That experience was overwhelming for me, especially since I wanted to know everything there was to know about Irsch and the surrounding countryside, see every place that my ancestors might have known, and speak fluent German as well as understand every word of German spoken to me. But that afternoon I chose to begin with the list of questions that I had jotted down as I wrote chapters in my novel. They were little questions, yet they were so important when you are trying to tell an ancestral story; the kind of questions I could answer for farm life in 1920-60 Wisconsin but which I knew nothing about for the Trier Saarburg area of 1820-1860.
Maybe Ewald and Helena Meyer were a bit surprised at how ordinary my questions were, but they answered them enthusiastically, and I took notes to the best of my ability to understand.
I began with, "
What would the children call their parents? Were they Mama and Papa, Ma and Pa,
Mutti and
Vatti?" From them I learned that children in Beurich, where Ewald was born and in the Eifel Region, where Helena Meyer had grown up, called their parents
Mutter and
Vater or the less formal "
Papp," and "
Mamm".
Next I asked, "
What kind of beds did they have? Herr and Frau Meyer said that the beds were rope tied. The mattress was usually stuffed with straw. There would be a
Kisten, a cover filled with the feathers of geese or chickens. Sheets would be coarse linen, woven by hand. The pillows were stuffed with "
Spreu", the hulls of the grains that were used to feed the cattle. (It took Arno's English and a drawing or two before I understood about
Spreu). Three to four children shared one ordinary-sized bed.
The livestock kept by farmers in Irsch, as I expected, was similar to that found on a Wisconsin farm in the 1800's: pigs, cows, chickens, geese, horses, and oxen. Sheep too were raised in abundance in this region.
I asked
how women did the laundry. The Meyers said that many women washed their clothes and bedding in the Grossbach, a small stream, as late as the 1920's or 1930's. (Later the landlord of the vacation apartment I had rented, Hans Dieter Jung, showed me a postcard picture of sheets spread out to dry on the banks of the Saar River after they had been washed there. It was my good luck to have found a landlord with an enormous collection of old postcards from the entire Saarburg area.)
We moved on to my
questions about the houses, most of which were actually both house and barn under one roof. In earlier times there were straw roofs. Then in 1842 there was a terrible fire, and most of the village of Biest (today a part of Irsch) burned. The Prussian emperor forbad straw roofs after that time. So the roofs from that time on were made of tile (
Ziegel) or slate. The kitchen floor would be of stone (probably sandstone), and in the older houses there were no hallways. One would enter the door from the street and be in the kitchen. The rest of the house was unheated in winter. The floors of the bedrooms would be of wood, and stamped lime was used for a cellar floor. There was a bake oven in the kitchen fireplace; meat could be smoked in the fireplace chimney. Or there might be a bake oven outside.
The
bark of the oak trees in the area, known as
Eichen Lohe, was used in the tanning industry. The farmers would strip the bark for the tanneries, and this was done when the trees were still quite young. Then two or three new shoots would come up and form even smaller trees, so that today there are no large oak trees in the area.
I had wondered if people drank both wine and beer in this region. People did drink some beer but wine was their usual alcoholic beverage. Each farmer had a few grape vines in cultivation and could make his own wine. In the autumn,
Viez, an apple wine, was fermented from small, sour apples. (Note:
Viez is still sold at farmers markets and at roadside stands today; it has actually gained popularity in the last several years. Its alcohol content varies, usually about six or seven percent. There is even a publicly proclaimed "
Viezstrasse"
or "Rue de Cidre" that runs between Saarburg and the Luxembourg border. The word "
Viez" comes from Roman times [Lat. Vice = the second or deputy wine] and suggests this apple wine was drunk by the Roman occupiers as a replacement for genuine wine. In the Eifel, Hunsrück, Mosel Valley, and Trier the drinking container for
Viez is a "
Viezporz", a jug/jar made of white porcelain or stoneware, from which the name "Porz" is derived. In earlier times one stored the
Viez in larger stoneware containers (
Viezkrug). In the winter, people often drank their
Viez warmed at the kitchen stove or fireplace. Source: http://adlexicon.de/viez.sthml)
Three meals were eaten each day. During the spring, summer, and fall, many of these meals were eaten in the fields; hilly fields that were far away from the farms. (On a drive with Herr Meyer, I saw that the fields of Irsch reach almost to the village of Oberzerf, about five miles away.) Probably it would be the grandmother who cooked at home while the adults and older children worked in the fields. The young children carried the lunch to the fields where the family was working.
The families purchased very little from shopkeepers because money was scarce. While they could make most things themselves or barter with neighbors, villagers always had to buy salt and sugar. Most of
their food was grown in the garden or gathered from their trees: Potatoes, cabbage (
Kappus in the Trier dialect), carrots, beets, celery, leeks, onion, lamb lettuce, beans, peas, kohlrabi, mirabel plums, pears, and many kinds of apples would be found in most gardens.
Clothing was mostly of linen or wool and work and bed clothes could usually be woven at home. However, families had to take the hides from their slaughtered animals to the tannery so that leather could be tanned for their shoes, then made by the village shoemaker.
Poor farmers had only cows to do the work normally done by a horse. Some farmers could afford oxen and the richest farmers had horses. Oxen or cows wore a head yoke when they pulled a plow or a wagon. Craftsmen like shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, etc., were better off financially than the average farmer.
In the meadows, growing wild or along the roadways, there were poppies,
Kornblume (cornflowers) and
Ganseblumchen (small white daisies). Edeltrud Heiser, a distant cousin, told me that children weave
Kornblume and
Ganseblumchen together to wear as a crown. She warned about the
Brenn Nessel (stinging nettle), still remembering how much it hurt when she wandered into it as a child.
Chicoree (chicory), which could be used in salads,
Weiden Katzchen (meadow kittens, known to us as pussy willows), and
Maiglöckchen (Little May bells/lily of the valley) were familiar to me but the
Schnee Glockchen (snow bells) which flower in January were not. Deciduous trees in the area were oak, chestnut, and walnut. Hickory nut trees, a type of tree found in abundance when my ancestors came to St. John Wisconsin, have never grown in the Saarburg area.
Weddings were festive occasions, but Helena Meyer explained that there was not a wedding feast as we would know it. The food for the celebration was baked
Kuchen of many kinds -
Obst (fruit)
Kuchen in summer and in winter, streusel, dried pear, or apple compote
Kuchen. Most homes would have a small bake oven either in the kitchen or outside as a separate structure. But there was also a community bake oven which could handle many more loaves of bread (or
Kuchen) and could be used when there was a special event, or if the family wanted to make a lot of loaves of bread at one time.
I asked about holidays, especially the celebration of
Christmas. I was told that the people would always go to Midnight Mass at Christmas. If one priest was in charge of two or more parishes, people would walk to the principal or parish church where the Holy Mass would be celebrated. Even if the person were poor, there would be a Christmas tree with candles as well as baked and decorated figures. These would be given to the children as a gift.
Baptism was not celebrated in any special way in these small Catholic villages. As soon as possible after the child was born, usually the next day (there were no baptisms on Sundays or holy days) but sometimes on the same day if the child was born in the morning, the midwife - usually a family member there to assist the mother during the birth- and the godparents would take the child to the church to be baptized. The mother and father did not attend and the mother could not enter the church until nine days after the birth. (Rev. Leonard Barbian, Pastor of St. William Parish in Waukesha, says that from about 60 A.D., the church used running water or poured water three times over the head of the child - in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. At first the churches' baptismal fonts were sunken because most baptisms were of adults. But as time went on, the fonts were raised since children were baptized almost as soon as they were born)
During
Holy Week, there was a procession on
Karfreitag (Good Friday). It was a time when the church expressed its penitence and sorrow by foregoing music and bells. The children in the procession would use a large wooden noise-maker called a
Raspeln, which looked almost like a small hurdy gurdy for an organ grinder. It had a handle connected to wooden gears inside a box. When the handle moved the gears, they ground together and there was a rasping noise that could be made rhythmic - rum--rum, rum-rum-rum, rum--rum, rum-rum-rum.
Klappern or clappers were also used in the procession as well as to replace the altar bells would ordinarily be sounded at the consecration of the Sacred Host.
On
Corpus Christi, a procession went through the streets of the village where each house had a small altar decorated in honor of the Body of Christ.
Musical instruments common to the area were harmonica, violin,and concertina (
Ziehharmonika)
At the close of my first visit to the Meyer's home, we had coffee and
Kuchen and then Herr Meyer drove me back to Saarburg, stopping along the way in his hometown of Beurig. Today it is part of the city of Saarburg but in the 1800's it was a separate village across the river from Saarburg. There were two things he thought I should see.
The first stop was a famous
Pilgrim church of Our Lady. This is where people would come, making the stations of the cross as they approached. The last station was right outside the church on the church wall. Very close by on the corners of the streets leading to the church, there were bakers who sold their wares to the pilgrims who had been fasting and needed food after their pilgrimage was over. Herr Meyer told me that the pilgrims would put dried peas in their shoes as they started their journey to increase their penitence and petition. From about the 1600's until the time of Napoleon, there was a Franciscan cloister along side of the church where the brothers and priests lived, brothers on one side and priests on the other side of the cloister yard.
On our second stop, Herr Meyer showed me an
old farm house. Up close, I could see that its thick walls were constructed of whatever materials had come to hand, including pieces of wood. (Few such buildings from the early 1800's exist in Irsch or Beurig. Both villages were heavily bombed and shelled during WWII.)
Old building in Beurig
Small window, upper right corner.
Stone and wood construction,
center left.
Our trip ended at the door of my vacation apartment. My head and notebook were filled with good information, and my stomach was soon to be filled with the remains of the Kuchen and Torte which Helena Meyer had sent as a dinner treat for me and my sister.
Books by Ewald Meyer:
Meyer, Ewald. Irsch/Saar: Geschichte eines Dorfes, ("Irsch/Saar: Story of a Village")
2002Meyer, Ewald and Gehlen, Bernd. Beuriger Lese und Bilderbuch ("Beurich Reading and Picture Book")
2004Thrasolt, Ernst. Hennerm Plou, ("Behind the Plow," poems and prose),
translated from the Mosel-Frankischen dialect and edited by Ewald Meyer, 2000
Thrasolt, Ernst. Dahäm. Edited by Ewald Meyer, 2000
