isolation from the world. Thus, while others might feel tempted to apply the dip-in sensor approach to other long-lived trade ecosystems such as wine growing or brewing, I feel it wouldn't work as well without the magical isolation of Venice.

how many insects are there?

Attempts to get an overview of all living species on Earth always run into trouble when it comes to insects. There isn't even a clear consensus on how many species there may be. Historically, estimates have gone as high as 30 million, with a recent trend towards lower figures around 6 million. New research now suggests that this last figure needs to be multiplied by three.

This is in line with the fact that wherever researchers have a closer look at insect diversity, they tend to discover several times more species than were previouslly known. I've combined both the challenge of the global count and some recent discoveries, together with the threat of population losses and extinctions to a feature about insect numbers which is out now:

Counting insects

Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 15, 03 August 2026, Pages R833--R835

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 .

A study of rove beetles in China revealed 61 new species. (Photos: Qing-Hao Zhao.)