ROOTS & BRANCHES

I did a “lunch and learn” webinar last month on behalf of the State Library of Pennsylvania about online German genealogy basics and as is often case, I received some interesting inquiries in response.

Among those emailing me was Tim Scheidler, who had a question about the origins of his surname line’s immigrant.

His great-great-grandfather Georg or George Scheidler arrived in America in 1844 from Bremen. In my lecture I had mentioned the Hamburg embarkation lists and Scheidler asked whether there was anything similar for Bremen but the short answer is that there is not.

The passenger arrival list in Baltimore said his place of origin was Wolldorf and Scheidler said a naturalization paper indicated his origin as Saxony, which can mean any number of areas in Germany.

I thought the spelling “Wolldorf” was a little off and suggested Wahldorf or Walddorf as alternatives, and two of them turned up in MeyersGaz.org (the electronic version of the leading geographical dictionary of the Second German Empire) in the Kingdom of Saxony. I had to use the MeyersGaz “sounds like” feature to get those results since the regular search is spelling-sensitive.

That might have been put down as “case solved,” but then Scheidler sent me a couple more documents, including the original of the naturalization paper, and that gave me better information to go on.

 In the renunciation section of the naturalization, it indicated that he was renouncing his allegiance to “Barnhart, King of Saxony.”

That led me on a Wikipedia search for such a monarch in the 19^th century and at first was coming up empty for sovereigns of the actual Kingdom of Saxony. I eliminated the Prussian territory of Saxony since then the sovereign would have been listed as the King of Prussia.

But recall how much of Germany had some sort of “Saxony” in its name? The so-called “Saxon duchies,” microstates in what is now Thuringia, seemed to be another option.

And sure enough, I was able to find a Bernhard (variant of Barnhart) who was Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. And, also sure enough, MeyersGaz showed a Walldorf in that state! Best of all, the Protestant church records for this Walldorf are available on Archion.de, the Protestant church records supersite in Germany.

 I did have to disappoint Scheidler on one item, though: Family lore indicated that the family was from the Schwarzwald (the most famous “Black Forest” in Germany, though there may be others), but it is nowhere close to any of the Saxonies.

Scheidler thanked me after that. “This has been an ongoing question for at least 65 years of research that I know of,” he said.