Early Posts Remembered

Wedding  Document from Hunsruck

Barge Stop on the Saar

Zerf farm life shown in village museum -
horn planters

Saarburg mill stream

On June 24 I celebrated an anniversary of sorts - my 7th full year of written posts for "Village Life in Kreis Saarburg". That means that this blog post begins year eight! When I wrote that first post, seven years seemed an impossibly long time to continue my project; now it seems impossible that the time has gone so fast. As these early posts are probably the most neglected, it seems fitting to bring them to the forefront again as part of my personal anniversary observance and as examples of ways to learn family history from less used sources.

My very first post on this blog was about Easter customs in the Hunsrück area of Germany. I bought a small recipe book, self-published, in a bookstore and it was a treasure. In searching for traditional recipes my ancestors might have enjoyed, i found not only recipes for Easter dinner, but also a gold mine of information about the traditions that went along with the recipes. For instance, children began to gather moss from the forests about two weeks before Easter so that they would have enough for a soft nest. The night before Easter, the moss nests were carefully placed in the garden, thus inviting the Easter Hase to lay its eggs there. But what if it rained on the evening of Easter Saturday? The children brought the nests inside and placed them in the kitchen, using a little willow basket to help keep the moss in nest-shape form. Recipe books can be a great source of information! 

My next four posts were written about a visit to a small village museum in Zerf, Germany. This dusty little museum was crammed full of farm implements, furniture for the living spaces, tools, baskets and buckets carried to the fields, harnesses for the ox, horse, or cow. There was even a reconstructed stone bake oven. That museum was the labor of love of one man in the village. When he died, the museum was kept closed unless one applied for permission to see it. The mayor kept the key in his office. Luck was with me when I visited because a local resident procured my entry. I had a guided tour from the mayor and his wife, and was given a guide to items in the museum. Because they knew I was coming, the mayor's wife had hand typed it especially for me. Through the blog, I was able to share that guide, along with the pictures I took, since much of what was inside that large room would be very similar to other village museums all over Germany. And there are many almost-forgotten museums in every state in the United States. When visiting the places where ancestors lived for a time, it is wise to ask if there is an almost forgotten museum. One of my favorite souvenirs of that day in Zerf was the tiny wooden peg I was given. Such pegs were used in place of a nail by the shoemaker when constructing the sole of a shoe.

I wrote three posts about wedding customs. My little Hunsrück recipe book - mentioned above - had the ingredients for traditional dishes served at a wedding meal in a location near Kreis Saarburg, Germany. It also included some traditional Hunsrück wedding customs in addition to the recipes for wedding dishes. On two other visits to Europe, I had stumbled across books that included the wedding lore of Normandy and weddings in Bavaria. So I included two other posts as a comparison to the Hunsrück wedding celebration. It was interesting that very far-flung areas had many baptism, marriage and death ceremonies and customs that were similar, something good to know when one is unable to find the "perfect" social history of the ancestors' town. A lot of the birth, marriage and death rituals in other parts of Germany, especially if the same religion was practiced, can be described (with proper notation) when writing a family history. There is more chance of being right than being wrong.

The history of Saarburg, Germany, which is the equivalent of a county seat in the US, was the subject of another early post. A German city which is designated a Kreis is one where the officials, who were a step above the local mayors, had offices and where most of the residents of the small villages had to travel when legal matters complicated their lives. The growing middles classes were likely to live in the Kreis or county seat in the 19th century. There were also owners of mills, tanneries, inns, and a great number of shopkeepers, since a city that could call itself a Kreis was a market town for cattle, produce, etc. My ancestors, I am sure, made a trip or three to Saarburg, sometimes to buy what they could not barter in their small village; or to sell produce. After the market closed for the day, there was an opportunity for the visiting villagers to observe the way of life in the "big city"- in what to them must have been a place of fascination. While there may not be that special book about your ancestors villages, there undoubtedly is some published information about the county seat or a larger city nearby, whatever it was called.

My grandmother had told me that her grandfather was a sailor, a story I dismissed as fictitious until I grasped the concept that a sailor did not necessarily sail on the ocean. The men who transported cargo in the unglamorous barges going up and down the Saar River were also sailors/seamen. The craftsmanship and ability necessary to build and sail the barges was greatly respected in Saarburg and the neighboring villages. It was a proud profession passed down from one generation to another, and it is doubtful that grandma's grandfather, Johann Meier, came from one of these families. But was he a hired "sailor" or one of the Halfen? As if to lend credence to Grandma's story, Johann still owned his own coil of rope, the kind used for pulling the barges, which he sold to a sailor from Beurig before leaving for America. It's always wise to take family stories with a grain of salt, but don't overlook the kernel of truth in the process. 

Some people believe that local customs have to be learned from the people who lived at the time. With today's quick-changing technology, it may seem that memories of the way life was lived told by parents or grandparents can't help much in recreating the lifestyle of great-grandparents and their parents. It's easy to forget that customs changed much more slowly even 50 years ago, and that a parent or relative or even a careful listener of one's own generation may have a head filled with details and tales a genealogist has never heard. All you have to do is ask. That's why I recorded every detail that Ewald Meyer and his wife Helena described about earlier times in their village of Irsch. Sometimes we were discussing customs from their lifetimes (more than a hundred years later than the period at which my great-great grandparents had lived there). It didn't take me long to realize that, from their reminiscing, I could learn about traditions which were observed in much earlier times. Using those notes, I wrote the blog post, "Of Apple Wine, Cabbage, and Other Everyday Things."

Yes, I've learned a lot about the Rhineland villages of my ancestors right from the beginning of my posting. Organizing my information well enough to make it clear to a reader often showed me anomalies that I would have missed otherwise, and even better, new thoughts occurred that put me on the track of more and more resources. Some of those documents and pictures I had never dreamed I would hold in my hands. And writing this post about my 2005 posts shocked me too. It reminded me how quickly I forget; how much I've already forgotten. Thank goodness for celebrating anniversaries!

Easter Epilogue

Since I wrote my last blog post about the Kläpperjungen (young boys) in Kreis Saarburg and their duty to call their village to prayer and church services when the bells in the church steeple were silent from Holy Thursday to Holy Saturday, I have learned a few things more about both the Easter customs in the Rhineland and in my very own Heimat village in Irsch.

This epilogue began to take shape because of  comments about my last post: "Easter Tales: the Kläpperjungen and the Mirror in the Fountain." The first comment was made by a fellow blogger who was born and grew up in Germany.  She said that her village in the Lower Rhineland area had no Klapperjungen, but she remembered that the church bells were completely silent on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The children were told that this silence occurred because the church bells had all "flown to Rome" to be blessed by the Pope.  On Easter Sunday morning, the bells flew back again, ready to ring out all over the city. This took me by surprise because Maria Croon, who had written about the Kläpperjungen in the Rhineland area that encompasses the Mosel and Saar rivers, had made no mention of flying bells in her reminiscence.

Friko, the blogger who had furthered my education on these Rhineland flying Easter bells, also said, "I come from the Lower Rhineland area, that is roughly the stretch between Cologne, Germany and the Dutch border, from the town of Krefeld. I went to Catholic schools and we were told these stories as children. Easter was the highest religious festival of the year and had a lot of ritual attached." 

Interesting, I thought.  Here is a person who came from today's Rhineland Pfalz state of Germany as do my ancestors, but her area lay north of Kreis Saarburg, and is not a quite as near to France as my ancestor's homeland. I knew that the French bells flew away during Holy Week.  Was it possible that my ancestors, too, believed the story of the bells making a trip to Rome, just as in France.

My relative Edeltrud, who grew up in the village of Irsch in the 1950s, was the logical person to ask. Her e-mail answer to my question read, "Yes, the bells leave here too, and kids run arround with wooden "Klappern" and call the hours when normally the bells were ringing. In Irsch they sang (in the old dialect): 'Beetgloock leut, de Beetgloock leut!' (The prayer bell is ringing). They are called Kläpperkinder. In earlier times they were just boys, but now there are girls too."  That accounted for the change of name from the more gender specific Kläpperjungen to the non-specific Kläpperkinder.

Ewald Meyer, who has been so much help to me in researching the social history of Irsch, e-mailed after he read my Easter blog. He had information about the Kläpperjungen and their three days of replacing the church bells.  He gave me another version of the calls of the Kläpperjungen - in the local dialect.  I believe he once called those words as he went about the village with the other boys who were replacing the voice of the bells.  Below are the calls and then, in parentheses, a translation of the dialect into today's German.:

1. Zum Angelusläuten am Abend ( before 7 p.m. ): "Et laut Baetglock!" (Es läutet Betglocke)
2. Mittags (noon): "Et laut Mettech!" (Es läutet Mittag)
3. Vor Beginn einer Messfeier: "Et laut zesummen!" (Es läutet zusammen).

Translation: 1. At Angelus time in the evening: "the prayer bell is ringing." 2. At midday: "It is ringing midday." 3. Before the celebration of a Mass: "It is calling (us) together."

My Summary of All the Additional Things I Learned:

*Church bells are silent as a sign of mourning for one or more days before Easter in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The tradition around the silent bells originates from the 7th century when the Church forbade the ringing of the bells in homage to the death of Christ between Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday.

*In France, and in bordering parts of The Netherlands and Belgium, legend has it that on Maundy Thursday, the bell’s chimes flee to Rome where the Pope blesses them. There, they collect the Easter eggs which they will scatter in gardens and yards on their return journey which is the morning of Easter Sunday. When children hear the bells, they go out to the garden on an egg hunt. The Easter Bells are often represented with a pair of wings, ribbons or sometimes are transported in a cart. 

*In the Rhineland t"he bells also fly to Rome, but only here do the Kläpperjungen take on the bells' work until the bells return on Easter morning. The Easter rabbit, meanwhile, is busy hiding Easter eggs and chocolate eggs and bunnies in gardens all over Germany.

As I was writing this short piece I was struck by  something.  My great-great grandparent's emigration journey across Germany and France to the Port of Le Havre must have begun just after the auction of their moveable property on March 22.  Palm Sunday was on March 24 in 1861, very early.  Thus the day that they and the other families who were traveling with them began their journey was sometime just before or during the Kläpperjugen days.  Four boys, including my great grandfather Mathias, who should have been carrying their Raspeln and crying out  "Et laut Baetglock!, "Et laut zesummen!" were instead traveling into the unknown with the rest of their family.

Easter Tales: The Kläpperjungen - the Mirror in the Fountain

The Klapperjungchen Scupture

Easter is nearly here. For many people, it is both a religious holiday and a day when children receive little gifts given by some unusual benefactors such as rabbits (Germany) or the church bells coming from Rome (France). For the Catholics in Kreis Saarburg, this most important feast day of the Church year was preceded by Karfreitag (Good Friday) and Karsamstag (Holy Saturday), days on which bells were not heard in any religious service or observance. Thus, the church bells could not be sounded three times a day for the praying of the Angelus, in respect for the passion and death of Jesus Christ.

Maria Croon, in her book, Die Dorfstrasse, starts most of her chapters by describing things she sees from her window in the village, the customs and conditions that my ancestors knew well. On this particular Good Friday, she turns her attention to the sound of the Klapperjungen.

The Klapperjungen Come:

Each year, some older boys are chosen to lead a procession on the three days before Easter Sunday. They will remind the villagers, in lieu of the church bells which do not ring during this time, that a church service will soon begin or that it is time for the prayers of morning, noon, and evening. These Klapperjungen take their job seriously. They carry a heavy wood rasp, or Holzraspel, in their left hand and turn its handle with their right, making a sound, says Frau Croon, rather like 20 grinding coffee mills. After each stop along the way, they cry out "Heh Mettech." Not finding this phrase in my dictionaries, I'm guessing that this is dialect and might mean something on the order of "Hark, Matin time." 


The four leaders of the procession that Frau Croon is observing are strong for their age, the Pitt, Kläs, Klos and Häns. So are the other boys of similar age who are part of the official procession. However, a spontaneous procession walks behind them, for almost all of the children of the village come along, even those as young as two. The little ones don't have any kind of a rasp; they carry a "Klipp-Klapp" rattle which is made of light wood, a wooden shell which they shake. Always there are some of the youngest ones who stumble over stones, tumble over their own feet, or step into puddles and fall. But they get up again, usually howling over their mishap, wipe the dirt off their faces with any tears and nose "moisture" there, mostly smearing the Dreck very effectively as they struggle to catch up with the rest of the procession again.

The older Klapperjungen are annoyed by the unwanted "tail" of "Klippklapp-Buben and of girls. They would like to make frightful faces at them, trying to convince them to stop following along. However they control their annoyance because they know they are now grown up and dedicated servers of the Church and community - and also because their mothers, grandmothers and aunts are watching at windows and doors.

By Easter Sunday, the responsibilities of the Klapperjungen have ended, but it is decided by these Klapperjungen to do a bit extra. Very early Easter morning, on their own, they make a last round through the village to wake up the sleepers, calling out that the Savior is risen from the grave.

The Water Mirror in the Fountain

Zerf Frommersbach

The Klapperjungen are not the only early risers in the village, says Frau Croon. The young women may go quietly to the village water fountain to get Easter water, believing the superstition that if they wash their faces with this special water and also if they drink it, they will be made beautiful in the eyes of others. Also, if they take three joyful little jumps and then look closely into the water just as the sun's first rays appear, they will be able to see in the water a picture of their future.

On this Easter morning, one young woman, slender little Eva, head covered with a cloth and wearing red slippers, comes quickly and quietly to the fountain so that no one will see her. At the same time, a cow named Sarah with a crumpled horn, awakens earlier than usual and makes her way out of the barn door, through the front yard with its manure pile, and her children and grandchildren follow after her. But there is no hay or grain out for them so early in the morning so they head toward the fountain to find water. Most onlookers would not know why the cows are out so early, but Franz, their young owner had pushed them along this morning. Franz, you see, secretly loves Eva. He has often seen her go to the fountain, but has never had the courage to say something to her because someone is always nearby.

For the first time, Franz and Eva will be alone at the fountain. He has worked up the courage to speak to her, taking the cows along as an excuse for being there so early. He is in luck. Eva is standing at the fountain's edge.  The sun is just about to come up, putting gray-blue fingers of light into the dark sky. And as Franz comes after his herd, old Sara with the crumpled horn has put her tongue in the water. Eva is staring at the water mirror to determine her future and sees the face of a large cow with a crumpled horn as her fate. She gives a cry that strikes pain to Franz's breast and puts her hands over her face.  She cries, "No, no, no! I will not have horns!" Franz kneels next to her and gently pulls her hands from her face. "Can this be the picture for your future, Eva," he says, as they both stare at the water mirror which now reflects them together. "Yes, that is what I want," the flustered Eva replies. In that moment as the sun leaves its bed to climb to the heavens, Franz places a brightly-dyed goose egg in Eva's apron.  Eva finds she has much to say to Franz, and so the cows wander back to their shed alone. 

Sources:

Croon, Maria, "Die Dorfstrasse; eine bunte Heimatchronik," 1956/1989
Top Photo: http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/display/16620290

Easter in the Saar-Hunsrück Region

Christiane Schabel-Becker,
Verlag
Auricher Strasse 28
28219 Bremen
Deutschland

Holidays in Germany were rich with tradition, some of which have carried over into our own times. But others have nearly been lost, showing up only in German self-publications or the Heimat books published to commemorate 1,000 or more years of history in the little villages of the Rhineland.

While I was looking for typical recipes from the Hunsrück region of Germany, an area which was mostly made up of small farmers, I found a little cookbook called Die Hunsrücker Küche by Christiane Becker. It not only provided recipes but also the little-known folk-customs that went along with holidays, marriages, harvests celebrations and more.

I was fascinated with Frau Becker’s description of the Easter of a Hunsrücker child. It seem that for a week or two ahead of Easter morning, the children went into the forests of the Hünsruck and gathered moss so that the Easter rabbit would find a soft nest for his eggs. This nest was usually placed in the garden unless the weather was so inclement that a little willow basket, lined with this moss, had to be brought into the kitchen of the farmhouse.

As in our own day, the children were the first up in the morning and the last child to leave his or her bed was called the "Österquack" (Easter Quack) and teased by the others for the remainder of the day. Then there was a rush to find the eggs (colored with onion skins, coffee grounds, and the early spring leaves of various plants). Once all of the eggs were found, it was traditional for each child to visit godparents and bring them some of the colorful eggs.

Then there was this somewhat unusual custom. In the afternoon of Easter day, the children would go looking for thriving anthills so that the colored eggs could receive further decoration – little dots that the ants left on the eggs placed in the middle of the teaming mounds. (Makes one appreciate Easter egg decals!)

There were countless games that were played in the meadows on Easter afternoon, all involving the eggs. Both children and adults enjoyed many of these activities. For example, two combatants would take their eggs in hand, small end forward, and smash them together. The object was to cause worse damage to the egg of your opponent than to your own. If your egg was the winner, you could claim the other egg. Another popular game was the rolling of an Easter egg down a slope. If by chance your egg hit another that had strayed off of its course, that egg was yours.

On the evening of the second day of Easter, the eggs were eaten as the supper meal. An old superstition said that if no lamps or candles were lighted on this day, one would be protected from the bite of gnats and midges for a full year. I wonder if that would work on mosquitos.