Railroad Travel Then and Now

This year I was granted my wish to spend Christmas together with my sister and cousin.  Our Christmas day was spent in an exciting location, Rouen, France.  The three of us had booked a Christmas cruise on the Seine River from Paris to Rouen.  During our trip, we also allowed time for a special day in Germany.  We took a train to the German Christmas market in Saarbrucken, Germany.

Saarbrucken is about 300 miles from Paris.  By taking the fast (200 mph) French TVG train, we could go one way in less than two hours.  It was our first experience with Europe's high speed rail service, and we came away impressed by this experience.  Nothing like it is readily available in the United States.  We had comfort, convenience and amazing speed, all available at a reasonable price.

A Train Trip in 2014
Why am I writing a post about my Christmas vacation and trains?  Because the railroads played such a major part in the emigration of all of my ancestors - and probably yours.  I was traveling back along part of a train route which my great-great grandparents also traveled as they left Europe for a new life in Wisconsin.  I was returning to their former homeland area - and in great comfort.  I had no luggage to carry and barely felt the motion from the train wheels which seemed to almost ride above the rails.  It was as easy to walk down an aisle of the train as it had been to walk down the aisle flying to Paris in perfect weather. The return trip to Paris again took less than two hours.  We sat relaxed in well-padded, adjustable seats and also had a table to hold our snacks and drinks.  Some other passengers used their tables for laptops or to play cards. In what seemed like no time at all we were back in the Paris train station.

An early passenger train

A Train Trip in the 19th Century
This was not the way my 2nd great grandparents, Johann and Magdalena Meier, made the trip by train.  Almost certainly they had brought a large trunk with them, and I'm guessing that they carried sacks or baskets filled with necessities such as food to be eaten during the trip.  They had to keep track of four children ages 10 years to 18 months.  The train was coal fed, and I have read that the locomotives belched coal smoke back into the passenger cars.  The seats were of wood and every movement of the train on the track could be felt, rocking their bodies and even landing them on the floor if the train had to come to an unanticipated stop.  Still, the train that carried them was as impressive to them as was the one on which the three of us traveled last month.

Some train history:  By March 1861, my ancestors' emigration month, the railroads already were crisscrossing Germany. In 1852, the completion of a rail line from Forbach (very near Saarbrucken) to Paris made it much easier for emigrants from parts of Bavaria, southern Germany, and Switzerland to reach the French port of Le Havre by rail.

On May 25, 1860, the railroad line connecting Trier with Saarbrucken was officially opened, reaching as far as Forbach. The emigrants from the Trier/Saarburg area could, for the first time, get to the port of Le Havre in France entirely by rail. Prior to that time, the usual route was by land and barge to Antwerp.  The difficulty of traveling to America obviously started long before the emigrants set sail on the ocean.  By the time they reached their port of emigration in Le Havre, Johann and Magdalena Meier and their four young children had ridden on three different but intersecting rail lines: Saarburg to Forbach line, Forbach to Paris line, and Paris to Le Havre line.

Gare de l'Est, 20 December 2015

Gare Saint Lazare by Monet, 1877

The transfer between the train from Forbach to Paris and then from Paris to Le Havre was the most intimidating.  The emigrants had to navigate the city streets of Paris.  Travelers from Forbach arrived at the Gare de l'Est station.  However that was only one of several railroad stations in the city.  To this day Paris has no central rail station.  Even in our age of high speed rail travel, passengers who arrive at Gare de l'Est (the station for trains to and from the east) trundle their luggage from the Gare de l'Est to Gare Saint Lazare in order to get to the train that will take them to their vacation spot on the Normandy coast.

Johann and Magdalena and emigrants like them had to have some means to get their trunks and other possessions (including children) through the Paris streets to that second railroad station.  I have not found any information on how that process was actually handled.  The most likely scenario I can imagine would be that the emigrants had to pay to hire a wagon to take their trunks for them.  Did they know about this difficulty when they bought their train tickets?  I have not found such information.

Most of the emigrants arriving in Paris had never been in such a huge city. They must have gazed in awe at the Paris of 1861, which was still being reconstructed into the Paris of today using the dramatic plan of Georges-Eugène Haussmann who was tearing down much of old Paris with the permission of Emperor Napoleon III.  Some emigrants probably traveled through a construction zone of some kind.  Upon finding the Gare Saint Lazare, another trip of approximately five hours awaited them before Le Havre harbor was reached.

It took my sister, cousin, and me one hour and 50 minutes to travel from Paris to Saarbrucken. A very rough estimate of the time it took my ancestors to complete that same part of that trip is about 10 hours of actual time when the train was moving and not stopped in a station.  How many stops were involved could change that calculation considerably.  A second estimate of their total time from Saarburg to Le Havre, using my less-than-ideal manner of calculating, would be at least 18 hours and does not take into consideration any time spent waiting for the next train connection or crossing a part of the city of Paris.

The French website developed by the Historical Association of Triel has a chart that shows a train schedule from Paris to Le Havre in 1849 and a multitude of stops.  Another quote from the website: "The advent of the railway in the early nineteenth century has revolutionized communications between people by reducing an unimaginable journey time. For example, to get from Paris to Le Havre, it took more than 30 hours in 1814 and only 5 hours by train forty years later."

It just goes to show that the term "high speed" is in the mind of the one who experiences it, whether traveling in 1849 or in 2014.

Sources:
Mergen, Josef, DIE AUSWANDERUNGEN AUS DEN EHEMALS PREUSSISCHEN TEILEN DES SAARLANDES IM 19. JAHRHUNDERT.
Hammaecher, Klaus, SERRIG: LANDSCHAFT, GESCHICHTE & GESCHICHTEN, Saarburger Satz & Druck GmbH, Saarburg, 2002)
HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION OF TRIEL Website

From Moselle to the Port of Le Havre

Covered wagon similar to those used to travel from Moselle to Le Havre
(Roscheiderhof Open Air Museum)

Department of the Moselle

Some time ago, I wrote, with a great deal of help from my sister Marilyn, a blog post about the port of Le Havre. She has an excellent command of the French language and was willing to do some research for me using French sources. That post has proved to be one of the most popular posts I have ever written. For those of us focused on finding out about the lives of our Rhineland, Bavarian, or Swiss emigrant ancestors, Le Havre is obviously a much more important emigration port than the usual genealogy texts or expert speakers at German genealogical conferences recognize. 

My sister, to help me with research for my novel, compiled and translated some other information on Le Havre-related subjects. These articles are in my files but also translated in full on her own blog, "Californie en français." Since you may not have found them there, let me give you a summary of one of them. I think that after I whet your appetite for further details, you will want to read the full article (right column, bottom of column) written by two descendants of an emigrant family from the French Department of Moselle in the Lorraine (Lothringen) region of France. It is called "Leaving for America" by Philippe and Giles Houdry. 

Thanks to Europedia, I learned that the Moselle is a department of the Lorraine region, and owes its name to the river of the same name. Moselle has a population of 1,024,000 inhabitants, and is divided into nine administrative districts (Arrondissements in French) for a total of 51 Cantons and 730 municipalities. It borders (clockwise from the North) the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, the German states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, as well as the French departments of the Bas-Rhin, and Meurthe-et-Moselle. This area, with its combination of residents with French or German ancestry - sometimes both - still today speak a language that is a close cousin of Luxembourgish, especially in the northern part of the Moselle.

The Houdrys write that Pierre BREM and his family emigrated to New York, in the United States of America. These were ancestors of the Houdrys. Pierre and his wife Elisabeth (Boutter) Brem and their children, came from their village of Hargarten-aux-Mines. This zone in the north of Lorraine was German-speaking. The notaries of the region would record their documents in French which was the official language, and they were also required to indicate that said documents had been read in German by both the participants and witnesses.

The Houdry article goes on to spell out the many reasons why so many people, including those from the Moselle, emigrated to America. It is an excellent list. What the Germans called America letters; that is, the letters from friends and relatives already in America, exerted influence in the Moselle as well. America was considered as a country of liberty and of democracy, where the recognition of the individual was based on his competence and not his birth, things which many in the Moselle felt was not true of their homeland.

Pierre BREM left in 1844 to scout the United States, leaving his family in safety at Hargarten-aux-Mines. In 1846, Elisabeth and her two children, Anne Marie and Michel, left from Le Havre to join him. On that occasion that Elisabeth received power of attorney from her husband, sent from New York, to sell their possessions and thereby pay the voyage for the three of them. The sale occurred in Hargarten-aux-Mines, in the family house itself, the 13 March 1846. Piere Brem must have had great confidence in his wife who had a difficult road ahead of her, both in their selling the possessions which were still in the village of Hargarten-aux-Mines and in making the trip to Le Havre with two young children. Not only did she have to sell all of their land and personal property, converting everything into the money to take with her; she also had to obtain two passports; one for permission to leave France for America and another to allow her to move freely from her own Canton to any others she might cross in and out of on her trip to Le Havre. Making arrangements for the trip with some kind of travel company or service also was required.

The majority of immigrants made the voyage in wagons up to the port of embarkation at Le Havre. The Houdry's conjecture is that Pierre in 1844 and Elisabeth and the two children in 1846, would certainly have traveled to the coast by wagon so as not to waste the precious savings scraped together in Lorraine. It is also likely, as is often the case, that they would have joined a convoy of other Lorraine emigrants, which made the trip much safer, especially for a woman with two children and no husband. In addition to the safety factor, it also maintained a familiar environment in foreign surroundings. On bad roads, the convoys moved slowly. For a trip of approximately three weeks, most travelers would have placed canvas or sail-cloth over the arches of the wagons to protect the passengers from bad weather and to more comfortably spend the night. What did the wagon look like? The wagon picture above, taken at the German open-air museum in Roscheid, would be very similar. With more than one such wagon, the travelers would have resembled Hollywood movies about wagon trains headed west.

The wagon trip from Moselle to Le Havre took about 3 weeks. The railroad line Metz-Nancy did not open until 1850, that of Nancy-Paris not until 1852. The line Paris-Le Havre itself was only slightly older; it opened in 1847.

Many of the emigrants, when they reached the port, especially before 1850, were not able to embark right away. In bad weather, the ships were clustered close alongside and prevented from departing because of the direction of the winds. Sometimes it was necessary to wait for the arrival of the ship. The travelers often had to stay one or more weeks in one of the auberges of the city.  The money that Elizabeth carried with her could have easily been depleted by the need to eat, to buy provisions for the long ocean voyage, and to pay for shelter in an auberge/Gasthaus until the day of departure.

The auberges, especially those which were cheapest, gave a foretaste of the steerage section where the emigrants were going to huddle during the roughly one-and-a-half-month length of the crossing.

The Merchant Traveling the Roads

White kittel, knee pants, stockings of the 18th century

Traveling, whether it involved great distances or just a trip to the nearest town, could be dangerous for the men and women of the Trier Land during the late 18th and early 19th century. Robbery and disappearances were common occurrences, especially on roads that were little traveled.

Martha Heit describes these "missing" or "waylaid" travelers as listed in the logs of the official government gazette of the times. There are too many for me to describe the clothing of all of them but here are the traveling clothes of a few of the merchants who took to the road.

The Elderly Gentleman from Wellen

Throughout the early years of the 19th century, the older styles from before the time of Napoleon were still worn, especially by those born before the "Little Emperor" had changed many of the laws and customs of the Rhineland. Such was the case of an older man who was traveling the roads with his son in 1827. The gazette records do not record the man's business, but it would appear that it was a profitable one based on the clothing he was wearing. The picture above gives you and idea of the garb of this 18th century middle-class merchant from Wellen

The description given to the police clerk, probably by the son, was very detailed. The older man's outer garment was a blue linen Kittel, a long, loose, smock-like garment, often used for work around the farm to protect the clothing underneath. A Kittel was also worn by well-to-do persons who wanted to disguise their wealth when they traveled the roads. But under the Kittel, the missing man had worn a dark blue Tuchrock, an undercoat that today would probably be called a suit jacket. It had a wide lapel and large buttons the size of a Prussian Taler (the size of the Taler did change over time but was always a fairly large coin). The picture below, a segment from a portrait painted in the 18th century, is a good example of the large buttons on the Tuckrock.

Under the Tuckrock, the missing man had worn a linen shirt with a collar that was all of a piece with the shirt and held together with a black silk scarf. Over the shirt he wore a dark blue high-closed vest, and Sammet (velvet) knee pants about culotte length. His knee length stockings were worn with a type of decorative garter and his low thin shoes closed with a silver buckle. On his head he wore a black hat with a brim and a low crown and underneath the hat he wore a more casual Zipfel (slightly pointed) cap, knitted from very fine wool.

When the man and his son had reached Konz, a town about seven miles from Trier, the father and son briefly separated. The father had gone into one of the businesses, possibly to "clean" himself from the dust of journey (says the police report) and after that he and his fine clothing were not seen again.

The Linen Weaver from Burbach

Mutze with Schirm (Museum in Honfleur, Normandy)

This weaver was about 40 years old and in Dec. 1835 he went on business to Gersweiler and disappeared. No one ever heard from him again. His clothing made it appear that he was a poor man, but robbers must have seen through his disguise which consisted of an old cap (Mutze) made out of dark material with a Schirm (a cap with a visor and sometimes ear flaps) as in the cap at the left. His cloth overcoat was gray and his trousers were made of black cloth. He had white linen gaitors and shoes that were in poor repair. Under his coat he had on an old worn-out shirt over which he had a muslin loose shirt, no scarf and no vest.

The Priest from Piesport

Priests also were "merchants" that had "customers" who needed "spiritual wares." In 1820 the priest from Piesport was on the road the day after Sylvester (New Year's Day) when the Mosel was greatly swollen, flooding over the path from Mannheim to Piesport. This priest never came home again; it is likely that he drowned. His clothing was of the style of the 18th century that was perhaps the official priestly dress of this time, something the author was unable to discover. He wore a large overcoat of dark green wool material with a collar, and part of the collar was a small standup necktie of a cotton material. The coat had a cuff that was also of cotton. Underneath His overcoat, he wore a typical priestly undercoat with small black buttons, a vest of black material, knee pants of black material with silver buckles and black stockings. His shirt was a form of muslin with crape cuffs. The letters WK were embroidered by hand about level with his highest breast bone. This most likely was a religious symbol of some kind.

The Jewish Tradesman

The occupation of Jewish men of the time was almost always that of a trader and/or money changer. This always made them a target for robbery when they traveled. In Saarbrucken, one such man is described as wearing a dark blue overcoat, a blue and white striped vest, a yellow scarf, blue trousers and a fur cap described as having a "Schirm". This could indicate that the cap had a visor, earflaps, or both.

A Robber from Landkreise Trier

A linen weaver from the Province of Westpfalen was attacked on 27 May, 1818 in the forest not too far from Trierweiler in the Landkreise Trier by an assailant who knocked him to the ground and left him for dead. The robber took 215 Taler; part made up of French Kronenthaler and the remainder of Prussian coins (The linen weaver must have traveled widely). The victim was found the following night and brought to Wintersdorf. Since he had met the man who robbed him the previous evening and, since the robber was dressed very well, the linen weaver walked with him as a travel companion. Thus the linen weaver was able to describe his assailant's clothing in detail: "blue linen Kittel, dark blue undercoat, dark blue vest, a pair of velvet pants, thin shoes with straps, a black silk scarf and a hat."

All people, but especially merchants who had to travel the roads any distance had a kind of fatalism, although they hoped for the best. But as you can see, it was a very unsure thing whether a man would ever reach his destination.