In 1827, Michel 1782 and Marie Anne Bourgeois packed up their children and their belongings - everything they would need to start a new life half a world away - and left Mertzen in the Haut Rhin for the US. At about the same time, in a small village four miles away, another family, the Hoffs, was getting ready to do the same thing. And just few years after that (1833), another Bourgeois family, Michel 1782's brother Morand 1785, packed up his wife, Anna, and eight of their nine children, to follow the exodus.
Records of emigration that early in the 19th century are sparse, but because Michel Bourgeois 1782 made a beeline for Somerset, Ohio, I have to assume someone else -- perhaps one of Michel's sons - had already scoped it out as the perfect place to start life over. But it could also be that someone else from the area had made their way to Ohio and wrote back, raving about good soil and cheap land. I haven't yet found an easy way to locate migrations from that particular area of the Haut Rhin for the 1820s, but what records I can locate indicate that people were moving.
Anthropologists talk about migrations' pushes and pulls, using those categories as ways of thinking about the motivation for movement among people. It's assumed that the more difficult it is to pick up and go, the stronger the pushes and pulls must have been. Migration always entailed taking with you anything and everything you could, whether it was tools of the trade, household belongings, precious possessions, or just the clothes on your back (think Irish during the famines). The Bourgeois were farmers or farm laborers, so in addition to household necessities (butter churns, milk pails, dishes, kettles, bedding, clothing), they may have tried to bring hand plows, metal-working tools, saws, axes, tools that they would need and tools to help make other tools. Taking all this down the Rhine to a port, loading it onto a ship, making the two-week (or longer) ocean journey, and then unloading and getting these things overland to Ohio sounds impossible to me. But that's what they did. All I can say is they must have really wanted to leave. So why?
The opportunities for farmers in Ohio were obviously a draw. Land was plentiful, fertile, and affordable. If there were friends or family already there to help with assimilation, so much the better. Somerset had a German-speaking community, a Catholic Church. Though Ohio at this time wasn't exactly tame, the native population was slowly being rendered powerless, and the predatory animals had been reduced in number. These factors would appeal. But given the labor involved in the move, there had to be pushes. What were they?
Lester Bushue argues reasonably that the limited land in Alsace would have been problematic for a man with four sons. After working the land for 100 years, passing land down to sons with each death (assuming they owned land, not an easy assumption), the land available for farming would been dramatically reduced in size. So Michel 1782 may have been concerned about his sons' ability to not only survive but be able to have families. And it's clear, regardless of what you read, that the tax burden on the poorest people was onerous, despite a revolution to change the way France did business.
Famine is also possible. Fr. Blaine Burkey relates that the good Burghers of Magden Switzerland paid Augustine Burkey to lead 34 people out of their starving town, across Europe, and to America. Is that the story of the Bourgeois and Hoff migration?
This is also a post-war era, and even though Alsace seems to have had an easier time than other parts of France, still there would have been issues. Villagers didn't always agree with Napolean, the monarchy, the position of the Church, or each other. Men had been conscripted into war and died in Napolean's retreat across Russia. Others had fled to dodge the draft. These men left behind women and children who would have struggled to survive. Men also migrated to the cities for work for long periods of time. While these deaths and disappearances may have opened up land, Anabaptist families fleeing oppression in Switzerland poured into Alsace in search of land. Men returned from war to discover that their land had been appropriated by migrants. Life wasn't fair, and it may have had periods of violence.
Rural France had had some crises as well, that may have made people uneasy about their fate. There had been a cholera epidemic, and the years without summer (when the volcano Mt. Tambora in Indonesia erupted and covered Europe in a dense pall) -- 1816 and 1817 -- had invited famine into their communities.
But counter these issues with the enormous cost of travel and buying land, of leaving behind a century of family and friends, of organizing for the trip. Of abandoning the devil you know for the one you don't.
I spent a good deal of time scouting for books and articles that might address life in the Haut Rhin in the early 19th century, hoping for insight. I learned a bit more about ordinary life, not necessarily in Alsace, but enough to paint a life of hard work and close living conditions. But this life was also one of close families and neighbors with a solid tradition of pulling together in times of need. So whatever drove them to leave must have been pretty big. I began to suspect disease.
I returned to my favorite set of records, those maintained online by the Haut Rhin archives. I examined the Mertzen, Strueth, and Fulleren death records starting with 1810, hoping to find clues in the numbers. I'm not sure anything I've done in genealogical research has saddened me as much as those records did.
The story in the records
Mertzen. Between 1810-1819, with the exceptions of 1811 and 1814, there were a total of 36 deaths, and these occurred at all times of the year; in general, the ages of the dead were spread from a few days old to 70. I did see more deaths of men and women in their 30s and 40s than I'd expect, but without knowing anything about life expectancy in 19th century France, the data seemed reasonable.
But what struck me the more I looked at the data were the outlier years of 1811 and 1814. In THOSE years, almost all the deaths (16 of the total of 20) were in the four winter months, late January to May. And in those two years, the majority of the dead were adults, both young and middle aged.
As I moved forward into later years, that nice pattern formed by the other years (ignoring 1811 and 1814) was replaced with a horror story that slowly began in 1820, peaked in 1826, and didn't really taper until 1827.
In 1820, all seven dead are female. In 1821, three of the five dead are under seven. Something was going on that made women and children more vulnerable.
The years 1822-23 appear to revert to normal, with the deaths spread among the ages, sexes, and time of year.
And then something happened in 1824: 6 people died, 3 of them children. In 1825, the death toll rose to 11, 6 of them under ten. And in 1826, starting at the end of January and lasting 4 months, the village of Mertzen buried 13 people, 11 of them children. Three families, families that were related through marriage to the Bourgeois (and Hoffs), lost 2 children each. Two babies died in 1827, two adults in 1828 and then we settle into the earlier pattern of 4-6 deaths, again representing the spectrum of possibilities. (In 1832, a man named Joseph Zwik died in December of cholera. Perhaps this event pushed Michel 1782's brother Morand to emigrate with his family to America.)
Strueth. Strueth is grimmer still. Keep in mind this is a larger community than Mertzen. But reading and recording the deaths year by year was incredibly sad.
In 1810, Strueth has 9 deaths; 2 are infantry men, reminding us that the Napoleanic wars were alive and well in this time frame.
In 1811, there are 18 deaths, and the situation mirrors that of Mertzen's. All but one death occur between Jan and May, and everyone is vulnerable but especially adults in their prime (15 of the 18 dead are adults in between 20 and 50). Something stalked these towns and targeted working men and women, people whose deaths would leave children in a precarious position.
As we saw in Mertzen, things seem to return to normal for 1812-1813 and then in 1814 we see 13 deaths, again among the adults. And, again, all but 3 of these deaths occur between February and June.
Between 1815 and 1823, the death rate fluctuates between 4 and 8 deaths a year, with most of the mortality striking the aging members of the community. One exception to this is what we see in 1822-1824, when more children than adults die: 4 of the 6 deaths in 1822, 3 of the 4 in 1823, and 3 of the 5 in 1824 are very young children. Are the children more vulnerable with so many adults having died? Have families taken in orphans and their resources are stretched?
And then we roll into 1825, and it's a nightmare. Thirteen of the 21 deaths (21!) are children and two-thirds of the deaths occur in the first half of the year. There are days when there are 2 or 3 deaths of children. The records become increasingly difficult to read as officials scrawl their reports.
The death rate drops in 1826 (9 deaths, 4 of which are children), but I imagine that at this point the community is staggering. Children lost both parents within a week or two, parents watched two and three of their children die, people lost spouses, two parish priests die. It must have been a nightmare.
Fulleren. Fulleren is larger than either Strueth or Mertzen, so its average number of deaths in any given year is about 10. And Fulleren's real nightmare is in 1814 when there are 43 deaths, more than 4 times the average. Half of these deaths occur in the first 4 months of the year and strike ruthlessly at old and young, male and female. It's a slaughter.
While 1814 is the worst year, 1825 and 1826 are also years when the death rate soars. In 1825, there are 17 deaths and 14 of these are between Jan and March. There were 20 deaths in 1826, three of them Hoff babies. Maurice Hoff and his wife Anne Marie Danzé lose two children that year. The number drops to 12 in 1827, but there are two stillborns, one of them belonging to beleaguered Maurice and Anne Marie. Life seems to return to normal by 1828; I'm willing to bet that by then the Hoff's were gone.
In all three towns, the years 1814 and 1825-26 seems to heartbreakers. These three towns are walking distance apart, with Strueth just down the road from Fulleren, on the west side of the Largue. Mertzen is just across the Largue from Strueth. These communities must have felt the world was ending.
Other than Joseph Zwik's death from cholera, and the two infantrymen who died of battle wounds, I have not found anything to indicate what 19th century scourge had visited them. My French genealogist friend Catherine Studer suggests typhus, cholera, dysentery, influenza, measles, as good candidates, as well starvation. Deaths during the truly horrible years occurred in Jan-April and strike the children. My naive guess is that there was an epidemic. I doubt we'll ever know what the disease(s) was, but its virulence was assisted by the particular living arrangements of the era.
Most people lived in small, one-room homes; occasionally their animals shared a space connected to the house to make caring for animals a little easier. Young marrieds (and their children) lived with parents until they were established well enough to start their own homes. There could easily be 8-10 people of all ages living, eating, sleeping, sneezing, coughing, puking in the same one room. The Largue was their water source; did human and animal waste drain into the stream? Who treated the ill, and what did they know?
These conditions would have made contagious diseases genuine scourges. We can add to the intimacy of the dwellings the close relationships among residents. Families were intricately connected through marriage and were quick to help one another in the event of need. Furthermore, the civil records reveal that continuous contact between households was the norm: when someone died, the death was reported by a witness and attested to by two more, always males. The very factor that made survival possible in an uncertain world would have accelerated the hazards of contagious disease.
Did the towns pull together, or did people avoid contact with their neighbors? Did they start hoarding resources, or did they reach out to those suffering? Did they blame the dead and stigmatize their families, or reach out in sympathy? Did they turn to the darker arts, seeking intervention from gods and devils, or did they pack St. Maurice and St. Andre, light thousands of votives, wear out their knees on the hard floors? And did they choose to stay, living in uncertainty, or scoop up their loved ones and set off to start again?
No matter which of the four horsemen decided to ride into those towns, he was a ruthless killer, especially in winter and especially of the young. I can't imagine that the carnage didn't take its toll on people's relationships with their families, the neighbors, their officials, and their God. I imagine, even after life returned to normal, that it was a long time before a cough was just cough, when bells tolled for holy days and not death, when a knock on the door wasn't death calling. In my opinion, the Bourgeois and Hoff families chose the devil they didn't know, and fled to America.
NOTE: I have posted the raw dataset of deaths in these three towns from 1810-1830 in my dropbox account. It's a spreadsheet and I'm happy to share. Just ask.
