Surprising Village Residents

Johann Nepomuk
Government Worker

Regine Braconnier
Photo from Kommern Open Air Museum Website

The open air Museum in Kommern, with its costumed interpreters, allows one to step back into the lives of ancestors who lived in the northern part of the Rhineland. While the farm buildings are somewhat different from those in Kreis Saarburg in the lower Rhineland, many of the customs and living conditions would be very similar to those of the people of Kreis Saarburg's villages and small cities. 

In addition to interpreters who take on the identity of farmers, craftsmen, day laborers, etc., three of the historical figures described in detail on the museum's website were such interesting inhabitants of the area that I have translated their stories to share them you. The interpreters at the museum dress in the costume of their time as you can see in the two pictures above.  

The Government Man

Johann Nepomuk lived in Schwerz, a village in the upper Rhineland. He was a government worker commissioned by the Prussian government in 1816 to describe the agriculture of the Rhineland. For this purpose he spent three years creating records of Rhenish lands, coming in contact with many people and documenting the land they owned and the outlook for agriculture in a part of Prussia far removed from Berlin. At the open-air museum, visitors can look over his shoulder as he works with maps and writes down his observations about the farms for his reports to Berlin.

The actor who plays Nepomuk says, "It is exciting to see how we make a journey into history possible." The young and the old can observe the clothing of that time or watch a letter being written by the writing instruments of the past, using a font that some of the oldest visitors still know from their school days and that the young ones have never seen. They "can touch history."

The Upper Middle Class Frau

In 1892 Sybilla Schmitz was living in Poppelsdorf near Bonn, and her story is interpreted for visitors by a woman dressed as a visitor just arrived in her home village.  Sybilla was born in 1833 in Ruppenrod in the Westerwald, the daughter of wealthy farmer and mayor August Mungenast. In 1847 she moved to Bonn to live with her godmother, whose husband "had achieved something." As a trained cabinetmaker he ran a thriving furniture manufacturing business. In Bonn Sybilla attended a girls' school where she received lessons in music, handicrafts, painting and French. There she met her future husband Hermann, who worked as an administrative lawyer at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University and later held a senior position in the direction of the Agricultural Academy in Poppelsdorf. Thanks to the elevated position of her husband, Sybilla Schmitz lived in a spacious house with front garden and there was a servant to take care of the house and its cleaning. Ladies of the house in those circumstances had spare time, and this was the case for Sybilla. She had activities like a Reading Society weekday visits to her friends, and opportunities to travel.

The invention of modern transport such as horse-drawn trams and the steam train made it easier for people of Sybilla's class to travel longer distances. It was possible to visit her family in Ruppenrod, the village of her birth and perhaps stay for a few days.

 The Traveling Trader and Mousetrap Maker

Regine (Jien) Michels was born in 1833, the daughter of a poor farmer in Kirchweiler in the Eifel. It was a place that was shrinking, partly on account of the bad harvests from 1843 to 1845. In 1858, Regine married Hans Braconnier, a trader, who owned a farm in Neroth which was only 5 5 kilometers away. Like almost all others in Neroth. Braconnier, in addition to his farm needed a trade route to survive. A third pursuit to earn money was the production and sale of mousetraps.

For Regine this marriage with Hans was an economic improvement. The butter and eggs which the farm produced earned money for the couple or could be exchanged for other goods. Regine ran the farm while her husband was working his trading route and with the additional money, they were able to buy sheep, lease some more land, and send their sons Robert and Francis to school. With the help of her ​​mother, sister and the Braconnier children, Regine was able to keep making the mousetraps when her husband was traveling, sending them to him in the mail. In 1872 Hans Braconnier had increasing discomfort in his knees, so that Regine had to become the traveling trader for the family. She enjoyed the change and tells visitors, (through the interpreter who plays her role at the Kommern museum), "Working as a peddler, I made money and saw something of the world!"

When any one of these three people entered a farming village to visit it, children probably stared and followed after them. For their parents, it made for a bit of excitement in their long day. For this blog, it adds one more lively view of the colorful Rhineland village life.

Source:
http://www.kommern.lvr.de/de/im_museum_unterwegs/menschen/menschen_1.html

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!