A new lead

So Kevin tells me that the only other thing he knows for certain is that Gramma was originally from Leipzig.

Leipzig is just a few minutes from Merseburg. Merseburg at one time was the Rieger-Bezerk of Sachsen. That is to say, a regional seat of the district of Saxony, Prussia. This is the information contained in the Wappenbuch under the heading of Gerbstaedt. A town of Gerbstadt lies just north and west of Leipzig in a region of Mansfeld. Schloss Lauenstein lies about 200 miles south of these cities.

This connection, though tenuous, leads me to believe that I have been on the right track as far as locating the origins of Gramma's family name. I had not suspected to find a historic connection between the two families. I had thought due to the creation of a Gerbstadt crest, that the Gerbstadts were ennobled before the Lauensteins. Now I see that is not the case due to extensive quartering of the Lauenstein crest which pertains to this region of Lauenstein. The Gerbstadt crest is not quartered though two shields appear next to each other on the field. Either the crest began with a blended family or the family blended with another after its initial creation. In either case, the crest indicates that the landed status of the Gerbstadt family did not continue into another generation.

So what is the likelihood either set of grandparents belonged to a noble family? Excellent, though not in a way that you might imagine. I doubt, given Gramma's Jewish heritage, that she herself is descended from nobility. It is most likely that they belonged to a German noble through acquisition, the surname indicating possession rather than birthright.

time to play "What do You Know?"

"Not much. You?" Is the audience response for the NPR talk show. I feel like it should be mine for anything that has to do with this quest. It would seem from the last family conversation that i can't trust some of what mom told me. She's the one who said that Gramma never learned to speak English. In the follwing I will list what I heard by accident that has always stuck with me, the things that were direct answers to questions and some of the cryptic things Grampa said to me.

• Grampa had a brother Wilhelm: served in WWI, and was lost. Naturally I assume that meant that he had died. The helmet and service revolver that Grampa kept in the third bedroom was said to have belonged to Willie.
• David Gerbstadt said his uncle was Wilhelm, that he emigrated and that he worked in a bakery in dearborn in the 1930's
• Grampa talked with Marty Killian about several places in the old country associated with the family: Schwabia, Bavaria, Bohemia, Hamburg, Hannover and a large old church there that was kitty corner from the family bakery, and a place called Sachsen.
• Grampa's dad was a baker
• Grampa worked in the bakery as a kid and hated math, especially math involved in recipe division and multiplication
• Mom called Gramma a Bohemian when I was being just like her and mom didn't like it. She called Gramma a Bavarian when we did homework.
• Grampa talked a few times about Orlamunds.

What does it all amount to? Leads to be sure... but beyond that only time will teall.

Dredging the past

Many would say that the past is best left in the past, that it can serve no purpose to expose the pain and misery that our descendants suffered. I have always advocated knowing the truth, past to present. The past is a complete education; an ancestor's misery can be our road sign to avoid pitfalls. The past can also inspire and instruct. A family history is so much more than a bunch of facts and figures, though those are important too. I have always believed that. Until I talked to Kevin last night.

He didn't know that Grampa had a sister.

You see, I always have assumed that because Anne's kids are older than us, that they knew more about the family than did we. After all, they had years with Grampa when he was younger, more vibrant and capable of remembering in greater detail... not that his mind was ever dull. They would have done the same homework requiring the construction of a family tree... I thought. Apparently that was not always the back to school assignment of choice for teachers then. So I tell Kevin about Erna as he had not read the blog yet. And he didn't know.

How could he not know about her? How could he not know about Willie either? And this makes me wonder how much more I want to know. I mean, what could make siblings disavow any knowledge of each other? I was told it was about a recipe and working in the bakery. David Gerbstadt of PA said the same thing. But since I didn't know that Gramma Ada was Jewish, I wonder if the recipe was just a convenient disguise for bigotry in the family. And here is the thing... David knew about Grampa. We just didn't know about David and his family. so I wonder, again, what keeps you from acknowledging your siblings to your children and grandchildren?

It is sad. And I don't think I want to know. I almost idolize Grampa for the contributions he made to my becoming who I am. How will I feel about him if I find out that he was the reason there was a fight and he was the one who would not forgive? But what if I find that I like these other cousins and we become friends? Would Grampa think it was betrayal to like someone he clearly did not? Is even looking a betrayal of Grampa's love?

Of course, I could be too close to the whole thing since it is my family and there are generational patterns playing out even now with my own siblings. Grampa had told someone about Willie... mom and Anne fought about namesakes. And I remember several occasions where Gramma Olive rode Grampa about it, resulting in better details for the homework. I just wish that I remembered more than I did. I think. But still... no one mentioned Erna except to tease Aunt Anne about a name she said was not hers. How does this happen? Do I want to know?

The Traveling Gerbstadts

Moris Gerbstadt born in 1901: departed 24 August 1905 aboard the "Blucher" bound for Germany had been residing in Detroit MI.

Frieda Gerbstadt born in 1865 accompanied Moris on his overseas voyage.
No further information for either of them is available at this time. I do not know if they returned and no reason for their departure is listed. But I suspect that this is the boy for whom Brian acquired the M. on his birthcertificate. Although, I have seen a german birthcertificate and the M. appears before a boy name because so many germanic names are actually transgendered. Little girls have F. in front of their names. It's just a german thing that might have tripped Grampa up with lasting consequence for Brian.

Emma Gerbstadt born in 1888 departed Hamburg aboard the "Cincinnati" and arrived in NY, New York 19 September 1909. No further information was taken by the purser on this voyage.

I have no further information on this group of Gerbstadt immagrants with these spellings, no point of origin, no year of emigration; I only know at this point that the 1900 Wayne County census listed the following family: Amiel H. (father) and Fredreska (mother). Children listed are Emma b. Feb. 1888, George b. Oct 1889, Freddie b. Sept. 1893, Frank b. Dec. 1885 and Hugo born in 1898/99.

An Elfreidt Gerbstadt b. 26 April 1906 was naturalized 29 August 1935. No immagration records are available at this time.

Emil and Amiel are variations of the same name as are Frederika and Fredreska. These could be the same people. I think that they are because the consistant information is the child Hugo born in 1998. At the time of the 1930 census he was 31 years old and the only child listed living with the parents. The 1900 census in which I found Amiel and Fredreska asks what age the children were the year prior to the census being taken; Hugo's age is listed as 1 year. The difference between 98 and 99 is the time of year in which the form was sent in relation to when Hugo was born. Undoubtedly these are the same people.

Meet Emil Gerbstadt, baker

I knew from a david Gerbstadt in Pennsylvania that there was a family bakery in Detroit and that his grandfather, Wilhelm, was some how affiliated with it. From the sketchy stories I had heard, I thought that the bakery belonged to Wilhelm. In its last days it may have. But the bakery started, I surmise, with Emil.
Emil was born 15 May 1859 in Kretzschan, Saxony and left the port of Hamburg aboard the "Hammonia", arriving in the states 1 July, 1884. Five years later, on 10 March 1899 hecame a naturalized citizen of the United States in Ward 2 Detroit MI.
He applied for a travel visa to Germany twice. The first time was 12 February 1904, one month after Erna was born. At this time he lists Drangodd as his father living in Hannover. The second application dated for 9 May 1922 lists Drangodd as deceased. His visa application describes him at the age of 45 as being 5'1" with light grey eyes, light hair tinged with grey and occupied as a baker.
Sometime in his life he married a Frederika A who was born in 1866, 14 years younger than himself. They had one son listed as living with them on the 1930 census form. Hugo Victor age 31 was single and drove the bakery truck. The family lived in Nakin twonship of Wayne MI. Hugo was born 6 August 1898

Meet Erna Gerbstadt

I was growing frustrated with trying to find Gramma Ada through regular searches. Even running her name through the Jewish resource filter at ancestry turned up nothing. So since I had found that Grampa arrived in the States in '25, and his first child was born in 27 or 28, I reasoned that perhaps he and gramma were married before they left Germany. So when I plugged gramma's first name in with Grampa's surname, I got quite a surprise. I found one female emigre from Hannover... Erna.
Erna,born 1 January 1903, left the port Bremen aboard the "S.S Muenschen" on 12 January 1927 and arrived in New York, New York 23 January 1927 with a final destination listed as Detroit MI. At 24 years old, Erna was listed as single with no occupation and having last lived in Hannover. Her nearest relation in her home country was listed as Armin Gerbstaedt at Concordiastrasse 8, Hannover. This is the same information that Grampa listed on his ships registry. She stated that she was to visit an uncle, Emil in Wayne MI.
Her visa describes her as 5'5", blonde hair with blue eyes and a fair complexion with no birthmarks. Aside from a naturalization tag, no other record of Erna Gerbstadt exists in this database.

I have had a little time since finding her yesterday to ask myself a few questions, which I hope Kevin will answer... attempt to answer. Why would she come to Michigan and not stay with grampa? He was here two years before her and in the same city as their uncle, the same city in which she was to reside. My next question is what happened to her? I found Emil and a wife, Frederika A. in the census record of 1930. No Erna is listed in their household. Where did she go? She arrived in 27, either the same year or just before Anne was born to Alfred and Ada. Had she been coming to help care for a newborn infant? Had she come hoping to find marriage and a family of her own? Did she find that? But now I really want to know, among so many other things... why did I not know about her? And how did she just disappear?

Yeah TADL Friends

The friends of the Traverse Area District Library have purchased a subscription to Ancestry.com. With this subscription, anyone can walk in an look up their family with access to the full range of services that Ancestry provides. This means that any of you can do what I did yesterday:

• Look at Grampa Gerbstadts registry at Ellis Island
• Look at the vessel which brought Grampa to the States
• Look at Grampa's naturalization tag registered with Wayne County MI
• Find addresses for the Gerbstadts remaining in Wayne County MI
• Look at his Uncle Emil's requests for a passport; one request was to return to Germany in 1922 in which he lists his father as deceased
• See the Census records for Gerbstadts living in Wayne County in 1900, 1930
• Gain access to ship manifests and immigration records of trans-Atlantic crossings
• be disappointed that Gramma Ada shows up NOWHERE in these records

Ancestry also has a feature that puts the information that you plug into the software into an easy to read, genealogically correct format. Between the translating and the web searches, compiling the information will take just a little while longer. In the meantime there is the column to the right.

Apologies

Sorry Tessa,
I realized that if anyone wanted to print these pages the black background, cool as it was, would not print well. So I changed the look of the layout. It is the same blog set up but it is more readable.

Gerbstadt origins uncovered

Apparently an indispensable tool in researching Germanic families is the 100 volume, Seibmacher's Wappenbuch first compiled in the middle ages. The Wappenbuch is a compendium of armory and heraldic insignias for families, regions and states within the German kingdoms. Heraldry is an intensive field of study that is as complicated as tracing the family trees of European nobility... or unwinding the genetic code from a mobius strip. Fortunately one does not have to be an expert on the nuanced meaning and the excessive quartering between blended families to know two things about the name Gerbstadt as found in the Wappenbuch. First, the Gerbstadts came from common circumstances. Second, the family and then the state of Gerbstadt, were ennobled by favor; extrapolating from hints as to the proper ways to achieve a title one is not born to, the assumption is that Gerbstadts won their favor through hard work and talent.


As I stated before, by understanding how compound words are formed in the german language we can begin to define the surname. We know that Gerb is a noun form of the verb gerben which means to tan, as in hides. A Gerber is therefore a tanner. Stadt is the German noun for a community, city, lands of a nobleman, county, province or region. Understanding that due to the offensive smells associated with tanning, the tanner and his family usually lived outside of the regular community or fortified town. According to Arthur Charles Fox's 1904 heraldry text, a leather craftsman could only produce a complete livery for an armored warrior in the King's service every 8 weeks. Therefore a fortified town would have to employ an army of tanners and leather workers to tool and sew the finished leather sheets to produce goods for warfare and everyday use. The tanners would then be a large community unto themselves. Thus originally Gerbstadt is a surname describing a specific lifestyle and would explain Seibmann's use of the word Geburgaburg in his description of the Gerbstadt sheild. That word can be interpretted as "town in a town"


In Seibmacher's Wappenbuch, we find a shield for Gerbstadt under the heading of "Staedtewappen" These are the heraldic crests of the city states employed in the German empire. One can surmise that exceptional tanners rose to noble status by royal appointment, were granted lands and the authority of their new rank and thus a small commune increased in size to that of a full city. Likewise it is possible that this free-state of Gerbstadt grew around a geographic area renown for its supply of natural materials and ease of production as the process requires very specific chemical reactions between a variety of mineral and plant materials.


The following is taken from Seibmacher's Wappenbuch:





""Gerb.", Stadt der Koniger. Preussen, Provinz sachsen, Reiger-Bezerk Merseburg. Der Ort bereits im 10 Jahrhundert al Geburgeburg, auch Gerbestede bekannt, erheilt in J.985 ein sonst beruhmtes Kloster und dadurch seine Bedeutung, bleib aber Flecken bis 1530, wo ihr Kaiser Karl V zur Stadt erholb."


trans. Gerbstaedt, city of the King, Prussia, the province of Sachsen, region Reiger-Bezerk Merseburg. The place, for ten centuries was a Geburgeburg, also known as Gerbestede. In the year 985 it was most famously known for a Cloister of particular reknown which it remained until 1530 when the Kaiser Karl the V returned it to the state as a country market town.

To the best of my understanding, the Geburgaburg is a castle within a castle or a community within the purview of the castle. Gerbestede is a similar place name. While researching the name Lauenstein, I found references to a castle that was commandeered by the church and became a Cloister under the protection of the knights of Thuringa, a region bordering Saxony, Sachsen in German, during this same time frame. In fact the dates are nearly identical. Karl took much control away from the church during his reign. Unfortunately the success of these areas seems to have been linked with the church's favor as many of these places fell into disrepair or to invading enemies of the German King shortly after the Wappenbuch's compilation.

What is in a name?

Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. And Anne of Green Gables once told Dianna Barry she didn't think a rose would still be sweet if it were called skunk cabbage. How did we get our names? What does a name really mean? ? Why should we care?

The first person to have a name was Adam. Adam's name is related to the Hebrew* word for red clay, or red earth, adom, or adama sometimes spelled edom. It is suggested that the name Adam is a derivative of the word which describes where he came from since the Bible claims he was created from the earth. Throughout the Bible people are named by the promise God made to the parents, the life goal of the child or the parent's hopes for the child, or as in the case of Isaac, because of something that happened at or prior to birth. Sarah laughed at the thought that she could become pregnant so when she gave birth the child was named Isaac. It is a derivative of the Hebrew word .
Eventually, as the populations grew, it became necessary to have a surname, to distinguish one Adam from another. In Hebrew bar, ben, ba are common conjunctives linking the child's name to the father's name. Shimson ben Dovid would then be Sampson, son of David to separate him from Shimson ben Ari. Place names or geographic descriptors, vocations or, less commonly, character traits are the roots of our surnames. Some of those surnames have been around for ages and others die within generations.
This day and age, we are less likely to think on the importance of our names, first or last. It is perhaps one of the things we most take for granted, thinking little about the meaning beyond a fourth grade exercise. Yet names are very important. Look at yourself in the mirror and call yourself by another name. Then call out your own name. Now look at a family member. Could you call then by any other name and really feel that name should stick? Okay, for you Welshes that change names like Nascar changes sponsors this is perhaps unfair. But you'll at least know why your cousins still call you by the names they knew as kids. Any other name is not likely to feel right in our Western ears. Yet, it is a very Hebrew thing to change names with changes in ones life such as marriage, career change, self perception and surviving a serious illness. Beyond that there is power in the spoken word. And this is why a name is important.

Words are powerful. Words create and they destroy. The entire Universe was spoken into existance with just a few words. For this reason Jews do not pronounce YHVH lest God should think that a human was attempting to usurp His powers or to control the forces of Creation. It is thought among occultists that to know a demon's name is to leash its powers. In the spy business knowing a secret agent's real name is to have power over the agent. Knowing your name and where it comes from or why it was chosen for you can have a powerful effect in your life. Your name is charged with meaning that you can tap into, that can empower you to make changes or inspire you to find new direction. It can fill in something that was missing. Or, hopefully, you find that your name's meaning is completed in you.
Further, knowing what your name means and where it came from can link you to people that you may never meet, but can learn much from. To that end, I have been researching the origins of Gerbstadt and Lauenstein. I will also incorporate a list of family first names and their meanings into the blog with a column to the right. **

*As frequently as possible, I will throw Jewish/Hewbrew bits of imformation into the blog as it is a part of the family heritage. I find it absolutely fascinating that we have this connection to a culture that I have been studying for years, not to mention that the oldest naming traditions started within the Fertile Cresent region.
** The transliteration into Hebrew with the possible meanings for these names will be included in each name study. Those meanings will be more intuitive than academic as each letter has several possible meanings attached to them and the addition of each letter leads to a more expansive description.