A Family History Blog

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This post is dedicated to JoAnn Schrotzberger (1927-2021) [link is to her obituary], an avid genealogist and  passionate historian of all things related to the Schrotzberger family.
She was a cousin, a friend, a mentor, and a collaborator who will be sorely missed.

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Our paternal grandfather, Herman Schutze (1891-1968) used to quip about the tangled relationships between the Schutze and Schrotzberger families.

His birth mother Friederike (née Schrotzberger) died when he was an infant, and his father then married Friederike’s widowed sister Hannah. That resulted in Herman having an aunt who was his step-mother and a cousin who was his step-sister. And years later when Herman’s sister-in-law married Ted Schrotzberger, Herman’s uncle became his wife’s brother-in-law.

The close relationship between the families began in Hamburg, Germany, where our great-grandfather, Hermann Schütze (1851-1909), a journeyman butcher, came across Johann Schrotzberger (1823-1902), a master butcher and business owner in Hamburg’s slaughterhouse district. It’s likely Hermann worked for the older Johann, and through that connection began an association with his family. Hermann ended up moving in with them  and marrying Johann’s eldest daughter Friederike in 1879. Their children and their progeny, therefore, owe half of their German genes to the Schrotzberger bloodline.

We’ll take a look at the history of the Schrotzberger family in Germany, to see where the family roots began and where they spread.

Johann Leonhard Schrotzberger (1823-1902)

Johann Schrotzberger, the master butcher, moved from his birth village of Röckingen, in Bavaria, four hundred miles north to one of Europe’s largest ports —the city-state of Hamburg, Germany, in 1845, at the age of 22.¹ He left a village of about 800 people to join a city of over 140,000 residents (that more than doubled by the time he emigrated to the U.S.). It’s likely he went to Hamburg to complete the requirement of becoming a  journeyman (literally “journey man”) butcher, but the prospect of adventure and opportunity in a major port town likely contributed to his move to that particular city.

Johann was the oldest of his parents’ eleven children. His father was an (at the time) unmarried farmer (Bauer). His mother was the granddaughter of a butcher and one-time mayor of the village of Röckingen.² His mother’s father and brother were also butchers, likely inspiring Johann’s career choice.

The earliest record of Johann in Hamburg is his marriage register, dating to 1853 when at age 29 he married the 26-year-old Sophia Elisabeth Stallbaum. The register shows he’d come to the city eight years previously and that he became a full citizen of the city three weeks prior to his marriage. The couple already had a daughter, Friederike (our great-grandmother), born six weeks before the marriage. (Johann, too, was born illegitimate. See image above.)  They continued building a family, ending up with ten children born between 1853 and 1871, one of whom died at an early age.

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Sophia Elisabeth Stallbaum’s history is harder to trace, as the parish records of her home town of Lüneburg, 35 miles southeast of Hamburg, are not yet digitized. From research that JoAnn Schrotzberger did, we know Sophia’s father was Heinrich Georg Stallbaum and her mother was Anna Catherina Bleÿ. Her parents were married in April of 1816 in Lüneburg while her father was serving as a soldier. Sophia was born in 1827, the seventh of nine children. She came to Hamburg in 1843, nine years after her father’s passing, and two years before Johann Schrotzberger arrived at the city.

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During his years in Hamburg Johann had at least seven residences, moving his wife and growing number of children from the old town, to the new town, to the harbor, and eventually to the St. Pauli district.³ Hamburg was a port city that catered to sailors and the seafaring community, and the St. Pauli district — in 1840 — had 250 different occupations deriving income from port activity, and housed 100 captains, 100 innkeepers, and 150 registered prostitutes in 20 brothels.⁴ One can imagine that all that activity required a lot of energy — and meat — and Johann worked at providing the latter.

By all appearances Johann Schrotzberger was an enterprising man, rising up the economic ladder through a succession of jobs and businesses. When he married in 1853 he was a sausage and smoked meats dealer, then became a hide trader, a sausage maker, an intestine dealer, a butcher, a master butcher (he obtained that status in 1860⁵), and a business owner — of the J. L. Schrotzberger company.⁶ Around  1870 Johann took over the quarters of another butcher on Sternstraße (Star Street) in the noisy and malodorous central slaughterhouse district, moving his wife and at that time eight children to their final home in Hamburg. See the map above.

By 1877 Johann bought most of the flats in his and the adjacent block’s building and rented them out, adding the title of landlord to his portfolio.⁷  A photograph of his children from the mid 1870s shows a family that is well dressed and by all appearances prosperous.

As his daughters became marrying age, suitors began to arrive. On the same day —July 4th, 1879 — two of his daughters married men who joined the Schrotzberger household at Sternstraße 70. One of the suitors was the fore-mentioned butcher Hermann Schütze and the other was a ship’s helmsman, Hugo Kopff. The sisters were Friederike and Hanna. (In a twist of fate, Hermann later married Hanna after their first spouses died, leading to that Schutze-Schrotzberger entanglement mentioned earlier.)

The happiness of nuptials, however, was soon tempered by loss. The newlywed son-in-law Hugo Kopff died six months into his marriage, in December 1879, leaving a grieving and pregnant widow. The other son-in-law, Hermann Schütze, emigrated to the United States in May of 1880, with his wife following three months later. And most devastatingly, Johann lost his wife Sophia, who passed away at age 53 in September of 1880.

Johann, now a widower and father of multiple children, was at a crossroads. Never one to shy away from a challenge or opportunity, he decided to join his eldest daughter and son-in-law in Detroit, Michigan. He emigrated, with his remaining eight children and two grandchildren, in August 1881 at the age of 58. On the inner east side of Detroit, in Germantown, he opened a butcher shop on Gratiot Avenue with his sons, replicating his success in Hamburg.

According to his great-granddaughter JoAnn Schrotzberger, Johann had a falling out with some of his family in the early 1890s. He bought a 360-acre farm north of Detroit where two of his sons joined him. Six years later he returned to the city, for a while living with his daughter Hanna and son-in-law Hermann Schütze — completing the circle that began in Hamburg. When Hermann and Hanna moved to Canada in 1901, Johann went to live with his sons Frederick and Julius, at whose home he succumbed to nephritis at the age of 79 in 1902. His body was buried in an area of Trinity Cemetery, on Mount Elliot in Detroit, holding a number of his family members, including his daughter, a son, and two granddaughters. (If you want to visit them at Section O, Lot # 12, be forewarned that many Schrotzbergers don’t erect headstones, including the family buried here.)

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The earlier Schrotzberger Families of Röckingen

The Schrotzberger clan can be traced back to the mid 1700s,⁸ with the marriage of Johann Leonhardt Schrotzberger (1720-1762), son of Tobias Schrotzberger, to Anna Barbara Eissens in 1751 at St. Laurentius Church in Röckingen. (Click here to see the entry in the church register … and let me know if you have any better luck interpreting it! )

Röckingen is a village about 100 miles northwest of Munich — roughly in the middle of a triangle formed by the cities of Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Munich — nestled between the Wörnitz River⁹ on the south and the Hesselberg mountains on the north. Johann Leonhard was a barley farmer (Gerstenbauer), an occupation typical for the area, and he and Anna Barbara had  four children between 1752 and 1761, before Johann’s untimely death at the age of 41 in 1762.

Their third child, named after his father, was born in 1759. He was fatherless before the age of three. This Johann Leonhard Schrotzberger (1759-1837) married Maria Margaretha Wunschenmeier (you’ve gotta love these Germanic names) and they had four children between 1795 and 1803. Johann made his living as a small  farmer (variously reported as a Söldner¹⁰ and Halbbauer), owning probably less than 10 acres.¹¹

“In Bavaria … most farm houses were and still are located inside the village. Attached to the house is the barn. The space in front of the house and barn is called the Hof (courtyard). Cows, pigs, and other farm animals live inside the barn. Outside the village, land was divided up into fields where farmers grew crops.”¹²

He went on to also become a master baker (Bäckermeister) in his middle and later years.  He died at the respectable age of 77 in 1837, Maria died in 1844 at the same age.

Their first child, Johann Michael Schrotzberger (1795-1861), was a small farmer like his father. He, however, put his cart before his horse, so to speak, fathering four children before marrying their mother. Their fourth child, named for his father, died when only twelve days old, and the couple married seven weeks later in 1828 . . . whether they suddenly found religion through tragedy is unknown. The couple went on to have seven more children, for a total of eleven between 1823 and 1840.

Johann Michael Schrotzberger’s wife was Sophia Katharina Rau, whose family apparently played a large role in their children’s lives. Sophia Katharina’s grandfather, Johann Georg Josea Rau, as previously mentioned, was the first recorded mayor of Röckingen, from 1788 to 1790, as well as a master butcher (Metzgermeister). Sophia’s father and brother were also butchers. This is likely the reason that three of Johann and Sophia’s four surviving sons became butchers, including our Johann Leonhard Schrotzberger as reported at the top of this post.

The other son, and the first of their legitimate children, Johann Georg Schrotzberger (1829-1894), carried on the farming tradition of his Schrotzberger ancestors, inheriting the farm and house in Röckingen¹³ which still stands. JoAnn Schrotzberger sent me a captioned photograph of it. When I travel to Germany this summer I’ll look up the house that sheltered our ancestral families and their farm animals . . . the house where Johann Leonhard, our great-great grandfather, played in the courtyard as a child, helped feed (and perhaps butcher) the animals, and got his start in life before moving to Hamburg, and years later to Detroit.

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The Röckingen Schrotzberger Descendants

The Schrotzberger legacy didn’t end in Röckingen after our great-grandfather Johann Leonhard (J. L.) left to pursue his career in Hamburg. Per “The History of Röckingen and Its Environs:“

• Friedrich Schrotzberger, likely the brother of J. L., was a decorated soldier of the 14th Bavarian Infantry Regiment which fought against Prussia in 1866.

• In the Second World War another Friedrich Schrotzberger soldier went missing in action.

• Georg Karl Schrotzberger (1896-1977), a grand-nephew of J. L.’s, was the mayor of Röckingen from 1933 until 1940. In 1940  he was drafted into the army and served on the front lines in Russia, Greece, and Yugoslavia as a staff sergeant.

It should also be noted that on the other side of the ocean, Earl A. Schrotzberger, a great-grandson of J. L., signed up for service with the American forces in the Second World War and served as a turret gunner in a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. He was captured in July 1944 during a mission over Ploesti, Romania, but was freed in 1945.¹⁴ In effect, World War II temporarily clove the family in two.   

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Notes:

1.  The years of Johann Leonhard Schrotzberger’s and Sophia Elisabeth Stallbaum’s moves to Hamburg are found on their marriage register: Verheiratungs-Protokoll, 1816-1865; Authors: Hamburg (Hamburg). Bürgermeisterei Wedde II; Salt Lake City, Utah : Gefilmt durch The Genealogical Society of Utah, 1968. Family History Library film #558609, record 305 / DGS #8207690, image 205 of 260.

2.  Karl Schrotzberger, The History of Röckingen and Its Environs (Die Geschichte Röckingens und seiner Umgebung), (Röckingen: Karl Schrotzberger, 1975). The booklet was sent to me by JoAnn Schrotzberger in November, 2013.

3.  Addresses and occupations of Johann Leonhard Schrotzberger were tracked from 1854 through 1881 through Hamburg address books archived at Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, “Hamburg Address Books,” https://agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de/subhh-adress/digbib/start-en.

4.  St. Pauli Kirche, “Geschichte” (History), https://www.stpaulikirche.de/geschichte/

5.  Staatsarchiv Hamburg, “Beitritt des Darmhärmhandlers J.L. Schrotzberger zur Schlachtergesellenlade, 1860 (Bestelleinheit),” http://recherche.staatsarchiv.hamburg.de/detail.aspx?ID=956759

6.  “Hamburg Address Books.”

7.  Ibid.

8.  Sources of information on the Schrotzberger family in Röckingen are parish records obtained at Archion.de, “Bavaria: Regional Church Archives of the Evangelical Luth. Church > Deanery Wassertrüdingen > Röckingen” unless otherwise indicated.

9.  A tributary of the Danube River

10.  “In some areas of Germany, Söldner can mean ‘soldier’ or ‘mercenary’ (Latin: soldarius), but in Bavaria a Söldner was a Kleinbauer (small farmer).” See Söldner link for more on the definition.

11.  The likely farm size is based on 10 Tagewerk, converted to acres at this Tagwerk link.

12.  Auswander, “Types of farms, house owners, residents, occupations in Bavaria, Germany,” https://sites.google.com/site/auswanderer20/types-of-farms-in-germany

13.  The house number, Nr. 100, is identified on his death register dated 3 March 1894. The register also identified his section of the fields outside the town as Nr. 199. I’ve written the current mayor of Röckingen for assistance in finding the house in town and the field outside of town so we can visit them this summer.

14.  The Detroit News, “16 From City Area Killed, 4 Wounded,” November 19, 1944, page 75; and The Detroit News, “7 More From Area Give Lives in War,” July 2, 1945, page 13.

 

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In a previous post we looked at the early life of Hermann Schütze, our great-grandfather, in the Dresden and Hamburg areas of Germany before he emigrated to America in 1880.

With the help of German church records we’ve now traced Hermann’s ancestral line back another six generations to its 17th century roots in the area just northeast of Dresden, which is the subject of this post.

Special thanks to Hugh Davis and Freimut Kahrs who started us on this journey.

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At a bend in a rutted road that headed north out of Dresden lay the small village of Lausa. The surrounding landscape was farmland and forest, with a small stream that lazily trickled through the area and fed its ponds. It was eight miles north of the provincial capital city, and it hosted a modest Lutheran church that served the small surrounding villages.

It was in this area in 1659, in Hermsdorf to be precise, that Christoph Schütze was born to a farm laborer.^[1] And it was in  the parish church of Lausa in 1684 that Christoph married Martha Meißner, daughter of a miller in Lausa, while he was engaged in farming the acres surrounding the town.

The area of Lausa was a kind of hothouse for Schütze families.^[2] The parish church register of  1717 to 1756 shows that one of every six children baptized during that period was named Schütze,^[3] a fairly remarkable number.

It is Lausa, then, which we consider to be the origin of our modern-day Schütze family line — where Christoph and Martha began a string of descendants that stretches today as far away as North America.

Farmers, merchants, and craftsmen

One of the fruits of their union was a son, George (1684-1759), who, like his father, was also a farmer in Lausa.

George married Elizabeth Neumann in 1711, and they had a son, Christoph (1719-1769), who became a flour merchant  (Mehlhändler) in the adjacent village of Friedersdorf.

Christoph, in turn, wed Rosina Leuthold (remember that name) in 1742 and from their marriage came Johann George Schütze (1750-1799), who started as a flour merchant and later became a canvas merchant (Leinwandhändler) in Friedersdorf.

Johann George Schütze in turn married Hanna Sophia Menzel in Lausa in 1775, and their first child was Johann Gottfried Schütze (1777-1837), who worked as a canvas merchant,  linen weaver (Leinenweber) and a barrel maker (Böttcher) in Lausa, Grünberg, and Friedersdorf.

Gottfried (Germans frequently went by the last of their forenames) had wandering feet — and a wandering eye, which got him into trouble. However, we owe a change of scene to him.

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Our cousin Hugh asked me if I’d found any heroes or villains in my Schütze family research. I’d have to say that Gottfried may have come close to being one of the latter.

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At the age of 23, Gottfried married Johanna Christiana Leuthold, his 19-year-old second cousin, in Lausa. (In his defense, small villages don’t have large gene pools.) Their first child was born eight months later, followed by four additional children born in Grünberg and Friedersdorf between 1801 and 1809. Despite their many children, the cooper and his wife ended their marriage in divorce . In the midst of the divorce a married woman, Anne Rosine Hauptmann, caught Gottfried’s eye, and they had an illegitimate daughter, Anne Christiane, who was born in 1815. Gottfried, being the upstanding man that he was, abandoned both mother and child, and the daughter was raised by her mother and her cuckolded husband.^[4]

Meanwhile, Gottfried — who by the way was our great-great-great-grandfather, though maybe not as great as the title implies — relocated to the other side of the Elbe River, southwest of Dresden, to the village of Niedergorbitz. Whether he moved there by choice or force isn’t known — that is, we don’t know whether his path was lit by his own torch or that of pursuers.

Life south of the Elbe

Once Gottfried was across the Elbe, a young widow caught his attention and he married Johanna Christiana (née Barthin) Berndt in 1820 at the parish church in Briesnitz. Christiana, the daughter of a cattle farmer (Viehpächter), was a woman who’d had some hard knocks in life, namely,  losing a husband to fever and one of their two sons at birth. She was also apparently a stabilizing (after all, her father raised cattle … stable … oh, forget it) force in Gottfried’s life. As Gottfried continued his barrel-making career in Neidergorbitz, the couple raised the son from her first marriage and added five children of their own.

Gottfried passed away at the age of 59 of emaciation (Auszehrung), likely caused by tuberculosis, diabetes, or cancer. Christiana followed him to the grave 15 years later at the age of 62.

Friedrich August Schütze

The eldest of Gottfried and Christiana’s children was Friedrich August Schütze (1821-1870).  August was born at five in the morning on Christmas Eve of 1821 in Niedergorbitz. It may well have been a snowy morning in that part of the world, and little August may have been welcomed as an early Christmas present for the newly married couple.

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Christmas Eve was a special time for our family when I was growing up. My parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at our grandparents’ house in Detroit to share a meal, play with cousins, and open gifts by the Christmas tree. Now that we know that our grandfather’s own grandfather was born on Christmas Eve exactly two hundred years ago, it will give us another reason to celebrate.

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The Coal Mines

Young men looking for work typically gravitate to the leading industry of the area, and for the towns south of Dresden that industry was coal mining, which came into full bloom in the coal-rich hills of the Döhlen Basin around the same time that August was born. His older half-brother, Gottlob Berndt, became a miner  in the town of Großburgk^[5] and he may have been the one to convince August to join a mining crew there when he was of age, likely around the time of his father’s death when August was 15.

Perhaps supporting his mother and siblings for a few years, August eventually moved from Niedergorbitz to the mining town of Zackerode three miles to the southwest. It was here he met a young widow who, like his mother, lost her husband early in her first marriage.

The widow, Hanne Sophie (née Lehmann) Rothe, was born in Zauckerode in 1823 to a coal miner (Kohlenhauer)/mine carpenter (Bergzimmerling). Her father died at age 48 in 1841. Two weeks later Sophie, then 18, married a coal miner from Großburgk by whom she was pregnant. Five months later she gave birth to their son, but the child died a few months afterwards from a tumor.

Sophie then gave birth to twins in 1843; one died at birth, the other died two days later. As if that wasn’t enough, her husband passed away in 1845 of weak nerves (Nervenschwäche), less than four years into their marriage. All of this occurred to her by age 22.

In 1848 Sophie married our great-great-grandfather Friedrich August Schütze at the area’s parish church in Pesterwitz. The couple had eight children between 1849 and 1863. The oldest was their son Ernst Gustav. Our great-grandfather Friedrich Hermann was second, born in 1851.

An excellent website, mindat.org’s “Freital, Sächsiche Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, Saxony, Germany,” helps to visualize the towns and mines around Zauckerode and Großburgk, showing a number of postcard views dating to the early 1900s. Although that would be a few decades after the era of our family’s story, it gives an idea of the landscape against which the drama of our ancestors’ lives played out.

Life at home would have been busy for Sophie, nurturing and tending to the needs of her children. Though she lost two of her three daughters at young ages, she had six children remaining at home.

Likewise, life in the mines for August was strenuous. He worked for the Freiherrlich von Burgker Steinkohlen-und Eisenhüttenwerke mining company in Großburgk. There were a number of mines in the area,^[6] and we don’t know in which one, or ones, he worked. Whichever it was, he would have come home after a day or night underground exhausted, sweaty, and covered in coal dust.

“… a skilled worker breaks five to six tons of coal during an eight-hour shift.
“…his main instrument is the wedge pick. With this he first made a horizontal incision one and a half cubit deep under the coal to be mined, the scrape. An iron drill is then used to dig a hole thirty-six inches deep and three-quarters of an inch wide, in which the twelve-inch-long powder cartridge, speared onto the ignition needle, an iron rod, comes to lie. At the top you ram the borehole with a solid mass, “occupy” it, as the word is. The ignition needle is then withdrawn from the cartridge and the trimmings and the ignition channel is obtained in this way. Finally, a rocket causes the explosion, which blasts the coal blocks off the wall.”^[7]

Trail’s End

August’s granddaughter, Harriet (née Schutze) Davis-Ray left a note about her father Hermann’s childhood which read that he, August’s second child, was:

The note is telling in a couple of ways. First, it only mentions five of the six surviving children in the family. That’s because, unfortunately, the oldest son, Gustav, committed suicide shortly after his mother’s death.

The note also indicates that Sophie and August died early, which church records confirm. Sophie died in 1868 at age 45 of a stroke or cerebral hemorrhage (Schlagfluß). Her eldest son, as mentioned, died later that year, and her surviving children ranged in age from 5 to 17.

August apparently met his death in the mines, dying two years later at age 48 in March of 1870 from an accident (Verunglückte). Mining was a dangerous career, as evidenced by the loss of 276 miners the previous summer in an explosion in two of the Großburgk mines.

With August’s death we come to the end of the trail of our German ancestors. His eldest surviving son Hermann, of course, left the Dresden area to pursue a career as a butcher in Hamburg, and later emigrated to the United States. But it was the Schütze families in Lausa, Friedersdorf, Niedergorbitz, and Zauckerode in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries who set the story in motion and whom we can credit for seeding the generations that followed.

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Regarding Hugh’s question of villains and heroes, I’d be tempted to say that August may come close to being a stoic hero, a common man who worked laboriously to support his family, and who had to deal with the grief of his wife’s and eldest son’s passing before his own tragic demise.

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Notes:

1.  Records are increasingly illegible — between poor handwriting and poor paper — the farther back we go. Plus the Lausa parish records begin in 1644, so we can’t go back farther than Christoph.

2. A graphic representation of the distribution of current-day Schütze families in Germany shows that this area still has a strong family presence. See https://www.namenforschung.net/fileadmin/dfd/maps/Schütze.pdf.

3.  In the baptismal register there were 979 baptisms registered, of which 143 had the surname of Schütze, which calculates to 15%.

4.  Evidenced by Anne Christiane Schütze’s death register. She died of fever in Lausa at age 17.

5. Gottlob Berndt’s occupation at the time of his marriage in 1839 was a miner (Bergarbeiter) and he lived in Großburgk.

6. A drawing of the area’s numerous mines is at Das Döhlener Becken bei Dresden, pages 331-332.

7. Hugo Scheube, “In the Grave of the Buried,” from an account of the mine explosion that killed 276 miners in Großburgk on 2 August 1869.

A trip to California in July to meet my dad’s 91-year-old cousin delivered an unexpected surprise:  a key to unlocking our family’s German history.

The key came in the form of a packet of documents our cousin Hugh Davis had gotten from his mother. The cache included my great-grandfather Friedrich Hermann Schütze’s birth certificates, a record of his military service, and his marriage certificate.

For years I’d wondered about the origins of the Schütze family in Germany. A family bible placed my great-granddad’s birth in Dresden. Then a few years ago I found his Hamburg marriage register on Ancestry.com which put his birth in Zeulenrode — or so I thought (it turned out I misread the town name).  I wrote to the Lutheran Church in Zeulenrode and they responded that they had no record of a birth for Hermann Schütze. I resigned myself to never knowing about my great-granddad’s early years and the story of his birth family.

Until, that is, Hugh Davis handed me the paper trail of our German ancestral history.

Nothing is simple, though, when it comes to German ancestry. The handwriting was in Kurrent script, in which most letters look different from their present-day counterparts. Compound that with reading each scribe’s unique — and frequently hastily written — chicken scratch, er, handwriting, and then pile on the fact that all of this is in a foreign language with it’s own syntax, and the challenge of deciphering and translating these documents grows larger.

Birth Certificates

The first clue that I was on to something big, however, came from examining the seal at the bottom of the certification of birth and baptism letter. It read Kirche zu Pesterwitz — Church of Pesterwitz — which put the document on the map. When I looked up the town of Pesterwitz I discovered it was on the outskirts of Dresden. So the family bible was right.

Upon examining the birth certificate, it turned out Hermann’s birth town was Zauckerode, just outside of Pesterwitz. My original reading of the town on the marriage register got a few of the middle letters wrong, not surprising given that darned Kurrent script.

Having the true location of Hermann’s birth in hand, as well as the names of his parents, I found a family tree on Ancestry that Freimut Kahrs had put together that included Hermann’s brother Friedrich WIlhelm Schütze (previously unknown to me) and his parents^[1] in Zauckerode. I wrote to Mr Kahrs to ask if he had any more information on the family, and this kind gentleman did some digging and found more background information on Hermann’s parents and the name of his grandfather.^[2] Eureka! This was coming together.

Now that the path was laid out came the work of deciphering the documents. There are online resources^[3] to help with transcribing Kurrent. In addition, WordMine is great for finding German words when you can only read a few letters within a word. And Google Translate is invaluable for performing the final step of translating the German words into English.

With those tools in hand, I began the frustrating and time-consuming task of transcribing and translating the birth certifications. It was worth the effort, though, as they yielded some enlightening information.

Our great-grandfather Friedrich Hermann Schütze was born on the evening of 9 April 1851 in Zauckerode. He was the second son of Friedrich August Schütze, a coal miner working for the Freiherrlich von Burgker Steinkohlenwerke in Burgk and living as a tenant in Zauckerode. Hermann’s mother was Hanne Sophie (née Lehmann) Schütze. Witnesses to Hermann’s baptism included two Schütze men, probably uncles, living in nearby Roßthal and Niederpesterwitz, and at least one of them was also a coal miner.

In notes on her family history, Harriet (née Schutze) Davis Ray, Hugh Davis’s mother, states that Hermann was “one of five children orphaned at an early age, scattered by adoption and lost to one another.” This, too, was new information, though Freimut Kahrs could find no records of early deaths for the parents.

It was interesting to find that Hermann kept two certifications of his birth from the pastor of Pesterwitz. I believe the dates of the two documents are significant. The first one, a certificate, was signed 15 February 1867; while the second one, a letter, was signed 14 June 1879. The second one was undoubtedly used to verify the information required for his marriage, which occurred on 4 July 1879.

The earlier certificate, on the other hand, was probably required for Hermann to begin an apprenticeship at age 15. As a butcher, he probably began working at a slaughterhouse in Dresden, likely at the location where today the State Theater — Staatsschauspiel Dresden — stands.^[5]

(This would not have been the same slaughterhouse made famous by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in his book Slaughterhouse-Five about the Dresden fire bombing at the end of World War II. That more modern slaughterhouse was about one and a half miles away.)

Military Service

Military service was required of all young German men, and it appears that Hermann began his service after completing his apprenticeship. Becoming a journeyman butcher would have required him to travel, and by the age of 23 he already seems to have been living in Hamburg, given that is where he entered the military. From his certification of military service we learn that in November of 1874 Hermann was inducted as a Gefreiter (private) with the Hannoversches Husaren Regiment (Hannover Hussar Regiment), a cavalry unit of the Prussian Army based in Wandsbeck just outside of Hamburg and today part of the city. Whether he was issued a saber or a rifle with his horse is unknown, but it would be ironic if he was given a rifle, considering that Schütze means rifleman in the German army, not to mention Schütze can also mean private first class. He completed his three years of service in September 1877.

Less than two years later he married at age 28.

Marriage Certificate

Hermann’s marriage certificate reveals that at the time of his marriage he was working as a schlachter (butcher) and living with the family of Johann Schrotzberger, an intestines dealer in the slaughterhouse section of Hamburg. Hermann married the eldest Schrotzberger daughter, Johanna Christina Friederike Schrotzberger on July 4th, 1879. One of the witnesses at the wedding was Hugo Kopff, a ship’s helmsman who married another Schrotzberger daughter, Johanna, on the same day. They were both married at St. Pauli Kirche^[6] near the harbor, a thirty minute walk from the Schrotzberger home. One can envision the entire family walking together in their Sunday clothes (or riding in a couple of horse-drawn carriages) to the church for the dual-wedding ceremony.

(After Hermann’s first wife Friederike died in Detroit years later, he married the widow Johanna. It was Johanna who was the mother of Harriet née Schutze Davis Ray and grandmother of Hugh.)

Less than a year after his first marriage, in 1880, and shortly after turning 29, Hermann emigrated to the United States and took up residence in Detroit, continuing his career as a butcher. His wife followed, as did the entire Schrotzberger family.

So ended the history of the Schütze family in Germany along the Elbe River, first in Dresden and then in Hamburg.

In the coming months we hope to go a bit further back in the family’s German history by examining old church records. With luck, we’ll have a pretty good picture of the ancestral family by next summer, when we hope to visit the old country and walk in the footsteps of our German ancestors.

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Footnotes

[1] The tree included Hermann’s brother Friedrich Wilhelm Schütze, who was born in 1857 in Zauckerode and died in Dresden in 1918.
[2] According to Freimut Kahrs in an Ancestry.com message dated 24 July 2021:
    – Friedrich August Schütze was a coal miner from Gorbitz
    – His father was Johann Gottfried Schütze, who died before 1848
    – Hanne / Johanne Sophie Lehmann was born and baptized in 1823
    – Her first husband Carl August Rothe was a coal miner from Oberspaar
    – Her father Friedrich Wilhelm was also a coal miner
    – Her mother Regina Otto came from Braunsdorf
    – There is no evidence that any of them [Friedrich August Schütze or his wife Hanne] died early
[3] On-line aids to reading old German Kurrent handwriting include:
    ○ Brigham Young University’s Script Tutorial on the German alphabet
    ○ Family Search’s German Genealogical Word List
    ○ Family History Library’s Handwriting Guide: German Gothic
[4] Photo from “Das Döhlener Becken bei Dresden” (“The Döhlen Basin near Dresden”), https://publikationen.sachsen.de/bdb/artikel/12178.
[5] Wikipedia, “Old slaughterhouse (Dresden),” https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter_Schlachthof_(Dresden)
[6] Location of wedding confirmed by St. Pauli church book entry obtained from the Evangelisch-Lutherischer Kirchenkreis Hamburg-Ost via email with image of the register’s entry attached.

 

James Matthew McCrie went down with the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. Why he was on the ill-fated ship has been the subject of conjecture.

Beginnings

James (Jim) was born on July 4th, 1879, the son of Matthew and Roxanna (Harrington) McCrie. His father was the last of William and Margaret (Miller) McCrie’s nine children born in Ayrshire, Scotland, shortly before the family emigrated to Canada in 1852. His mother was born in Scarborough Township east of Toronto, Canada, in 1849.

Jim’s father Matthew McCrie was a farmer and oil producer, living two lots east of his own father’s farm on Churchill Line road, southeast of Sarnia, Ontario, and northwest of the small town of Petrolia in Enniskillen Township. In addition to farming and oil production, Matthew McCrie, the father, performed public service as a town assessor, a township auditor, and a school board member, a natural interest given that Matthew’s own father (Jim’s grandfather) was a teacher.^[1]

James was born on the family farm, the third of eight children. He helped his dad through his teen years but when he turned twenty he headed north to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to be with his pregnant 17-year-old girlfriend, Maud Brown, whose family had relocated there from Enniskillen.^[2]

Family Life

He took a job as a laborer in the Canadian “Soo,” and in June 1900 he and Maud crossed onto the American side to get married by a justice of the peace before Maud delivered their first daughter, Margaret Irene, back on the Canadian side a couple of weeks following. A year later the 1901 Canadian census reported him working as a blacksmith in Sault Ste. Marie.

Shortly thereafter, however, James—with his new wife and daughter in tow—returned to his father’s farm, where he resumed farming and working the oil fields.^[3]

James and Maud had their second daughter, Francis May, in April 1902. He then moved his growing family three lots west and settled next to his grandfather’s farm where they had their third daughter, Eveline Pearl in June of 1904.

Their fourth and last child, Elsie Maud, was born in December 1906. On the birth register James was reported as a “driller.” That occupation is confirmed in a 1906 biographical history of the county which reported that “James, born in 1879, married Maud Brown, of Lambton County, and lives in Sarnia township, where he is engaged in drilling for oil.”

Sadly, the blessing of four daughters was tempered by the loss of their third one, Eveline Pearl, at the age of 11 months in May of 1905. The register lists her cause of death as “scalded” and length of illness as 31 hours. Those would have been unimaginably painful hours for the young parents as well as the infant.

The Oil Capital of the World

Oil drilling in all of North America began in Enniskillen Township in 1858 when James Miller Williams successfully extracted barrels of oil from an area of sticky crude “gum beds” caused by underground oil seepage. (You will be forgiven if the theme music from the old television show Beverly Hillbillies begins playing in your head.) In the early 1860s the area was the “Oil Capital of the World,” with wells extracting crude oil, which was then transported to newly built refineries in Sarnia, and shipped as far away as England. Derricks sprang up in the town of Oil Springs, and as those wells played out, production moved north to Petrolia, which became a boom town.^[4] It was natural that Matthew McCrie and his son James became oil men, supplementing their farm income with the fruits of black gold extraction.

Over the next few decades as the wells dried up, many Petrolia area men who worked them took their expertise and tools to other promising locations around the world. A 1913 article in the Detroit Free Press, titled “When Oil Gushed at Petrolia,” concluded with:

“Many drillers still live in Petrolia, but most of the heads of families are scattered over the face of the globe, where they go on punching holes in the ground and sending their wages back to the loved ones in the oil town.”

Foreign Driller

Such was the case with James Matthew McCrie who went overseas to ply his expertise in oil drilling in order to support his family. Ship passenger records show he sailed from New York to Singapore in February 1907 with five other Enniskillen men listed as “boremasters.” They returned in April of 1908 from Yokohama, Japan.^[5]

In May of 1911 he sailed from New York to London on his way to Egypt.^[6] A picture of him and fellow Enniskillen drillers in Egypt, below, shows he was tall and strongly built. Although the caption says it was taken around 1900, it dates to 1911 or 1912.

A niece of his related, “My dad said Jim was so interesting, that he would come back home from those trips and tell so many good stories.”^[7] Home by then was a house in the town of Sarnia, Ontario, where he sent his earnings while the family awaited his visits between overseas jobs.

If Jim suffered separation loneliness, the home front had issues of its own. According to a Red Cross record,^[8] his daughters had physical ailments that must have challenged his wife Maud:

“The eldest is a cripple from hip disease. The second is in frail health, threatened with throat tuberculosis. … [and] after her father’s departure for England, the youngest daughter suffered an attack of infantile paralysis, which has left one ankle useless for life.”

It may have been these conditions which prompted James to return home when he did. One account says, “He rushed back home, 503 North 16th Street, Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, because one of his three children was dying from tuberculosis and he wanted to comfort his distraught wife.”^[9]

Another account said he “learned his wife Maude (nee Brown) in Sarnia was sick and was coming back home on the Titanic.”^[10]

Yet another account says he and his buddy Gus Slack were on furlough and Gus offered him his own ticket for the Titanic because Jim’s wife was ill. According to that account, “At that time, all the tickets were sold out but Gus decided to go visit a friend somewhere in England and give up his ticket.”^[11]

Jim’s niece and nephew recall hearing that the company he worked for gave him a ticket on the Titanic as a bonus, or that Jim demanded a Titanic ticket as “one of the perks of the job.”^[12]

Of all the accounts, the one with the most credence probably comes from a contemporary article in The Sarnia Daily Observer of April 16, 1912, which read:

“Mr. McCrie, who is a driller by occupation, has been engaged in that pursuit for the past eighteen months or so in Egypt. A short time ago his contract expired and he was on his way home to Sarnia. A letter recently received from him by Mrs. McCrie announced his arrival in England and also conveyed the information that he intended to remain over in England a week in order to make the passage across the ocean on the new steamer Titanic.”

Regardless of how he obtained the ship ticket, it seems clear he was looking forward to the trip on the world’s largest — and luxurious — liner, and he arranged his return accordingly.

The aforementioned Red Cross record also mentioned that “he had written to them [his family] that he would remain at home, permanently.” Had he made it, home life would have been far different than before, with the daughters, ranging in age from six to twelve, having their father around to help raise them.

The Ill-Fated Voyage

While in London waiting for his sailing date, James stayed at the new Strand Palace Hotel in the center of the city near the River Thames. On the 10th of April he walked across the Waterloo Bridge to the Waterloo Station to catch the Boat Train to Southampton,^[13] the port city on the southern cost of England, and boarded the Titantic for her maiden voyage. He held a second class ticket, enjoying the comfort of the ship, though not the opulent amenities reserved for its first class passengers.^[14]

The ship launched around noon on the 10th, made stops at Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, and set sail the afternoon of April 11th, 1912, for New York with 1,137 passengers and 885 crew aboard.

On the night of the 14th the Titanic entered a patch of sea known to have icebergs, but maintained its speed of 22 knots, despite receiving warnings from two other ships in the area: the Mesaba warned the Titanic’s radio operator of an ice field at 9:40 p.m. and the Californian sent word at 10:55 p.m. that it had stopped after becoming surrounded by ice. The Titanic’s radio operator, who was busy handling routine passenger messages, scolded the Californian for interrupting him and didn’t pass the messages to the bridge.

It was the lookouts in the crow’s nest who spotted an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. but it was too late to avoid a collision. The starboard side scraped along the iceberg and the ship’s hull was punctured along six of its sixteen supposedly watertight compartments.

At 12:05 a.m. the first orders to abandon ship were given and its too-few lifeboats were deployed. Distress signals (flares) were sent out by 12:15 a.m.; by 1:00 a.m. water was seen at the base of the Grand Staircase; and around 2:00 a.m. the stern’s propellers were clearly visible above the water as the bow had plunged below water. At approximately 2:18 a.m. the lights on the ship went out, it broke in two with a groan, an eerie rattle, and a roar, and at 2:20 a.m. the stern also disappeared beneath the ocean. The ship sank within three hours of hitting the iceberg. Hundreds of passengers and crew went into the icy water where they either died from drowning or exposure. More than 1,500 lives were lost.

Among them, James Matthew McCrie, age 32: son, brother, husband, father, oil driller and provider. His body was not recovered.

The aftermath

Jim’s wife Maud went to Detroit four months after the loss of her husband to work as a nurse at Bowland Sanitarium, apparently leaving her daughters with her mother and sister until she could get settled. The children were reunited with their mother by 1915.^[15]

In 1916 at age 33 Maud married George Kienle, an automotive supply clerk four years her junior, in Detroit. They had no children together, and in the 1930 census she wasn’t living with George and listed herself as divorced, though in later years they were together again. She died in 1965 at age 82.

The youngest daughter, Elsie, was married and divorced three times and died childless at age 53. The eldest daughter, Margaret “Irene” married at age 36 and also had no children. The middle daughter, Frances, had two marriages and three children.

Whether any of the sisters had long-term effects from their childhood diseases is unknown, as is whether separation from their father, and temporarily from their mother, played a part in their later spousal relationships.

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A 13-minute video on the history of oil and oilmen in Enniskillen Township during James McCrie and his father’s lifetimes is available from the Oil Museum of Canada on YouTube (click link to open). The video includes the photograph of Jim McCrie and his mates in Egypt shown above.

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Footnotes
[1] J. H. Beers & Co., compiler, Commemorative Biographical Record of the County of Lambton, Ontario. (Toronto: The Hill Binding Co, 1906), 124-125. Available at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/recordlambton00beeruoft/page/124/mode/2up.
[2] The Canada census of 1891 places the Brown family in Enniskillen. In September 1898 one of Maud’s brothers, Henry, was married in Sarnia and listed Enniskillen as his residence. The 1901 census puts the Brown family in Sault Ste. Marie. It’s reasonable to assume, therefore, that Maud’s family moved to Sault Ste. Marie some time after Maud’s pregnancy began in September 1899.
[3] James McCrie is listed as a farmer living on his father’s lot at the birth of their second daughter in April 1902.
[4] Fathi Habashi, “The First Oil Well in the World,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, Vol 25, No. 1 (2000): 64. Avilalable online at http://acshist.scs.illinois.edu/bulletin_open_access/v25-1/v25-1%20p64-66.pdf.
[5] Ancestry.com, “UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 for J M McCrie,” Southampton, England, 1907, Feb, image 32 of 62; “UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960 for J McCrie,” Southampton, 1907, February, image 41 of 124; “UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 for F McCrie,” Southampton, England, 1908, Apr, image 63 of 278.
[6] Ancestry.com, “UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 for M McCrie,” London, England, 1911, May, image 204 of 312.
[7] “The Untold Story of Sarnia’s Role in a Night to Remember,” The Sarnia Observer, July 19, 1997, B7. (Transcript available at https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/collection/1030/tree/8102249/person/24449722694/media/5c731c85-788e-4d17-8aee-258702b23257?_phsrc=vEA126&usePUBJs=true, accessed 4 Feb 2021.) The original resource is listed in the Lambton County Museums Catalogue, as Accession Number NEWS0000000000053352, though no digital image is available.
[8] Encyclopedia Titanica, “Mr. James Matthew McCrie,” https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-victim/james-matthew-mccrie.html.
[9] Ibid.
[10] “The Untold Story of Sarnia’s Role in a Night to Remember.”
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Titanic-Titanic.com, “Southampton and Titanic,” http://www.titanic-titanic.com/southampton-and-titanic/.
[14] Ancestry.com, “UK, RMS Titanic, Crew Records, 1912 for James M McCrie,” Passengers Surviving or Missing, Image 16 of 33.
[15] Ancestry.com, “U.S., Border Crossings from Canada to U.S., 1895-1960 for Minnie Maud McCrie” shows she arrived unaccompanied at Port Huron on 14 August 1912; “U.S., Border Crossings from Canada to U.S., 1895-1960 for Frances McCrie” shows Frances arrived unaccompanied on 3 March 1914; and the 1930 U.S. census shows the youngest daughter, Elsie, came to America in 1915.

 

NOTE: Click on underlined links to open images of referenced documents.

Bessie Estall, our grandmother, was the daughter of a newly-married London dock worker and a seamstress. Her mother had previously given birth to three children by unnamed men; her father previously sired two children by another woman. Bessie, therefore, had five half-siblings.

This is the story of the half-brother Bessie never met, and possibly never knew about. Like many of the Estall family children, it’s a story of abandonment and evolving name identity.

Our grandmother’s half-brother, William ‘French’ Estall, was born in London in 1882. He had what appeared to be a short life, disappearing when his paper trail ended in England in 1911. His death was confirmed when his wife remarried in 1917, classifying herself a “widow” on her marriage registration.  I spent a number of fruitless years looking for his death certificate and finally gave up, concluding his paperwork was lost forever.

Forever, that is, until I recently discovered he reappeared in North America. Hence, I began to think of him as the “Resurrection Man.”

Beginnings

William Estall was born on 18 February 1882 in a working class neighborhood of Lower Sydenham, in the Lewisham district of London. His mother, Sarah (nee Whitmarsh) French was married . . .  just not to the infant’s father.

Sarah previously had two children by her husband William French when her marriage went on hiatus and she began living with William Estall, a general labourer.

Sarah then had two children by William Estall out of wedlock: William in 1882 and Ann^[1] in 1885. William’s birth registration names his mother as “Sarah Estall formerly Whitmarsh.”

On William’s sister Ann’s birth registration, excerpted below, their mother identified herself as “Sarah Estall late French formerly Whitmarsh” which is not only a mouthful, but reflects the convoluted state of Sarah Whitmarsh’s marital condition.

Unfortunately for the children, the marriage wheel didn’t stop turning there. Their mother returned to her husband William French by the time of the 1891 census, where it shows the reunited couple raising William French’s children as well as William Estall’s son William.

Family Tensions

Tensions can arise in blended families, and apparently did so in the French household. The 1891 census shows that Ann Estall, William’s sister, was living with her grandparents rather than with her mother. Meanwhile, nine-year-old William was living with his mother and her formerly estranged husband and was now going by the surname “French,” undoubtedly a concession to the cuckolded step-father in whose house he was living.

But not living there for long.

By the next year, at age 10, William was pulled out of his neighborhood school and was attending Laxon Street School, six miles from home, making it unlikely he was still living in the household. A year later, at age 11, he was enrolled on the Exmouth Training Ship docked downriver on the Thames. In effect, William ‘French’ Estall was institutionalized — read abandoned — from the age of ten, as would be our grandmother. Being a child of William Estall, Sr.,  didn’t provide a propitious start in life.

The young William ‘French’ Estall was assigned classes in music on the Exmouth, learning to play the bugle and clarinet. At age 13 and standing 4’4″, he was handed off to the Royal Navy in Portsmouth where he was assigned to the boys’ training ship HMS Boscawen as a “band boy.”

Ba(n)d Boy

At age 17 he was enlisted to the Royal Navy as a bandsman, playing clarinet, and upon turning 18 was embarked on a series of British battleships and cruisers stationed in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Home Fleet.

William was decades ahead of his time, the equivalent of a modern-day globe-trotting “bad boy” rock musician. His service record shows his musical ability to be ‘very good’ but he spent a great deal of time in ‘Cells’ (solitary confinement) and reduced to ‘2nd Class for Conduct’ (losing privileges and reduction of pay) for multiple instances of misconduct^[2] on most of the ships to which assigned.

In 1907 at age 25 while stationed with the Home Fleet docked at Chatham, in southeast England, William took leave to return to his old neighborhood in London and marry Eliza Alice Abel. Their marriage, despite his deployments, yielded a daughter, Nellie Elizabeth French.

On his last deployment, in 1910-11 aboard the HMS Cornwall in the North America Station, he received his only “very good” character rating. He may have found this corner of the world sparked his imagination, and this may have inspired his plans for the future.

William completed his enlistment and left the service on August 9th, 1911, at the age of 29, returning to Lower Sydenham, London. That’s where his English paper trail ended. As mentioned, his wife remarried in 1917 as a widow and his daughter Nellie remains untraceable.

The First Resurrection

This was not the end of his story, though. Three months after his service discharge William — without wife or daughter though identifying himself as married — boarded a passenger ship to North America. The ship’s manifest shows he arrived in Canada in November of 1911, with the intended destination of Quebec, as a musician “going to enlist [in the] Royal Canadian Artillery.”  If he went to Canada to continue a military career while maintaining a family in London, he struck out on both counts.

Perhaps lured by the “Porcupine Gold Rush” when gold was discovered in the area of Timmins, Ontario in 1909, William settled in Porcupine, Ontario, undoubtedly working the mines. The town, with a population of under a thousand, consisted of hastily erected wooden buildings to service the mines and miners. William stayed there a little over a year, perhaps concluding that working underground just wasn’t panning out for him.

What apparently was in his sights, however, was a new life in America, a return to his birth surname, and a job with the Remington company. In the spring of 1913 William left Canada to join his friend Frederick Lloyd in Ilion, New York.

Frederick Lloyd, five years William’s junior, grew up in the same London neighborhood as William and also ended up with the Royal Marines Band. He, too, was a clarinet player, and served on some of the same ships and attended some of the same music classes as William. Lloyd left the Marines in 1909, and emigrated to the United States in 1912. He was living in Ilion, New York, in March of 1913 when William Estall decided to join him there. Given that Remington (of firearms and typewriters fame) was the major employer  in the town, and that Lloyd went on to become a machinist — a trade one would learn in a factory — it’s likely Lloyd worked for Remington and that William took a job with the company as well. William, however, didn’t pursue a trade like his buddy did. Lloyd went off to Canada to serve with their Armed Forces during World War I and later ended up in Royal Oak, Michigan, working at a Ford Motor plant. William apparently remained in America but dropped off the paper grid for the better part of two decades.

Ironically, if William had followed Lloyd’s lead and headed to the Detroit, Michigan, area, he would have lived in the same city as his half-sister Bessie, though they may not have been aware of the other.

The Second Resurrection

William reappears in the 1930 census in Manitee, Florida, working as a farm laborer at at truck farm. It may have been William’s nature to tweak the nose of authority, either in jest or defiance; his history of detentions with the Royal Marines demonstrated that. The trait continued, as evidenced by his answers to the censuses of both 1930 and 1940, in which William identified himself as being a native of India, with an Irish mother and a French father.^[3] Those bizarre assertions made him difficult to track in the censuses, but the 1940 census, which places this man of so-called Indian descent with his wife Lois in Destin, Florida, confirms it was him.

In 1933, at age 51, William married a 23-year-old southerner, Lois Margret Huff, in her home town of Rockmart, Georgia. By 1940 Lois was living with William in Destin on the coastal Florida panhandle. The census paints a portrait of William trying to make a living as a music teacher — his Royal Marine records show he was both a clarinet and violin player — but apparently struggling at it. He had been out of work for most of the previous year, earning a paltry $90 when the mean annual income of the time was $956.^[4]

Even more distressing was his divorce two years later from Lois, which she filed because of his “habitually intemperance [read drunkenness] and cruelty.” Their marriage lasted nine years and didn’t result in any children. Whether William was cruel or a drunkard is debatable, though, given that Lois  immediately remarried and then divorced her second husband four years afterwards citing the same causes. (This in the days before no-fault divorce.)

His occupation of last resort turned out to be a fisherman, as he reported in his application for U.S. naturalization in 1951.

Destin, on the Gulf of Mexico coast, is still known for its fishing. I bought a cap there in 2009, long before I knew this was William’s last home.

The naturalization application also reveals the evolution of William’s name and identity. William was born an Estall, became a French from at least the ages of nine through 29, entered America as an Eastle, was occasionally an Estelle (like my grandmother), and died an Estall. His forenames were equally fluid: he came to Canada with a self-assigned middle name of Ed, assumed the first name of “Jack” at times in Florida, and died with Jack as a middle name.

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Footnotes

^[1] Ann Estall, our grandmother’s half-sister, lived to the age of 86, residing in Lewisham, London, her entire life. Growing up she lived with her mother’s parents Henry and Sarah Whitmarsh. (Our grandmother Bessie Estall may have met Ann when their father dropped his children off on Henry Whitmarsh’s doorstep in 1901 before Bessie was turned over to the workhouse.)
Ann married Hugh Duffy, a labourer, in 1905 at age 20 while working as a laundress, and had seven children, all sons, between 1905 and 1921. She worked domestic duties after her husband died in 1938. Ann passed away in the spring of 1971.

^[2] “2nd Class for Conduct” was awarded in cases of gross insubordination, dishonesty, or gross misconduct, and also to men for whose continual slackness or misconduct the repeated award of minor punishment proved ineffective. “Cell” is solitary confinement in a cell, with forfeiture of wages, reduced diet, no bedding, limited exercise, and assignment of two pounds of oakum picking daily. (The King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions for the Government of His Majesty’s Naval Service, 1913, pp 254, 256.)

^[3] Bessie Estall also thought she was of French lineage as evidenced by her entry document to the United States in 1911. The idea, though mistaken, may have been verbalized by their father.

^[4] National Public Radio, “The 1940 Census: 72-Year-Old Secrets Revealed,” https://www.npr.org/2012/04/02/149575704/the-1940-census-72-year-old-secrets-revealed, accessed 15 Dec 2020.

September 16th, 2020, marked the 400th anniversary of the launch of the Mayflower from Plymouth, England to North America.^[1]

The voyage and early years of the colony at Plymouth were documented by one of the Mayflower’s passengers, William Bradford, a Pilgrim leader who became governor of the colony in 1621. His journal, Of Plimoth Plantation,  includes a list of passengers on the Mayflower — the original New England founders.

One of the passengers on board was Edward Doty, a 21-year-old servant accompanying his employer Steven Hopkins.

From the list of Mayflower passengers, showing the Steven Hopkins family and his servants, including Edward Doty.

Click on the image to see the passenger list in its entirety.

 

Edward Doty, a contributor to the story of our nation, is also one of our ancestors, as shown in the descendant list below.

In essence, the children of James and Billie (née Ehrlich) Bartlett, which includes my wife, are the 9th great-grandchildren of Edward Doty.

In the following four posts, below, we’ll explore the historic voyage and colorful character of Edward Doty.

Be forewarned. Though Eddie sailed over here with the self-called Saints — later called the Pilgrims — he himself was no Saint, literally or figuratively.

No surprise, there, huh? Read on for his story.

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Footnote(s)
[1]. The Mayflower sailed on the 6th of September 1620 according to the Julian calendar in use at the time. However, England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1751, essentially adding 10 days on the current calendar to prior calendar dates.