Mayfly

Mayfly


On January 15, 1787, in Fulleren, Haut Rhin, Alsace (near Mertzen), just before the French Revolution started, when bread cost a bazillion dollars, when everyone in France who wasn't clergy or Royal was suffering immeasurably, Joseph Hoff* and Anne Marie Koegler had a baby girl. It was eighteenth century France; having babies in the face of doom was what people did. Joseph and Anne Marie had married about 1782 and promptly proceeded to reproduce. Marie Eve was their second child and second daughter; as far as I can tell, they had no sons, which for a farming family in rural France was a shame.

Two years later France blew up, and ugly, ugly stuff happened. It's likely that the area around Fulleren didn't feel the full effects of the war, but the Reign of Terror was real; people gathered at markets to shop and gossip, and they would not have been immune to the stories of blood, greed, tragedy. They would have heard about the community of Hirsingue, where protesters cut down the Tree of Liberty and, in punishment, EVERY SINGLE PRIEST AND RABBI in the community was executed, the temple and church looted and destroyed. Sons would have been conscripted to serve in Napolean's disastrous effort to conquer the world, priests would have been watching over their shoulders, waiting to be betrayed, and everyone would have been hoarding food. During this frightening time, Marie Eve was growing up.

The family survived the war. But on May 26, 1805, Marie Eve, who was living with her uncle's family, had her own baby girl. Delivered by a midwife, Anne Marie Wallier,  Anne Marie Hoff arrived without benefit of a named, legal father. Four days later, she died. Since she was illegitimate, she was probably not given a Catholic funeral or burial.

Hers was not the only death in Fulleren that year; she was one of 25 deaths, in a town that generally lost 10-15 people a year. And tiny, doomed Anne Marie was one of nine small children to die that year. A scant nine years later, 3 days before her 27th birthday, still single and quite possibly marked for life, Marie Eve died.


You may be asking, why do I know this? Well, I was doing due diligence, trying to trace yet another woman who bore a child and vanished. I had decided I'd see if, by some chance, the woman was from the Bourgeois part of France. Examining the Fulleren records for Mary Moritz's name, I came upon Anne Marie Hoff in the 1805 index and got curious. The rest is what you see here.

Marie Eve has no descendants seeking her out, no one for whom her brief existence has any meaning. But she was a daughter, someone's lover, briefly, a mom, perhaps a pariah. So tonight I'm having a glass of wine in her honor. Yet another leaf on my family tree I hope to meet wherever we go after this.

* Joseph Hoff was the brother of my great-great-great grandfather, Jean Hoff 1755.