In Search of ..... myself? Part 3

In search of myself...Part 3... or "why I quit 'doing' genealogy."

Sometime before my grandma died in 2009, a post showed up on the old MI-Macomb list about Spallers.  I asked my grandma about them, discovered she had known them from church in Mt. Clemens, and she was able to give information to report back to the person who was stumped looking for her family.  I got chewed out by another member of the list.  "Your grandparents don't know what they are talking about.  That is only hearsay." So on and so forth.   That was the final straw for me.  I deleted everything off of Rootsweb.

Over the years as I have tried to learn more about my family, I have been chastised time and time again by so-called "real" genealogists.  Floating around out there is the wrong birth date for my great-grandma Hummel.  Grandma Hummel and Aunt Annie (whom I remember!) were born Dec 11 and Dec 27, respectively.  When the clerk came around and recorded the births, a few years after the fact, he wrote the dates down wrong (got the years correct).  My grandpa could, and my mother can testify to the trouble that Grandma H and Aunt Annie had straightening that out.  It was fixed before Grandma H died in 1973 but apparently not noted in the early records.  So when I contacted someone who had that info incorrect, I was chewed out because that was hearsay.  Really?  I have her baptism certificate.  She is my great-grandma.  "That isn't really family," I was told and I was supposed to supply some stranger, who never did explain how he was connected to my family, my great-grandma's baptism certificate.

Then I understood.

My grandparents were apprehensive about sharing information much outside of the family.  They told me stories about their grandparents, Grandpa and Grandma Rohrbeck, Grandma Hurttgam, Grandpa and Grandma Saal.  I even heard stories from my grandma about her great-grandparents, Christ and Matilda Ahrens, and even Uncle Alfred's parents and grandparents (that would be the Daus and Schuett families.)  No one -- and I mean NO ONE -- will ever tell me that I am not really related to these people.  So I never got to meet some of them here.  Whatever.  I take care of their graves, yes, even my great-great grandparents' graves are checked, as I learned from my own grandparents.  They are all family.  On July 28, 2018, four out of five of Grandpa and Grandma Saal's children were represented at a family gathering for my great-uncle's 95 birthday.  Because Grandma's aunt married Grandpa's cousin, I had double family there.  There were other parts of the family there, too.

Don't get me started about the warped sense of family in today's society.  I have known too large a family to allow myself to say that my grandparents' cousins aren't really family.

So what am I?  I don't "really" live in my township, as I was told by elected township officials.(Because I live on the border in a cheap house, I'm not really a resident.)  I am neither a Mayflower descendant nor English, nor do I have family that fought in the Civil War, War of 1812, or Revolutionary War, so I'm not "really" an American, in the same sense on not "really" living in my township.  (Yes, I have been told that, too.  Plenty of family in WWI and WWII, however, and even a KIA in WWII.)  On my father's side I am part Moravian (Czech), Irish and the mysterious "German."  I never really grew up knowing that, so is that really part of my identity?  On my mother's side, I am part French, the mysterious "German," sometimes "Prussian"  was written down, and in one case, "Pomerania" was used.  At this point, all I have left is my religion as an identity.  I feel like Philip Nolan, "The Man Without a Country."

In Part 1, I wrote: I suspect that those of Polish descent will be able to sympathize with his story in a way that I cannot, but more about that later.    

I have yet to meet Polish Americans who are lackadaisical about their identities.  There seems to remain a pride in the descendants.  They know they are Polish, and the identity is carried through the generations with the food and customs.  I assume that comes from 200 years of keeping the identity alive when the country wasn't on the maps.  I don't have that.  One great-great-grandfather became an American citizen as soon as he could, the other did not until 1918.  However, I get the "identity crisis," if you will, in A Polish Son.  I understand what drove the writer to go to Poland and search for family.  I would do the same, if I had a distinct country and identity to search.  It is a brave person who opens himself to the criticism of the so-called "real genealogists," and Leonard Kniffel gets my respect for doing so.  

So check out those books.  They're worth the read.  Anything that makes me stop and think this hard is good.  Then again, An Old Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott makes me think this hard.  I like to think.  Even my husband read them, and he's the first one to say he doesn't read books.

I might not know what I am, but I know WHO I am.

http://claraspet.blogspot.com/2009/12/trip-down-quilt-memory-lane.html

In Search of ..... myself? Part 2

Then I asked myself, "Why isn't there ever anything written about us of German descent?"

There are Polish Americans, there are Irish Americans.  Italian Americans.  So on and so forth.  My grandparents, who spoke Low German at home amongst themselves and with a few others well into the 1980s, never fell into being hyphenated Americans.  They were Americans, and they didn't appreciate it being advertised they still spoke Low German, thank you very much!

Of course, two World Wars have something to do with this.  In my church history book I talk about Rev. Justus Lohrmann, Pastor Lohrmann's son who almost stood trial in WWI, down in Southern Illinois.   (The man who was not American enough in WWI lost his son in WWII.  Justus was born in Richmond, Michigan.)  Whenever I would ask questions about the war years, my grandparents refused to talk about the "German" question except to say that one never, ever spoke German except when sure it was safe.  I've also heard the local stories of the farmer of German descent, whose family has been here since the 1830s, and the zealous milkman who dumped out into the ditch "that German milk."  Germans are racists, horrible people, uneducated, unrefined, you name it.  I know, I've heard it -- and gotten the treatment to go with it.  We're still immigrants, 4 and 5 and 6 generations later.

My family ditched "Germany" between 1840-1871.  Sometimes I have found towns, sometimes not, and some of the places seem to be those not found on maps.  When I ordered the Busia book, I also ordered two maps from the Polish Art Center.  I have looked for years for old maps showing old place names, and these are from the 1830s-40s.  Some of these place names are: Woderik Vorfonen,  Brandenburg, Schwaneburg/Schwanburg, Kadlow (Kartlow perhaps?) (Pomerania), Schmarsow (Pomerania), Pasewalk (Prussia), Rossow bei Prenzlau (that family originally moved to Germany from France!), and Schwerin.  These are the names written down in family records and sometimes church records.  For you see, all I have to do to go visit multiple generations of my family is drive down to Sterling Heights, Fraser, and Clinton Township, to some obscure cemeteries, and there I find generations going back to my 4th great-grandparents or so.

But these names -- they aren't all from Germany.  Some appear to be in modern day Poland.  Then there are the last names... I have been told by real Germans that some of my family names, like Rohrbeck, isn't German at all.  "Never heard of it before.  Are you sure it isn't Rohrbach?"  No, in the few records that have shown up from Germany (Schwaneburg area) it is very distinctly "Rohrbeck."   So tell me, do these people look German to you?  (My great-grandma is in the back row on the left, picture taken in 1929.  Grandpa and Grandma Rohrbeck are in the center, both of whom were born in "Germany" or "Prussia".)

So in the end I'm left with the question that all Lutherans learn in Luther's Small Catechism :  "What does this mean?"

Well, a few thoughts.  On my mother's side, I come from a long line of Lutherans, and German would have been the language of the church.  (Some Reformed/Calvinists show up also, but the language was still German.)  Lots of border changes, Prussian Union of Churches, etc, and throw in some moving around (Grandpa Rohrbeck and his siblings were born in different towns in "Germany") did nothing but confuse the nationality.   Throw in a couple wars and goodbye any records that may have been.  In many respects, I'm no further than when I started trying to work on "the family tree" over 20 years ago.  I have more questions than answers when it comes to "what am I?"

Stay tuned for Part 3.