ROOTS & BRANCHES

As I reported in “Roots & Branches” a few months ago, I had come back to one of my personal genealogy lines, the Rathmacher family, and thought that I’d need a trip to Salt Lake City’s FamilySearch Library to solve the brick wall I was in.

The background: Some two decades ago, I had traced the records of the Rathmachers to Sprendlingen and Partenheim in the former Hessian Rhineland, with the earliest record I found being a 1658 marriage Hermann Rademacher indicating that his father was a Heinrich or Friedrich Rademacher from the “Grafschaft Mörsch,” which under guidance from the expert FamilySearch Library staff I took to be a village near Frankenthal, with church records to be found in that latter city’s parish.

When I couldn’t find any Rathmachers in the Frankenthal records, I let that drop.

When I started revisiting the case, I even submitted the elusive location to a German script translation group I was in—but was discouraged by the response I received there that I should be looking in the records for the village near Frankenthal … which I had already done.

Somewhat stubbornly, I kept thinking that this referred to the city and namesake countship Mörs in the lower Rhineland. Unfortunately, the early church records of that area didn’t appear to be easily accessible from home on FamilySearch.

Then enter German friends and friends of friends.

Nancy Myers, my always helpful American friend who lives in Germany, showed me ways to access some of those records but truthfully they were in such scrambled condition that I couldn’t make heads or tails of them.

But Myers also put me in touch with Regina Kleinophorst, an expert genealogist living in Mörs, and she kindly found a database of the countship’s records, and then emailed me a copy of a baptism that Hermann sponsored in 1653, just a few years before he left this area and moved south.

This was exciting to see a record connecting Hermann not just to the countship, but specifically to the town of Friemersheim—right on the Rhine River!

As for my original plan to research the Rademacher / Rathmachers in Salt Lake City, I was recently there and did find some books mentioning Friemersheim and the area, with references to the family as early as the 1400s.

Also looking at the record Kleinophorst sent me, it appears this might be an area in Germany in which surnames were not fully fixed … but that’s a research challenge for the future!

More immediately, I’m focusing on what I’ll call the cherry on the sundae, so to say: In little more than a month, I’ll be going on a Rhine cruise that passes by Friemersheim!