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