of goats and Bitsches

Names with a geographically defined origin - kind of a series.

When I was looking into the connection to Grace Kelly's ancestor Leonhard Treusch in the Odenwald, I was reminded of another case of a nameline leading back to the place after which the people are named to add to my occasional series, namely the Bitsch lineage hailing from Bitsch in Switzerland, in the German-speaking part of the Kanton Wallis / Vallais. (Not to be confused with Bitsch in Lorraine.)

The lineage can be traced back to Christian Bitsch, who was born around 1611 in Bitsch and died in Schiers (Kanton Graubünden/Grisons), which is also the place where his relevant son, also Christian, was born. We don't have documentation for the older Christian's birth in Bitsch, so my guess would be that when he settled in Schiers he became known as the guy from Bitsch, and the name stuck.

The younger Christian Bitsch was among the many Swiss immigrants who helped resettle southwestern Germany after the devastation of the Thirty-Years War. He went to the Odenwald area, married Katharina Zehfuss from Wernigerode (Harz) at Reichenbach in 1666, had at least 11 children (that's a lot of bitches!) and died at Raidelbach in 1708.

Her name, which literally translates to "toe-foot", sounds a bit strange, but her paternal grandfather was called Baltzer (Balthasar) Ziegenfuss, which means goat's foot, which makes more sense, especially as he died in Geisleden, a place that also has a goat in its name. Oh and the Swiss village of Bitsch has a goat in its coat of arms. Coincidence? There's definitely a goat theme emerging in this story.

Coat of arms of Bitsch, Switzerland.

The most recent Bitsch in my family tree, Barbara Bitsch, was born at Bonsweiher (now part of Mörlenbach) in 1704. So we have four generations of Bitsches.

Interestingly, the distribution of the name is still heavily focused on the Odenwald, with a secondary hotspot in Baden.

 

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List of origin stories for name lines in my very irregular series:

• Siepmann from the farm "Am Zipp" in Schwelm.
• Trimbach - a wine-growing family in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, Alsace to this day, originally from the eponymous village in Switzerland.
• Zeutzheim from Horchheim (Koblenz), not far from the village of Zeuzheim.
• Wolff (named after the Wolffskotten farm in Styrum).
• Kauer (linked to the Kauerhof at Nickweiler, mentioned in 1074).
• Weyland is a name chosen by my most recent Jewish ancestor upon his adult baptism.
• Obelode is a unique name linked to a farm at Steinhagen near Bielefeld.
• From the same branch of the family tree and geographic area comes the French connection of Dopheide / d'Oppède.

Ancestors' names matching place names that I should look into include: Trimbach, Wilsberg,

 

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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.

Stop press, here's the index of migration events.

a Belgian in the family

As I’ve mentioned before, my ancestors, who appeared to be German through and through in the 19th and 18th century, suddenly turned out to be a load of immigrants when we reached the 17th century. So far, we have found one move from Hungary, one from Italy, several from France and seven from Switzerland. I've now discovered the 16th immigration event in my family tree, which is the first one from today’s Belgium.

Linard Jacque, who later called himself Leonhard Jacob in Germany, arrived in Fachbach on the river Lahn in the 1670s. (This is very close to where the Lahn meets the river Rhine, and just a little bit upstream of Koblenz, where the Mosel joins the Rhine from the other side.) New ironworks were built there from 1671 onwards by the Mariotte family from Liege, Wallonia. That area was leading the world in metal processing technology at the time and had developed blast furnaces long before the industrial revolution came along with its steam engines. Expanding into other European countries, the Walloons brought skilled workers to the site, maybe from places in Wallonia where they had other ironworks. This also happened in Fachbach, where there is a marked influx of people with French names including also Jacquemot, Grisar, Permantier (from France, though), and others.

Historic painting of the Nieverner Hütte, from Wikipedia.

One family that seems to have been closely linked with my ancestors, judging by the mutual services as godparents and marriage witnesses, is the Grisar (Grisard, Grysar, Krisar) lineage, coming from Yvoir near Namur, and in previous generations from Sauheid near Liege. One might speculate that the Jacque family came from the same place and the families knew each other before they arrived in Germany, but I also found a source saying that recruiters working for the Mariotte family came to the town of Theux near Liege, so they may have just scoured the region for skilled workers in which case it would be quite hopeless to try and find the departure region of my Belgian ancestor.

Under the name of Jacob, his descendents did reasonably well in Fachbach, to the extent that in the mid 18th century there are two males called Johann Jacob who are the same generation but I’m not sure which belongs to my branch of the family (Leonhard Jacob junior) and which to Leonhard’s brother Wericus Jacob.

In any case, my lineage only stayed there for four generations, as Leonhard junior’s grandson, Philipp de la Strada, moved to Krefeld to work in the textile industry there and left lots of descendants.

Additional sources:

L'évolution des sciences et des techniques en Wallonie - (1995) by Robert Halleux et al. (Intriguingly, this source mentions that Ottavio Strada was involved in the Wallonian ironworks industries, he was granted a patent in Liege.)

genealogy of the Grisar family by Gerhard Hufnagel

Patrimoine - Les industries sidérurgiques de la basse ourthe (about ironworks in Sauheid near Liege)

Germany's nuclear exit strategy

Immediately after the Fukushima disaster, the German government performed a spectacular U-turn on nuclear energy. Just six months after drawing up a plan to slow down the planned closure of its remaining nuclear power stations, Germany now looks likely to speed it up, and may well do so by 2020. This would make Germany the first country to abandon nuclear energy after using it for decades, so it would set an interesting example for others to study and possibly to follow.

Read my news feature which is out in Current Biology today:

Energy U-turn in Germany
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 10, R379-R381, 24 May 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.05.003
Summary and open access to pdf file.

This is also one of the rare articles to be printed with one of my own photos, namely this one:



(click image to see larger versions in my flickr photostream)

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Updates:

31.5. German government gives detailed plan for 2022 exit: Guardian report.

25.5. Pleased to note that the Swiss government is now moving in the direction I anticipated and taking steps towards a phase-out of nuclear energy (see this Guardian report. It would have been slightly embarrassing if they had changed their mind in the weeks between my writing the article and its publication.

The UK, meanwhile, has decided to dump radioactive waste in an ordinary landfill site. What a brilliant idea. I wonder whether nuclear energy expert Homer Simpson was involved with the planning? And seeing that the company involved is called Augean, will they divert a river to wash the waste into the sea?