I wrote this the night after the Paris terrorist attack and have been debating a post here ever since. I'm sharing because I AM French and I pray for us all.
France
I am a compulsive genealogist, and I have spent the last few nights entering data into my mother's side of the tree: the Hoffs, the Wolfs, the Bushus, who are French. Eva Hertling and Johannes Muller have donated their German ancestors to the cause, but for the time being, I've been focused on France. The process means seeing, again, that Salome died at 34, leaving seven children. That Anthony was felled by a tree and left his wife with 11 children to raise. That Jean died 25 days after marrying. It's hard to do this without seeing tears and pain in faces I never knew.
In the process I've been writing, laboriously, to my French relatives (and a genie friend) with questions. In answer, Michel has sent me some of the loveliest photos imaginable of Brittany (a slide show of chrysanthemums was breathtaking), and Etienne has graciously answered my demands about just how strong and accurate his sources are (very!).
Tonight, France is hurting. And I realize just how much my world has grown to embrace a land across the Atlantic. Intellectually, I have been educated to the nth degree to be culturally sensitive, to embrace the wider world, to empathize, to feel. But it's different tonight. I have relatives -- LOTS of them, I imagine -- in France, and given the propensity of restless young people to put their rural homes in their rearview mirrors, I imagine I have relatives in Paris. So suddenly an intellectual exercise has changed; I have skin in the game.
Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that the violence in Paris appalls me because of relatives I've never seen. I'm saying that this recent research process has made me think about France in ways I never have before. I've been researching agricultural processes, folk sayings, living arrangements, marriage rituals, the relationship between husband and wife, the dynamics of life and death in a small farming community. I spent a week reading and recording all the deaths in three tiny towns from 1810 to 1830; the families, whom I already knew because of marriage and baptism records, became real to me as I read about some killer years when three or four children might die within two weeks, of whole families wiped out, of priests and town officials dying, of death visiting house after house and leaving his mark. I am still haunted by what I learned.
Two hundred years ago, the villain was probably disease. Today, we have a new villain. There was a time I would have been saddened by what's happening to people in France. Tonight, it stalks me, perhaps because of the incomprehensibility of people hating enough to kill. But also because I just discovered this beautiful spider web of connections in France, and tonight explosions and gunfire sent tremors along those delicate threads, reminding me that in mourning for France, I mourn for myself. Je suis une Francaise.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Should you use Google Translate?
First, let me say that Google Translate has helped me enormously in my genie work. Because the Bushu and Wolf families were Catholics from Europe, I spend a lot of time with documents written in Latin, French, and German. I also spend a lot of time on German and French websites. I can get by in all three languages, though at a very, very, basic level.
I also correspond with five people in France and Germany. While I can use English with two of these people, that is not the case with the other three. One friend writes in French, and I answer in German, another writes in German, and I respond in kind. And the third, let's call him Jean, prefers that we use a translation program, so he composes in French and lets his program translate; I compose in English and turn the translation over to Google.
I tell you this to demonstrate that my use of Google is pretty complex. I cut and paste lengthy text from foreign websites into Translate. (I can manage short stuff, but it takes a while; long stuff is overwhelming.) I compose my long emails to Jean in Translate. But I compose the German emails, and the short French ones, "freehand," meaning I use the language as I know it, using a dictionary to look up words I don't know. It's a long, arduous process, but good for my brain. However, when I'm done writing, I submit it to Translate for comparison. Translate fixes my spelling and syntax, but sometimes changes my meaning. Sometimes a LOT. So I don't always accept what Translate tells me because sometimes Translate is wrong.
So based on my pretty complicated experience, I'd like to offer some suggestions to those thinking of trying out a translation program. I'm writing about Google Translate, which I understand is one of the best, but I imagine much of this applies to other programs as well.
If you're asking Translate to convert foreign language text for you, expect errors. Be patient, get creative in your thinking. If you're translating something written by a native speaker, assume they didn't intend to confuse you or insult you. Here's a good example of what I mean. Jean wrote and told me that he was giving me access to his online tree. He said I could either do "one copy to stick" or access the whole tree. I played around with that "one copy to stick" thing; did he mean copy to a USB drive? Nah. I finally found the French terms in his email (one good reason to know something of the language), entered the individual words (copier coller) in Translate and Voila! Copy-paste. "Coller" is paste as well as stick. Now it makes total sense. If you are totally perplexed, try using another translation program. My friend Jean uses Systran.
Now, if the translation is going the other way -- English to another language, my advice gets more detailed.
First, I would strongly caution you from using a translation program for anything sensitive or important if you don't know the language at all. I would NEVER try to correspond with someone in Russian, Japanese, or Dutch; I'd find someone to help me, even if I had to pay. I might use a program to say "Thank you," but that's it. There are too many ways things can go wrong; at the very least, you'll look like an idiot and at worst, start world war III. You don't need to know much; some vocabulary would help, as well as a little bit about how the language goes together. In general I'd say the more important the message is, the more you should have some acquaintance with the language.
If you're writing someone, be upfront that you're using a translation program. Your reader will assume you didn't mean to be insulting or confusing; she will blame the program, perhaps get a good laugh.
The less you know the language, the simpler your text chunks should be. Use simple sentences with simple punctuation, and translate one sentence at a time. You can put them in paragraphs when you paste into your email or whatever.
Avoid slang or specialized language. While current tech language (wifi, USB, Internet) often retains its general English spelling in Western European languages, lots of English jargon and idioms turn into gobbledegook at the other end. So for instance, I would not use the word "passing" to refer to death, or "tying the knot" for marriage. Try to read your prose with an eye out for stuff that doesn't make literal sense. (For example, I'd avoid "keep an eye out" and "stuff" in the previous sentence if I planned to have Google translate it.)
Proofread, proofread, proofread your English before you submit it. Translation programs are literal; non-words will be left untranslated, and the program won't catch your use of "piece" when you meant "peace." Don't forget to look for accidental spaces in words; that could make a mess of the translation. So triple-check everything for typos, spelling, correct pronouns (no accidental "our" when you mean "your"), and homonyms.
Finally, read through the translation for obvious errors. Yes, I know, you wouldn't be using the program if you could translate the text yourself. But a careful look will help you catch misspelled English that didn't get translated, odd characters where there shouldn't be any. In a recent instance, when I cut and pasted text from Google, I ended up with the same paragraph pasted multiple times. In another, I discovered a sentence had been cut off. In a third, an acronym (CDHF) was converted to another one entirely.
On the upside, I strongly encourage anyone with immigrant ancestors to dive into foreign research. And connect with people overseas. I have found that Europeans are gracious and helpful as long as I'm courteous and clear. My experience is they love knowing what happened to those ancestors who vanished. But if someone helps, offer help in return.
I doubt that I've covered all the bases here. I'll add as I experience yet more fun with translations. And if others have advice or experiences to share, please leave a comment.
À bientôt!
I also correspond with five people in France and Germany. While I can use English with two of these people, that is not the case with the other three. One friend writes in French, and I answer in German, another writes in German, and I respond in kind. And the third, let's call him Jean, prefers that we use a translation program, so he composes in French and lets his program translate; I compose in English and turn the translation over to Google.
I tell you this to demonstrate that my use of Google is pretty complex. I cut and paste lengthy text from foreign websites into Translate. (I can manage short stuff, but it takes a while; long stuff is overwhelming.) I compose my long emails to Jean in Translate. But I compose the German emails, and the short French ones, "freehand," meaning I use the language as I know it, using a dictionary to look up words I don't know. It's a long, arduous process, but good for my brain. However, when I'm done writing, I submit it to Translate for comparison. Translate fixes my spelling and syntax, but sometimes changes my meaning. Sometimes a LOT. So I don't always accept what Translate tells me because sometimes Translate is wrong.
So based on my pretty complicated experience, I'd like to offer some suggestions to those thinking of trying out a translation program. I'm writing about Google Translate, which I understand is one of the best, but I imagine much of this applies to other programs as well.
If you're asking Translate to convert foreign language text for you, expect errors. Be patient, get creative in your thinking. If you're translating something written by a native speaker, assume they didn't intend to confuse you or insult you. Here's a good example of what I mean. Jean wrote and told me that he was giving me access to his online tree. He said I could either do "one copy to stick" or access the whole tree. I played around with that "one copy to stick" thing; did he mean copy to a USB drive? Nah. I finally found the French terms in his email (one good reason to know something of the language), entered the individual words (copier coller) in Translate and Voila! Copy-paste. "Coller" is paste as well as stick. Now it makes total sense. If you are totally perplexed, try using another translation program. My friend Jean uses Systran.
Now, if the translation is going the other way -- English to another language, my advice gets more detailed.
First, I would strongly caution you from using a translation program for anything sensitive or important if you don't know the language at all. I would NEVER try to correspond with someone in Russian, Japanese, or Dutch; I'd find someone to help me, even if I had to pay. I might use a program to say "Thank you," but that's it. There are too many ways things can go wrong; at the very least, you'll look like an idiot and at worst, start world war III. You don't need to know much; some vocabulary would help, as well as a little bit about how the language goes together. In general I'd say the more important the message is, the more you should have some acquaintance with the language.
If you're writing someone, be upfront that you're using a translation program. Your reader will assume you didn't mean to be insulting or confusing; she will blame the program, perhaps get a good laugh.
The less you know the language, the simpler your text chunks should be. Use simple sentences with simple punctuation, and translate one sentence at a time. You can put them in paragraphs when you paste into your email or whatever.
Avoid slang or specialized language. While current tech language (wifi, USB, Internet) often retains its general English spelling in Western European languages, lots of English jargon and idioms turn into gobbledegook at the other end. So for instance, I would not use the word "passing" to refer to death, or "tying the knot" for marriage. Try to read your prose with an eye out for stuff that doesn't make literal sense. (For example, I'd avoid "keep an eye out" and "stuff" in the previous sentence if I planned to have Google translate it.)
Proofread, proofread, proofread your English before you submit it. Translation programs are literal; non-words will be left untranslated, and the program won't catch your use of "piece" when you meant "peace." Don't forget to look for accidental spaces in words; that could make a mess of the translation. So triple-check everything for typos, spelling, correct pronouns (no accidental "our" when you mean "your"), and homonyms.
Finally, read through the translation for obvious errors. Yes, I know, you wouldn't be using the program if you could translate the text yourself. But a careful look will help you catch misspelled English that didn't get translated, odd characters where there shouldn't be any. In a recent instance, when I cut and pasted text from Google, I ended up with the same paragraph pasted multiple times. In another, I discovered a sentence had been cut off. In a third, an acronym (CDHF) was converted to another one entirely.
On the upside, I strongly encourage anyone with immigrant ancestors to dive into foreign research. And connect with people overseas. I have found that Europeans are gracious and helpful as long as I'm courteous and clear. My experience is they love knowing what happened to those ancestors who vanished. But if someone helps, offer help in return.
I doubt that I've covered all the bases here. I'll add as I experience yet more fun with translations. And if others have advice or experiences to share, please leave a comment.
À bientôt!
Sunday, November 1, 2015
The romance of log cabin life
I had visitors this weekend: my genie buddy Susan and her husband came for the weekend, and on Saturday we visited the Lincoln museum in Springfield IL. It's my second trip there, and it is wonderful. If you haven't been, and Illinois isn't half a continent away, I highly recommend it.
I mention this because one of the exhibits is a replica of the log cabin that Lincoln grew up in. And it looks surprisingly like the house that Morand Bushu, Mary Ann Miller, and their 11 children lived in from about 1840 to 1870, in Somerset, Ohio.
I mention this because one of the exhibits is a replica of the log cabin that Lincoln grew up in. And it looks surprisingly like the house that Morand Bushu, Mary Ann Miller, and their 11 children lived in from about 1840 to 1870, in Somerset, Ohio.
Theirs was one room with a loft, a luxury I don't think Lincoln had, and I think it's pretty much like the dwellings that laborers in Mertzen and Strueth lived in. From what I've been reading, one large room, and maybe an attached "barn" was pretty standard in 19th century France.
The Lincoln exhibit puts the rigors of log cabin living front and center. At night the only light is from a fire and lamps burning precious oil, something I really appreciate now that night falls at 5:00. You also realize just how cramped living was: much of life must have been lived out of doors. There sure wasn't room for a child to set up a blanket fort, chase the dog, have a tantrum, or get sick without making it necessary for other functions to cease. And when I think to what extent I'm shielded from the heat, cold, humidity, bugs, vermin, and other vicissitudes of midwest life, my awe at my ancestors' fortitude balloons.
The Lincoln cabin interior contains young Abe reading by the firelight, a dog at his feet, and the remainder of the room taken up with two beds from which loud snores emanate. I assume that once Abe set aside his reading, he'd have climbed into one of the two already occupied beds. Upon rising, one bed would slide under the other and somehow the cooking, eating, and other daily indoor activities would have taken place in the scant space remaining.
As I type this on my wifi-connected iPad, with overhead lights and a sofa lamp illuminating the space, a lovely fire at my side, and my spouse out of sight and sound watching a football game on a 50" satellite-connected television, I feel preposterously over-indulged. My ancestors would have been agog. But would they be jealous, or appreciative? Would they disaprove of such hedonism, or elbow each other out of the way to take part? I think Morand might have been judgmental, perhaps his children as well. Or maybe not. Maybe they'd be thrilled that so much came from their labor. I hope they don't judge me too harshly, at least giving me credit for unearthing their stories for their descendents to share.
Death rides a pale horse: UPDATED
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.
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.
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