ROOTS & BRANCHES

There are times when the different parts of your genealogical life just come together. And other times when you kind of forget what you know.

In a recent project on which I was working involving records from the German state of Hesse, I had a need to identify the location of particular town named Rohrbach.

Finding any old Rohrbach in Germany is not a problem. The Internet gazetteer of the Second German Empire, MeyersGaz.org, counts no less than 44 towns by that name!

Thankfully, another village name was given, Tann, and there turned out to be only one of those in all of Germany.

With that locator in hand, which showed these towns in be in eastern Hesse in what today is the district of Fulda, my next step was to try and find church records regarding those towns in the Germany-based Protestant digitized records site Archion.de

I try to be methodical in a search like this, since even town names (let alone personal names) are often subject to spelling variations, and since Archion lets the user drill down from the state church archive level (in this case, that of Kurhessen-Waldeck, the areas that were once the adjacent areas of the Electorate of Hesse and Principality of Waldeck).

That drilling down process would start by figuring out in which church regional district Tann and Rohrbach would lie. And then I remembered there was a good reason I fought to have included in my last book, The Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany, maps of the districts for the state Protestant churches. So, yeah, I had a map for that.

This told me that the villages in question would be found in the Fulda district, and there indeed was Tann, and a bountiful number of records.

In one of those records, a man’s occupation was identified as a Landbauer. Now Bauer alone means farmer, so I figured it must be some specific tope of agricultural worker. I went to the Germany room on FamilySearch Communities and asked the question.

Someone answered with a link to Grimms’ Woerterbuch, the 19^th century dictionary compiled by the Brothers Grimm of fairy tales fame …  a resource that’s available on the internet and that I knew well but hadn’t consulted before I reached out.

Basically it means a “farmer of the plain.”

And that’s, well, as plain as your nose, I guess.