LIONS AND TIGERS AND BRIDES, OH MY!

I was preparing for a wedding a while back, and I accidently let it slip to a young lady in the congregation that I really hate doing weddings. Well, I didn't mean her wedding in particular. As a matter of fact I feel disappointed that I'll probably be retired before her wedding comes around. I don't really mind weddings where at least one of the couple is a member of the church. I did one a couple weeks ago that was quite good. The couple were very nice people. I've know the charming bride for a long time. The wedding was sensibly done, with a professional wedding planner who knew what she was doing. A wedding that is thought of as an exchange of vows before family, friends, and church members and in the presence of God can be a wonderful occasion. It's just that most of the time neither party getting married has been in church in a decade, and they're only doing the ceremony because they can't figure out any other event that would provoke big time gifts from people or mom and dad won't pay for the reception unless there's a religious ceremony first. I have polled my clergy colleagues, and they all agree that they would rather do a funeral than a wedding any day. As a Catholic priest put it to me: "There's only one word for weddings. AGONY!"

It starts with a phone call. A unfamiliar female voice asks, "I'm getting married on such and such a date and I wanted to know if that date is available and how much you charge." Here we go again. I check the date and if nothing is scheduled, explain that I will have to meet with the couple before I decide whether to do the wedding. I don't charge for weddings, but we do expect a donation to the church if a person isn't a member. Sometimes it's not the prospective bride who calls but her mother who is collecting information about going rates. Once I made an appointment to meet with the couple, it wasn't the bride and groom who showed up, but the bride and her mother. I never did do that wedding.

I generally meet with a couple in order to determine if I can ask God's blessings on the marriage. I have only outright refused to marry one couple, but that was because the groom wouldn't meet with me. Wouldn't even talk to me on the phone. I have talked several couples out of getting married. One couple got married despite my advice. The marriage lasted four weeks. One wedding nearly didn't happen because I could not get it across to the bride that she had to make an appointment. She wanted to call me fifteen minutes before she was coming over and expected I would accommodate her whenever she got good and ready to call. At least 20% of the people who make appointments for an initial session don't show up and don't call to cancel. Beginning to see the problem?

Once I've decided I can do the wedding, I give the couple a booklet with the wedding service and instructions so that they can look through the various options. Then we meet again to plan the wedding. Most of the time the groom hasn't looked at the materials at all. His only concern is that the wedding get over as quickly as possible so they can get on to the reception for the eating and drinking. Maybe the bride looks at things, but only in a cursory manner. For years she's been planning the wedding–dress, color scheme, bride's maids, flowers, photographer, favors–but it's hard to get her to consider Scripture lessons or vows or whether she wants the parents to give a blessing and so forth. So you have to go through everything knowing some ideas will pop up in her head later.

So many times people have clever ideas that I warn them against. Don't let ring bearers have the actual rings. Many times they won't walk down the aisle. I've learned to have a pair of scissors handy because they tie the real rings on to a little pillow and can't get them off. If the bride is going to have a long train, practice walking in it with the shoes you're actually going to wear. Practice kneeling in the dress. Don't divide guests up at the church into bride's side and groom's side because invariably there are a lot more of the bride's friends who come and they get huffy if they can't sit on the "proper" side. If you're having a garden wedding, spray for bugs first and DON'T us a plastic runner. The women's heels will punch right through and drag it all over the place.

The most stressful time for me is the rehearsal rather than the actual wedding. Almost always one of the groom's men doesn't show up for the rehearsal. Several of the groom's men who do show up have been drinking. Worst off all, a gaggle of bride's maids, the maid of honor, the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom DO show up and all of them have their own ideas about how the wedding should be done, and it's often at odds with what the bride has already decided and sometimes not fitting for a church wedding at all.

One of the worst battles I ever had dealt with a bride's father. This was the third of his daughters to get married and in each case he opposed the marriage and threatened not to come at all. It was a shame in this case because the groom was a very nice young man. Well, he changed his mind at the last minute and came to the rehearsal to escort his daughter down the aisle. Fine, that's a perfectly acceptable option. But then he wouldn't let go of his daughter and sit down. He wanted to "give her away." I explained that there was no "giving away" of the bride in Lutheran services (or Catholic or Jewish ones for that matter). The bride is not the property of her father being turned over to her new owner the groom. He really became angry when I allowed the groom's father to give the homily at the service since he was a minister. Despite this, he would not agree to use the part of the service where the parents gave a blessing to their children. Another time I had a bride's maid give me a hard time because I wouldn't announce. "I now present to you for the first time Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so." I tried to explain that what we did was to declare: "John and Mary by their promises before God and in the presence of one another have bound themselves to one another as husband and wife."

In the good old days there would be some fussing about proper music for the wedding. So often a couple wanted a favorite song whose words implied anything but Christian love. Now people want to bring CD's in to play, so I have to insist on hearing them ahead of time to find out what sort of garbage they want. It was easier when they had to work with a musician. We could double team them. I have had one couple get furious that they had to play the organist a set fee.

Lately I have run into a problem with brides who want each bride's maid to enter on the arm of a groom's man, maid of honor with the best man. I've said that it makes it look like a quadruple wedding, but to no avail. I don't know where this practice came from, but it's not in Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt, or even Miss Manners. I usually tell people to walk naturally, but there's always somebody who wants to use the hesitation step which throws the men for a loop. I try to discourage it, but finally say, "Fine, if you want to goose step down the aisle, go ahead." I just tell myself our ritual doesn't say anything about how a bride and groom and the rest of the wedding part get to the front of the church, only that they do it. I kind of like the ancient custom where the wedding took place outside on the church porch, and then everyone came to the chancel for the blessings.

Then comes the wedding itself. There are two major headaches here. The first is trying to get the wedding started. Often brides are late, sometimes hours late for their own wedding. A while back I had one that drove up in her stretch limo, looked around, and pulled away again. It took three more trips before she deigned to get out of the vehicle. Justice was served, however. The caterer got lost or something so the wedding party was hours late getting started. Once I had to go pick up the bride and bring her to the church myself. Sometimes a relative is missing and we have to wait for them. Once I had a small wedding ready to go: Bride, groom, one guest. Now the problem. I needed one more witness to make it legal. We had to call around to get another person in to watch the wedding and sign the license.

The second headache is the photographer and videographer. I once had a photographer lay a white shag carpet down the aisle because it made a better background then our blue carpet. Another time I had a photographer leaning between me and the bride during the vows to get a shot. Another kept banging the narthex door shut behind each person who started down the aisle so he could get a better shot. Of course that meant everyone farther back in the procession including the bride and her father couldn't see what was going on. Maybe it is improved photographic methods or maybe I have gotten more skilled at dealing with the photographers, but I have fewer problems now. They take pictures during the procession, and take unobtrusive pictures without flash during the ceremony, and then I let them pose anything they want. The trouble now is everyone and their uncle jumping up to take flash pictures anytime they want during the service even when I tell them not to. One of these days I'm just going to go pop during a wedding and throw someone out of the church.

And then comes the honorarium. As I mentioned, I don't charge a fee for weddings. If the couple are not members of the church, I suggest they make a contribution to the church. Occasionally, they ask contribution should be. I have been tempted to say, "Ten per-cent of the cost of your reception," but they'd probably pass out if I said that. Sometimes the church gets $100, sometimes zilch. It's strange that they will pay $500 for party favors to pass out to people, but begrudge the church more than a pittance. Well, I guess I can't blame them. They really didn't want all that religious falderal anyway.

Oh well, such is life. Any good Christians out there who want to exchange marriage vows in the presence of God and his people, I'd be happy to travel that part of the road with you. It will be a grand occasion. However, if you're just looking for a cheap way to avoid renting a wedding hall and paying a notary's fee, well, I'd just as soon you took a detour somewhere else.

Sorry to be so grumpy. Maybe my blood sugar is down. I think I need a piece of wedding cake and a glass of champaign.


May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.


Wayne

GEEK

I notice on MySpace that many of the younger people have various quizzes and what not. I have always ignored them because they seemed silly or downright intrusive. Well, I was doing some online research one day about "preppies." I'm on a tangent about them because there has been a new release of the great Whit Stillman film Metropolitan. I'll try to write about it one of these days. Anyhow, in the research process I came across this test, "Are you punk, ghetto, gothic, preppy, etc." So I took it. If I've got how to do the html code right, the results are posted here:

You scored as Geek. Geek 90% Preppy 40% Punk 20% Gothic 10% Ghetto 0% Emo 0% Jock 0% Are you punk, ghetto, gothic, preppy, etc. created with QuizFarm.com

This is no surprise to me, as far as the geek measure. I have always been a geek. Just look at the picture of me at 16 at the head of this blog. I did use pocket protectors, and in my day we carried slide rules rather than calculators, but it's the same idea. I had hoped that as I aged I would improve, rather like a fine port wine. Evidently not. I am still 90% geek. Well, maybe that's an improvement over 100% geek, but not much.

I seem to recall that the term 'geek' comes from the carnival freak show. The geek was the guy who would bite the heads off chickens. Yuck. I am not sure what word we used when I was 16, probably nerds. As I recall there were really only two real classifications in my high school: greasers and dupers. Everyone else (the vast majority) defied classification. The distinction was based on both dress and attitude. The greasers wore black leather jackets, boots or shoes with horseshoe cleats, wore their hair slicked into elaborate pompadours, swaggered when they walked, and were the bane of teachers and principals because they took no adult seriously. Dupers were the equivalent of preppies–madras plaid shirts, chinos, white socks, brown loafers, neatly cut hair, but not crew cuts. They were often the leaders of the student council and clubs.

Nerds were, well, nerds, though maybe not the exaggerated type of the movies with white shirts and broken glasses scotch taped together. They probably blended in with great majority of nobodies, but had far less social skills than the general body of nobodies. The nobodies basically dressed in whatever was on sale at Sears or Wards. Keep in mind that this was a boys school so there were no girls to impress.

There must have been jocks at our school since we fielded teams in all sorts of sports and there was a lot of intermural stuff as well. Maybe I just didn't pay attention to that crowd because as a nerd I was hopelessly inept at sports and had no friends who were associated with them.

Coming back to the quiz, I am not surprised in the least that I scored 0% jock or ghetto or emo, although I have only the vaguest notion what emo is. I don't think there was anything like that in my day. I am also not surprised that I got 40% preppie. I have studied the old Preppy Handbook and do order clothes from L. L. Bean and, when not in my professional outfit, wear oxford cloth shirts with button-down collars. However, I come from 100% blue collar background, no one in my family has even been to prep school or attended an ivy-league college. We certainly don't have money, new or old. I am mystified, however, at even being fractionally punk or gothic. Well, maybe my wearing clerical black does qualify as goth, but I can't figure punk at all. Is this some hidden dimension in my life? Can I be saved from geekdom? Do I even want to be saved from geekdom? For that matter, exactly what is punk? Maybe someone in the under 18 demographic can enlighten me.

My geekiness (as enhanced by four graduate courses in statistics) does note that any sort of scale has a margin of error. A 95% reliability in a measure is desirable and 90% might be acceptable, so this "punk" dimension of my personality could be a statistical artifact, a false positive. But if it is a genuine result, maybe I have to study this "punk" stuff to see whether it is something to be encouraged or rooted out entirely. Wait a minute. Only a true geek would study punk to determine its desirability as a personality trait. Whew, thank goodness my geekiness is confirmed.

Geek, Preppy, Punk, Gothic, Ghetto, Emo, or Jock–whoever and whatever you may be–may the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

LIVING IN A CRUCIBLE

I saw a performance of Arthur Miller's The Crucible this past week. It was a quite credible performance by a high school troupe. I hope none of the actors take offense at that. They worked hard and did a good job, but they are young people in their teens. They don't yet have the depth of experience to draw on. I recall reading about some great actor who declined to perform the title role in Shakespear's King Lear because he thought he didn't yet have enough life-experience to do the part justice. That's just the way things are. I have to say that as the play went on, the performance improved because the experience of the play itself added to the actor's emotional state just as it increasingly grabbed hold of the audience. If a performance can do that, it has accomplished something worthwhile.

A young friend of mine played the part of Rebecca Nurse. I confess when she first told me she had been cast in that role, I couldn't recall the character. What do you expect? It had been years since I saw a production. I dug out my copy of the play and discovered that Rebecca was an elderly woman who only appears in the first and fourth acts. The part of Rebecca at first seems peripheral to the plot, although she is mentioned in the two acts in which she doesn't appear on stage. But there are several persons mentioned who never appear at all, for example the doctor, judges Stoughton and Sewall, George Jacobs, Ruth Putnam. Even Martha Corey is only heard as a voice. So why is it necessary that Rebecca appears at all? Because Miller needed a character to demonstrate the demonic nature of the witch-hunt. He needed a person who was innocent and above reproach to be condemned and executed. No other character could do that.

The audience knows the protagonist, John Proctor, is no witch, but he is far from an innocent. He has been unfaithful to his wife. To what degree he was seduced by the girl Abigail Williams is purposely left ambiguous, but it cannot justify his illicit relationship with a minor who was a servant in his house. There is an irony in that the court will not believe that he is a lecher (which he is), but will believe he is a witch (which he is not). Although he dies for the wrong reason, if he were the only person to be hanged by the court, we might feel there was some little justice because he was guilty of something. So he cannot show us the full horror of witch trials

Elizabeth Proctor, John's wife, is an innocent. She has done nothing to deserve being condemned as a witch. Her only fault is her righteous anger at the scheming Abigail. But she can't illustrate the full horror because she doesn't die. She is found to be pregnant and can't be executed until she delivered. No, it takes a character like Rebecca to make the required point.

It's interesting how Miller establishes the character of Rebecca and suggests a plausible reason for the fury of the witch-hunt to be turned against her. When she enters, the Rev. Parris immediately asks her to go to his daughter, Betty. She stands gently over Betty, and the girl quiets. On the one side we see a woman of such virtue that her very presence is able to still a tormented spirit. But another interpretation is possible, hinted at by Mrs. Putnam's reaction: "What have you done?" Does Rebecca have some supernatural power? Isn't it possible that a person who has the ability to quell demonic forces can do so because she is the cause of them. There is a kind of sparing that takes place between Rebecca and Mrs. Putnam. The later thinks what troubles Betty and her own daughter Ruth is the result of witchcraft. Rebecca dismisses it as their "silly season." She takes to warn Parris against searching for "loose spirits." We see in her a woman of common sense and simple, godly devotion. Her solution to the troubles is to consult the doctor and pray. Her character is confirmed by the Rev. Hale who recognizes her as "a good soul" and remarks, "we have heard of your great charities in Beverly."

In this brief introduction to Rebecca we are also given abundant reasons why certain people would turn against her. Her husband has sold a piece of property that Thomas Putnam insists belongs to him. Rebecca has been blessed with eleven children and twenty-six grandchildren, while all but one of the Putnam's daughters have died. (Hence the eventual charge against her of murdering those children.) And she rebuked the Rev. Parris for frightening the children with his sermons.

Well, I haven't said anything that wouldn't be obvious to a high school student writing an essay on The Crucible, but Rebecca has another function in the play. In the final act her presence helps to steel Proctor against signing his false confession of witchcraft. Now it is clear the Miller portrays Rebecca as a true Martyr. When Proctor enquires of his wife if Rebecca has confessed to witchcraft, she replies, "Not Rebecca. She is one foot in Heaven now; naught may hurt her more." Proctor, contrasting himself with Rebecca states: "I am not saint. Let Rebecca go as a saint; for me it is fraud." But I think there is much more. Rebecca is portrayed like the martyrs in early Christian martyrdom literature.

Perhaps the best parallel to Rebecca is Perpetua as described in The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. Although Perpetua was a young mother only twenty-two, she already has a pious reputation. She is referred to as being "in a position of great dignity" meaning in her relationship to God. In prison she insists on caring for her infant son as Rebecca had cared for her own children and those of others in the community. In prison Perpetua brings about a reconciliation between the bishop Optatus and the presbyter Aspasius, as Rebecca tries to reconcile Proctor with the Rev. Parris. ("No, you cannot break charity with your minister, John. . . . Clasp his hand, make you peace.")

So far the comparison is quite superficial, but the general situation of Perpetua and Rebecca is quite similar. If Perpetua would lie and deny being a Christian, she would be free. If Rebecca would lie and confess to witchcraft, she would save her life. Neither will utter the falsehood. Perpetua's father works to persuade her otherwise to no avail just as Danforth tries to persuade Rebecca to confess. Perpetua tells the incident: "'Father,' said I, 'do you see, let us say, this vessel lying here to be a little pitcher, or something else?' And he said, 'I see it to be so.' And I replied to him, 'Can it be called by any other name than what it is?' And he said, 'No.' 'Neither can I call myself anything else than what I am, a Christian.'" And the exchange between Danforth and Rebecca: "I say, will you confess yourself, Goody Nurse?" "Why it is a lie, it is a lie; how may I damn myself? I cannot, I cannot."

So Perpetua and Rebecca die, refusing to lie or to turn against their faith. Of course the ultimate irony is that while both die as good Christians women, it is people who claim to be Christians who put Rebecca to death. Of course, the historical people of Salem salved their consciences by excommunicating Rebecca from the church before her execution so it couldn't be said that they murdered a fellow believer, but we know better.

Miller wrote his play as a parable directed against the McCarthy hearings which labeled dozens of innocent people communists. Fifty years later nothing has changed except the victims. There is a religious fury directed by some Christians against godless heathen, secular humanists, liberals, and enemies of family values. Except the target is often other Christians who just don't see issues the same way. Recently one of the prominent religious leaders dismissed a possible presidential candidate by saying "I, don't think he's a Christian." So, too, have I been damned by the self-appointed judges of "true Christianity." I believe there is a depth to the Holy Scripture beyond the literal words, and have been told I am not a Christian. I have criticized some of the excesses with which Palestinians have been treated by Israelis, and have been told I am not a Christian. I have defended some views of Roman Catholic believers, and have been told I am not a Christian. I have sided with a Quaker who opposes the war in Iraq, and have been told I am not a Christian. I have urged people suffering from mental illness to seek medical help, and have been told I am not a Christian.

I am a Christian who fears theocratic government. As was seen at Salem, it's too hard for fanatics of any stripe to distinguish between the will of God and their own twisted desires. As Dr. King observed, the church was strong when it was weak. When it acquired political power it lost its way. The persecuted became the persecutor.

No more witch-hunts. No more Christians making martyrs out of other Christians. The way is hard enough as it is without fellow travelers trying to do you in. On your travels keep in mind the martyrs who have gone on before, including Rebecca Nurse who refused to commit perjury even to save her life.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

ROOTS

I have always been curious about my family history. I suppose I am typical of an immigrant family. The second generation tries to forget what the first generation knew. The third generation tries to remember what the second forgot. I guess I'm third generation, but it's complicated. My father's father was born and raised in the U.S. My father's mother was born in Germany and raised in the U.S. My mother's father was born in the U.S. and raised in Hungary (a part that later become Romania) and my mother's mother was born and raised in Hungary. You figure out what generation I am. I just know my father only knew a few words of German but my mother could pretty well understand most colloquial German. (Well, she did spend a summer living in Romania when she was 11.) Me? I'm monolingual, except that I learned to count in German first from my Great-grandmother Angner (my mother's maternal grandmother) because she was living in the U.S. when I was very young and she used to take for walks in the park. Naturally she knew no English, so I learned a few odd words here and there just to communicate, not that very young children and very old adults really need words.

Anyway, I was always intrigued by the family trees in my baby book. They only went back to my great grandparents, however. I listened to stories my Grandmother Kofink told about the family, but she didn't know anything about the ancestors in Europe. Neither did anyone else in the family. Since we lived in the house that hand belonged to my great-grandfather, we inherited the family papers, such as they were. I went through them one day after grandma died. They were hand written in German script so I had to decipher them before trying to translate them. There I discovered a family secret no one seems to have known about, or if they did wouldn't talk about. My great grand-father had been illegitimate. His birth certificate gave his name as Karl Kallenberger, son of Gottiebin Kallenberger. Another document turned out to be a legal acknowledgment of Karl as the natural son of Friedrich Kofink and authorized him to use the name Karl Kofink. Fascinating.

Kofink is an unusual German name. It is unique to southwestern Germany (Baden-Wuerttemberg). Since fink means finch, I would guess that Kofink was originally the name of a particular kind of finch. It doesn't appear in any German book of ornithology I've consulted, so it was probably a local name.

I've looked through the name Kofink in various Internet genealogical sources, but I don't think I've found the particular Friedrich Kofink who would have been my great-great-grandfather. One day I did locate a Gottlieben Kallenberger who married a man named Johann Theodor Steiss. This must be my great-great grandmother since there is a family document that refers to her as Gottlieben Steiss and my own grandfather was named Johann Theodore. However, I can't find anything about older generations of her family. That line of research is closed for now.

To investigate my mother's side of the family, I spent several hours talking to my grandmother's brother, John Angner. Uncle John was one of the most knowledgeable members of my family on almost any subject. He told what he could about ancestors, where they came from and best of all stories about various incidents back in the old country. Fortunately, I made a recording of this conversation. In the midst of the conversation, it turned out that my grandmother had a family tree that had been researched by her uncle. Suddenly I had information about my family going back to the mid eighteenth century. Then a few years back my mother's cousin had some professional research done that added even more people to the family tree, She generously had some work done on my mother's father's side as well.

I have poured over the materials, read about the area they lived in. It's an interesting story. After the Austrians had defeated the Turks and drove them from Hungary in the early eighteenth century, they wanted to settle German people in the area (Banat) as a bulwark against the Turks. But they had to beCatholicGermans, not Protestants. There was a Protestant streak among some Hungarians that the Catholic Austrians did not want to see extended into the new territories. (Besides, they had already settled a bunch of Protestant Germans in Transylvania and that was enough. So they recruited Catholic Germans from the Rhineland, and Alsace-Loraine with the promise of free land. Some of my ancestors took up the offer and made the trek to Hungary. I wonder what Austrian emperor would have thought that a good number of the descendants of those immigrants would wind up agnostic or Protestant. I don't think the colonization worked out for the poor colonists as well as they had expected. Nobody in my family wound up much better off than they had been in Germany. During the early years of the 20th century many people from the area immigrated to the U.S., some to become citizens, some to live a while and make money before returning. (That is not something new.) WWI dragged many of the men away, then the borders shifted with the towns were my family came from winding up first in Yugoslavia then Romania. My great-uncle John came to America after the war. As he put it, "I turned my back on the Old World and never looked back." My grand parents also came. I believe many grandfather came first working in Philadelphia to get enough money to bring my grandmother. After all, he was born in the U.S. and therefore a citizen. He was also the only member of my family who was not 100% ethnic German. His father's family were either Czech or Slovak or maybe even Slovene. He was never sure. His own family name, Szlavik, indicates his roots.

The family who left were the lucky ones. WWII was a disaster for the region since the Romanians sided with the Nazis and the country was overrun by the Russians. My grandfather's brother-in-law disappeared into a Soviet concentration camp. It would be decades before they ever admitted he had died there. Of course land was confiscated by the communists absolutely ruining what had been a fairly strong agricultural economy. The ethnic policies of Romanian dictator Ceausescu drove many of the Germans out of the country and back to Germany.

Back on my Father's side I was stymied. I ordered copies of my great-grand parents death certificates. One contained a clue. The name "Lukas" was given as my father's maternal grandmother's father. I didn't have a lot of hope in finding anything because her maiden name, Kuppinger (the equivalent of the English Cooper) us a very common name. I did turn up two Lukas Kuppingers, a father and son, but nothing that could have connected them to my great-grandmother. They were all from the wrong place in Germany. I knew that my great-grandmother had been born in Wildbad in the Blackforest and spoke the particular dialect of that region. Then I found another reference to the younger Lukas Kuppinger which noted he had married 9 May 1858 in Wildbad. My great-grandmother was born September 27 1859. Furthermore, her first name Luisa, was the middle name of Lukas Kuppinger's wife. There is no question in my mind that the Lukas Kuppinger I found was her father. Suddenly several genealogies were connected to mine, some stretching back to the late 1400s. There isn't much chance of going back too much farther since we start to get into times when people didn't have last names or the names changed as people moved from place to place. That happened to my mother's family when the original Ankner name was changed to Angner, probably by a government bureaucrat in the old country.

You have to be careful about the material you use from any source. Some people doing research are too quick to take any name that seems to fit into their genealogy. Be careful of sites tracing someone back to Adam and Eve (there are some). Also be wary of materials from the Latter Day Saints even when they are transcribing a record. I found one reference to my great-grandfather Karl Kofink where the first name had become Raul because they couldn't make out the clerks handwriting. Also, don't overlook the mess that government officials can make when they spoke a different language than you ancestor. My Great-Uncle John should have had some form of the German Johannes on his ship's passenger list, but being a German from Romania, he had been recorded with the Romanian Ioan instead.

I had hear a rumor that my Great-great-grandfather had been the Buergermeister (mayor) of Heidelberg. I think that highly unlikely since it I've been unable to find any Kofinks connected with that city other than my great-grandfather, and he seems to have been born there, but raised in Stuttgart. There may be a mayor of Dagersheim in the family, Magolt, but I haven't been able to connect the Hans Widmann of Dagerheim who was my ancestor to the great Widmann family, all of whom seem to be descendants of Mangolt. I haven't given up yet. I have confirmed that several of my ancestors were mayors of Ehningen. One ancestor, Conrad Stamler was mayor of Tuebingen, but the most famous of by ancestors was his son-in-law, Jacob Heerbrand,.

It took awhile for me to realize a connection to my illustrious ancestor. One of the many branches in my pedigree extended to one Jacob Heerbrand (1608-1656). I found a note in one source that he was "Pfarrer in Ehningen," a pastor in the town of Ehningen. This was the only clergyman in my family tree. One day I googled the name and was surprised to get numerous returns. But the Jacob Heerbrand I found was born in 1521 and died in 1600. I had no way to connect the two. Since the older Heerbrand was also a clergyman, I suspected a family tie. I eventually made the connection that no one else on the Internet seemed to have made. My Jacob Heerbrand was the great-grandson of the elder Jacob.

Who was this first Jacob? The son of a weaver, he attended the University of Wittenberg where he was a student of the two great reformers Martin Luther and Philip Melanchton. You might say that old Jacob (my eleven times great grandfather) was the first Lutheran in the family. Indeed, I have read of him described as the Reformer of Wuerttemberg. He was superintendent (the equivalent of a bishop) of Herrenberg, the state preacher of Pforzheim, Professor of Theology and eventually Chancellor of the University of Tuebingen. He wrote a massive theological work (which I have never seen) and was one of the participants in an exchange of letters between Lutheran theologians and the Orthodox Patriarch (I have read that exchange). Unfortunately, he was also noted for rejecting the foolish new notion that the Earth went around the sun. You should never let theologians opine on scientific matters. By the way, that's a picture of old Jacob Heerbrand at the head of this blog.

So what does all that mean? Not much. I just find it interesting to discover my own roots. It gives me a sense of where I have been before I was born. If that sounds like a Zen koan, so be it. But it is true that we are the product of those who have gone before us both genetically and culturally. That's something we take with us on the journey. Maybe what has gone before has some effect on the directions we take in life. Certainly my life would have been different if all the ancestors that I can find on my father's side had not been German Protestants. But I'm not sure how much of our path is determined by what's in the past and how much is only determined at the moment we take the next step. I guess we won't know until the journey is over.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne