ROOTS & BRANCHES

A well-known designation for people who came of age during World War I is the “Lost Generation,” for whom the catastrophe of that globe-spanning conflict left their spirits stripped of the 19^th century’s credo of never-ending progress.

A group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s was looked upon as the epitome of the “Lost Generation,” and indeed it was Gertrude Stein who’s credited with coining the term, and Ernest Hemingway whose use of it in one of his novels led to the popularization of it.

But were there previous such “Lost Generations?”

Recent discoveries in my own personal family tree in my Bickel / Böckel line, the village of origin for whom had been identified by Annette K. Burgert, have led me to the conclusion that the folks in the second half of the 1600s in German-speaking lands were such a “Lost Generation,” too.

To backtrack for a moment: For those with Second Wave German immigrants to America—those coming after the American Revolution but as a practical matter from about 1820 through World War I—once you find their village of origin in Europe, you’re going to find them in the same spot for centuries unless they had left the German rural countryside during the birth pangs of the Industrial Revolution.

For my First Wave German-speaking immigrants—those coming in a trickle from the settlement of Jamestown through a flood in Colonial times—many times I butted up against the earliest survival of church records, in some cases going no earlier than the first decades of the 18^th century.

Burgert identified the immigrant as Dobias Böckel, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1737 from the Palatine town of Ungstein. Böckel moved to what later would become Berks County and became one of the founders of North Heidelberg Moravian Church, even donating land to congregation.

Böckel’s lineage was traceable in the area as far as his grandfather Hans Böckel, whose burial record on Good Friday 1700 notes him as a “Calvinist.”

On the other hand, Dobias Böckel’s wife Anna Christina Kustor shows ancestry that gives life to the notion of a rootless “Lost Generation” following the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648, during which the Palatinate had been repeatedly used as the staging area for conflict between French and Austrian troops and their proxies.

Kustor’s maternal grandfather was a master tailor from Zennern, an exclave of distant Hesse-Cassel.

Her paternal great-grandfathers were from Diez in the adjoining countship of Nassau (a part of modern Hesse) and Birren, now a town in the Swiss Canton of Aargau (then controlled by Canton Bern).

Indeed, her ancestry shows that in the second half of the 1600s, the Palatinate became a place for many seeking new opportunities in the ravaged area.