Author Archives: clairegebben

A brief history of the Palatinate

Posted on February 18, 2012 | 6 comments

To imagine one might write a “brief” history of the Palatinate seems grandiose, but I think Larry O. Jensen has done a pretty good job, in “Articles of Interest” in a 1990 issue of the German Genealogical Digest (Volume VI, No. 2). I summarize the contents of his article below.

The Palatinate? Known in Germany as the Pfalz (from the Latin term palatium meaning palace or castle). Also called the Niederpfalz, the Pfalz am Rhein, “Palatinatus inferior”, “Palatinatus Rheni”, Rheinpfalz, and Rheinbayern. Why so many names for one relatively small stretch of land along the Rhine River? Perhaps because this charming locality has seen a whole lot of history.

HISTORY OF THE PALATINATE
3rd century – Inhabited by Alemannic tribes
6th century – Conquered by the Franks, who established tribal districts, otherwise known as “Gauen”
9th century – Under Charlemagne, earls were established to rule the Gauen
12th century – King Friedrich I became the ruler.
1214 – Ludwig of Bavaria, of the House of Wittelsbach, became ruler of the Palatinate, by marriage
1410 – Four sons of King Ruprecht III divided the region into four parts. Ludwig III, the eldest, received the Rheinpfalz
1508-1544 – King Ludwig V introduced Protestantism, although he himself remained Catholic
1618-1648 – Thirty Years War. At the start, the Pfalz was ruled by King Friedrich IV, leading supporter of the Evangelical Union. In 1622 Heidelberg was conquered and plundered, and the Pfalz turned over to Bavaria’s Duke Maximilian. Spinola of Spain then invaded the Pfalz. The plague hit at around the same time, wiping out as much as two-thirds of the population. The Thirty Years War established the right of three religions to exist: Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist.
1673-79 – War between the German Empire and France, in which the Pfalz had to pay 250,000 florin in war tax. (1683, Pietists emigrate, establish Germantown, PA)
1688 – War of the League of Augsburg. King Louis XIV of France invaded and burned most of the region to the ground.
1697 – Treaty of Rijswik made the State Church Catholic, although Catholics were outnumbered 5 to 1.
1705 – Calvinist and Lutheran churches re-established.
1707 – Palatinate destroyed in the Spanish War of Succession. (1708 – another emigration led by Joshua von Kocherthal, many of whom settled in Neuberg on the Hudson River.)
1742 – The Palatinate grew and prospered in trade, agriculture, arts, and science.
1799 – France moved in to occupy the Palatinate, Napoleon officially took the region over in 1801.
1815 – Paris Peace Treaty gives the Palatinate to Bavaria. Thirteen districts were created: Bergzabern, Frankenthal, Germersheim, Homburg, Kaiserslautern, Kirchheimbolanden, Kusel, Landau, Ludwigshafen, Neustadt, Pirmasens, Speier, Zweibruecken
1832 – Hambacher Festival – enormous gathering of peasants and intellecuals from all over Europe at Hambach Castle to advocate for a democracy – the tricolor black, red and gold flag was first flown. The rulers quickly put down the movement, and forbid political assemblies.
1849 – Democratic Revolution of 1848 crushed by Prussia and Bavaria (prompting a wave of emigration from the region)
1871 – The Palatinate joins the united German Empire.

There are many twists and turns in between, but were I to include them, this history would not be brief. Not at all. When I visited the Palatinate a little over a year ago, a member of the Bad Dürkheim history club noted they had suffered more than 20 wars between 1610 and 1850. No wonder the Spätlese (late harvest wines) are so popular — no doubt they take off the edge. These days, the people of the Palatinate are a fun-loving people, in a fertile, enchanting land.

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Posted in 19th century history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history, Genealogy tips, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel, Travels in Germany

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German children’s tale: Der Struwwelpeter – Shaggy-headed Peter

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

While we’re on the subject of dolls, on my visit to the Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art (see previous post) I was delighted to see a doll version of Shaggy-headed Peter, a German children’s book character. Der Struwwelpeter, oder Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder für Kinder von 3-6 Jahren (“Shaggy-headed Peter, or funny stories and amusing pictures for children aged 3-6 year”) was written by Heinrich Hoffmann, and first published in 1847. Note not only the long hair, but the untrimmed fingernails.

The link above is to a Gutenberg Project e-book of an English translation of STRUWWELPETER. Mark Twain enjoyed the humor of Hoffmann, and also translated his poems. Below is Mark Twain’s version of one of the stories in the collection, “The Story of the Thumb-Sucker.” (For illustrations, follow the link above.)

Story of the Thumb-Sucker
“Konrad!” cried his mamma dear,
“I’ll go out, but you stay here.
Try how pretty you can be
Till I come again,” said she.
“Docile be, and good and mild,
Pray don’t suck your thumb, my child,
For if you do, the tailor’ll come
And bring his shears ands nip your thumb
From off your hand as clear and clean
As if of paper it had been.”

Before she’d turned the corner south,
He’d got his thumbkin in his mouth!
Bang! here goes the door ker-slam!
Whoop! the tailor lands ker-blam!
Waves his shears, the heartless grub,
And calls for Dawmen-lutscher-bub.
Claps his weapon to the thumb,
Snips it square as head of drum,
While that lad his tongue unfurled
And fired a yell heard ’round the world.

Who can tell that mother’s sorrow
When she saw her boy the morrow!
There he stood all steeped in shame,
And not a thumbkin to his name.

(translation by Mark Twain)

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Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art is closing

Posted on February 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Dolls were an especially big deal in Germany, a full-fledged industry. This photo, taken in Freinsheim, Germany around 1870, shows Elizabetha and Margaretha Harm, the daughters of Philipp and Susanna Harm, holding their dolls. I thought of this photo recently on a visit to the Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art in Bellevue, Washington.

I attended with my historical fiction writer friend Michele.

“I hear the museum’s going to close its doors,” Michele said, “and I’ve always meant to go back. It’s an amazing resource for historical clothing styles and customs.”

What a great idea. At the Museum of Doll Art’s front counter, Michele zeroed in on a gorgeous book called The Rose Unfolds: Rarities of the Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art.

“See? This is what I mean,” she said, pointing at a photo of one of the treasures, a doll from the Regency era. “You can learn so much about the clothing and fabrics of the period.”

“That book is half-off right now,” the woman at the counter said.

“I might just buy it. Are you really closing?”

“March 1st.”

“What’s going to happen to all the dolls?”

“We’re not sure yet — they’ll probably go into storage for a while.”

Photography was not permitted, and it’s hard to capture the marvels of that doll-populated world. Imagine the best doll house you ever saw, each room meticulously arranged with rag rugs, tiny stuffed furniture, glowing logs, a porcelain cat by the fireplace, father, mother, and kids posed in various rooms, and take it to the nth power. Circus dolls, peddler dolls, international dolls, Kewpie dolls, dolls made of wax and wood and bisque and cloth. Dolls in toy Studebaker wagons and riding on horseback. Dolls of England’s royal family, dolls selling miniature hospital supplies, even opium-smoking dolls. Many of the dolls on display were created by German artisans: J.D. Kestner, Hertwig, Heubach, and Simon & Halbig.

I learned from one display that, in the days prior to the fashion plates in magazines, dolls were used as models of the latest fashions. They were dressed in haute couture, crated, and carefully shipped on the open seas. In naval confrontations, there even existed a prohibition against firing on ships with the valuable doll cargo in their holds. The photo here — one page of The Rose Unfolds — is of a wooden doll used for smuggling — she has a compartment in her back for hiding contraband.

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Charles Dickens: for the patient reader

Posted on January 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

I come from a family of readers. Over the years, as the old people have passed away, their books have sifted down to me. Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Darwin, Browning, Milton, Moore. Two sets of the complete works of Charles Dickens. This February, in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, I wish to champion not only his writing, but how much he wrote. “He was the Spielberg of his day,” my friend Michele said recently. Here’s one example, from an article in the most recent Smithsonian.

The two and a half years that the Dickenses spent on Doughty Street [London, 1837-1840] were a period of dazzling productivity … Dickens wrote an opera libretto, the final chapters of The Pickwick Papers, short stories, magazine articles, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickelby, and the beginning of Barnaby Rudge.

(Smithsonian, February 2012, Joshua Hammer)

To his credit, the writing stands the test of time, for the patient reader anyhow. A new film version (the 12th?) of Great Expectations, this one directed by Mike Newell and starring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, is currently in the works. And did you know? There’s a Dickens World Theme Park. (Where have I been?) Next Dickens read on my list is Martin Chuzzlewit, since I hear it’s based on the author’s 19th century travels in America.

Meanwhile, a popular author of the mid 18th-century languishes in relative obscurity: Oliver Goldsmith. Who? The author of The Vicar of Wakefield and the play She Stoops To Conquer. Duh. There’s a terrific write-up of this Irish author at Editor Eric. In Editor Eric’s opinion, the writing in The Vicar is less than stellar. Still, as described by Oscar Ameringer, 19th century German immigrant to Cincinnati, Goldsmith’s book had redeeming value as a teaching tool:

What a marvelous teacher that spinster lady [Cincinnati librarian] was! “You are young enough to learn to read English,” she told me one day. “Unfortunately, there are no schools for your kind and you haven’t got the money for private lessons, but if I give you an English book I think you can almost read, will you try?”

I would. The book was The Vicar of Wakefield, by Goldsmith. There were many words in it I could not make out; sometimes whole sentences and paragraphs were too obscure for me. But when I got to the end I knew fairly well what the story was about. I had even—and oh, what joy—caught a fine joke in the book. It was the one when the vicar told how he rid himself of unwelcome friends and relatives by simply lending them a sheep, a little money, or a pair of boots, whereupon they usually remained absent for a long while.

Goldsmith has endured in print for centuries, too, just not as prolifically as some.

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Celebrities of the 1848 Revolution

Posted on January 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

The “1848 Revolution” in Europe was a formative political event of the mid-19th century century. Beginning in late February, 1848 with an uprising in Paris, the foment of peasants against rulers played out across the many countries, duchies, and principalities of the day. It took over a year for all of the different revolutions to be crushed, the rebels scattered in exile. Here are a few persons who went on to make a name for themselves, who were active in some part of the 1848 struggles:

Richard Wagner was active in the rebellion in Dresden
Robert Schumann and his wife Clara were witnesses to the Dresden violence, and Schumann fled the scene rather than be conscripted in the city’s civil guard
Karl Marx was especially active in France in 1848; the failure of the rebellion convinced him of the need for a more radical society
Frederick Engels wrote about his role in the Palatinate in 1849, in a document called “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution”
Otto von Bismarck was a young landowner who rose to power and influence on the monarchist side
Carl Schurz was a leader in the rebellious provisional governments army, who escaped from the Prussian troops through a sewer from a village under siege, sailed to America, and later became an active advocate of the newly formed Republican party and an attorney and friend of Abraham Lincoln
Jacob Müller was a provisional government civil commissioner of Kirchheimbolanden who immigrated to Cleveland, eventually becoming the tenth Lieutenant Governor of Ohio from 1872-1874.

Perhaps you know of others? If so, do tell.

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

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Emigration geography

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 3 comments

When in Germany, I visited the Bremerhaven Auswandererhaus, where many genealogist types do research. A large number of Germans left for the Americas (New Zealand and Australia, too) via the northern ports at Hamburg and Bremerhaven. However, it’s not the route my ancestor Michael Harm took from Freinsheim in the Rhineland-Palatinate. He went through the French port at Le Havre, and he wasn’t the only one. According to Freinsheim emigration records, many of its citizens took a similar route in the 19th century.

The map here was made in 1596, so it’s a far cry from 1857 when it comes to locations of cities and borders, but nonetheless, I provide it here with Freinsheim inked in, showing also the usual route through Paris to Le Havre, in order to demonstrate how the French port of departure made sense geographically. It also made sense politically. Many young men who left snuck out of the country, since they were liable for military duty in the Bavarian-controlled Palatinate of the day. It seems the French were willing to look the other way when it came to the paperwork. Hence, consider Le Havre, France another place to look for your ancestors emigrating from southwestern Germany.

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Posted in 19th century history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history, Genealogy tips, The Last of the Blacksmiths: A Novel

A good tome on religion in America

Posted on January 19, 2012 | 4 comments

I admit I’m a history geek: Snowbound in Seattle, I can’t think of a better way to spend the day than curling up by the hearth fire with a just-discovered tome: Religion in American Life: A Short History, by Butler, Wacker and Balmer (2003).

Intended as an overview, the book begins with native religions and extends all the way into the Reagan and Bush eras of American conservativism.

Right now I’m buried in the chapter called “Reformers and Visionaries.” For example, William Miller’s numerology (mentioned in an earlier post: Is 2012 the end of the line?) led him to calculate the return of the Lord would occur in 1843. “[Miller’s] views reached a broad audience in Horace Greeley’s New York Herald, complete with illustrations. Comets and meteor showers at the time added to the excitement. Some said that Miller attracted thirty thousand to one hundred thousand followers.”

Another end-times religion began in the mid-18th century, due to the visionary zeal of Mother Ann Lee. Her sect came to be known as the Shakers. One of nineteen Shaker communities, the North Union Shaker Community was organized in 1822 on land just outside Cleveland, on property along Doan Brook.

Better known as Shakers, members of the sect called themselves “Believers,” a shortened version of “the United Society of Believers in the Second Appearing of Christ.” Suffering persecution in England, a small band led by their founder, “Mother” Ann Lee, came to America in 1774. Ann Lee symbolized the second coming of Christ in female form, establishing the Shaker concept of sexual equality and of the deity as a father-mother God. Shaker colonies were founded in New York and the New England states, and later, on the frontier. (from The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History)

Today, the North Union Shaker Community is the neighborhood of Cleveland called Shaker Heights.

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, General

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Internet clearinghouse at Alltop

Posted on January 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

I put a badge here on my blog recently, orange and gray, that says “Featured in Alltop: All the Top Stories.” I applied for the privilege to be listed there, and am proud to be included. Before you go over there, here are a few tips.

At Alltop’s home page, the site appears to be another search engine, with top web sites and popular posts. That’s fine, there are some great choices there. But what I like best is the sort feature. Click on an alphabet letter in the top bar and choose your topic. For example, my blog falls under H, for History.

I debated about this — my blog might also fit well under G, for Genealogy. Seriously, check out both History and Genealogy for a grand list of blogs of interest — any included at Alltop have been vetted by the powers that be for content and activity.

So whether your topic is History or Genealogy or Germany or Cleveland, Ohio or something else entirely, go to Alltop to check it out.

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A Kit Bakke groupie

Posted on January 12, 2012 | 2 comments

Seattle author Kit Bakke wrote Miss Alcott’s E-mail (2006), a series of imagined conversations between the author and Louisa May Alcott. (Louisa May Alcott was more than a novelist, she led a life of advocacy for social reforms, as an abolitionist, a women’s rights activist, and a hospital worker.)

In the novel, Kit Bakke writes to Alcott about life as a baby boomer, filling in the deceased Alcott (1832-1888) on the progress of the women’s rights movement into the 21st century. Alcott “replies” via material Bakke culled from Alcott’s journals and letters. The book is extensively researched and full of information about 19th-century life among the Transcendentalist crowd (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, Henry David Thoreau) in Concord, Massachusetts.

This past week, I had the privilege of hearing Kit Bakke speak at the Whidbey Island residency (Whidbey MFA) on interviewing people for oral histories, and the permutations of truth in fiction and nonfiction. Afterward, I went up to introduce myself.

“I’ve heard you speak about six times now,” I said. “You might say I’m a Kit Bakke groupie.”

“I wish,” she said, laughing.

But it’s true, I am. These days, Bakke advocates for literacy and helps support writers as a founding member of the Seattle 7 Writers, a group actively supporting literacy in the Northwest. She’s also working on collecting oral histories, and recommended a couple of great sites:

Oral History Association
H-Oralhist
The Washington State Heritage Center Legacy Project
StoryCorps

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Remembering 1857

Posted on January 8, 2012 | 2 comments

My ancestor Michael Harm emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1857. During my research of the time period, I’ve discovered a number of “big events” occurring that year.

– July 4th riots in the Five-Points slum of New York City, a Democrats v. Republicans squabble over who controlled the city, including control over liquor laws.
– On August 24th, railroad stocks tumbled, kicking off the financial Panic of 1857, further exacerbated by the sinking of the “Central America,” a ship loaded with federal gold to back up the U.S. treasury.
– Transatlantic telegraph cables were laid from North America to the United Kingdom for the first time. The first signal was feeble at best, then failed altogether a short time later. The first successful instantaneous communication across the Atlantic would not occur until after the Civil War.
– The Atlantic Monthly was founded. I learned this the other day in the grocery story, when I plucked off the magazine shelf a special issue of articles published in the Atlantic on stories of the Civil War. It is an issue in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War about the mid-19th century discussion of slavery, and includes essays by Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the first editor, James Russell Lowell. Here is an excerpt about the history of the magazine, given by Cullen Murphy at a 1994 presentation:

The year was 1857. Railroads did not yet cross the North American continent, but everyone knew that one day soon they would. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species was two years away, but loud rumblings in the halls of science had already warned the keepers of religious faith that serious challenges lay ahead. The largest wave of immigration in the nation’s history was pouring through the cities of the eastern seaboard. Though he would become President in four years, Abraham Lincoln in 1857 was no more widely known nationally than any former one-term Congressman is today. But the clouds of secession had begun to gather, and few believed that North and South, still joined by weak bonds of vexing compromise, would not soon be torn asunder.

Among educated people throughout the United States the issue of slavery was obviously one of great moment. But so, too, was another matter, and in the baldest terms it might be said to have involved an attempt to define and create a distinctly American voice: to project an American stance, to promote something that might be called the American Idea.

It was this concern that brought a handful of men together, at about three in the afternoon on a bright April day, at Boston’s Parker House Hotel. At a moment in our history when New England was America’s literary Olympus, the men gathered that afternoon could be said to occupy the summit. They included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several other gentlemen with three names and impeccable Brahmin breeding—men from the sort of families, as Holmes once noted wryly, that had not been perceptibly affected by the consequences of Adam’s fall. By the time these gentlemen had supped their fill, plans for a new magazine were well in hand. As one of the participants wrote to a friend the next day, “The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually that I have ever had.” Soon the new magazine acquired an editor, James Russell Lowell, and a name—The Atlantic Monthly.

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