This diary continues where our Community’s suspended Friday “Open Thread” series leaves off…. What are you doing, genealogically speaking, this July Fourth weekend? Some random observations on genealogical topics follow below the orange squiggly.
We’ve been very, very quiet of late. Seriously, what are you up to lately?
Last week I was considering another German Genealogy diary before I realized that the Supreme Court was going to drain away any possibility of an active Community discussion. But it was a good week, so I’m not complaining. Otherwise the month has been too loaded with activities and things I needed to accomplish for me to consider much else.
The first weekend brought the annual “Jamboree” sponsored by the Southern California Genealogical Society, at which the Immigrant Genealogical Society always buys a table in the vendors’ hall. After that came a mad scramble to complete the layout for a twenty-page publication we try to issue twice yearly. In the past it has always been called “German-American Genealogy.” This year — the first in which we will have had two yearly issues in quite some time — we began with something new. Dr. Fritz Juengling, past FHL International Floor manager and now a Germanic and Dutch Consultant there, wrote the articles for a new “Dutch-American Genealogy.” It has now been delivered to our members.
Next came a “Joint Seminar on Germanic Research” hosted by the two genealogical societies of Burbank, California — our IGS and the German Interest Group of the SCGS. Dr. Juengling, assisted by his wife Holly, presented two talks: “German Names” and “German Guilds and their Records.” For those of you who do not know this, guild records (if they survive) can contain the births, deaths and marriages we all crave, but predating the same information in church records. That is because churches often did not begin recording systematically until the early 17th century, while the guilds had needed to preserve this information on their members and their families from well before that time. If the FHL has these records for your German town, they will be found listed under the “Occupations” catalog listing.
Also this month I’ve been fighting my second case of the flu this year, and that hasn’t made me energetic enough to consider a diary. However, a silver lining is that it has given me some time to read. One of the items I’ve been studying is an obscure booklet by Myron E. Gruenwald from 1987 titled “Pomeranians: The Persistent Pioneers.” In his Foreword he pondered the ideas that led him to produce the manuscript.
First was the discovery of his wife’s mother’s family’s ancestral village in Württemberg, together with the realization that the family had spent at least 200 years there. This caused a sense of wonderment, and a keen interest in exploring what it must have been like to live in that village between the 1600s and the 1800s. I’ve discovered a similar situation in my own family tree, except that the village was in the part of the Kingdom of Saxony that was given to Prussia in 1815.
Second was the observation that spending 200 years in one village shows a profound shift in thinking and behavior from the centuries-long history of Germanic peoples living north and east of Roman-controlled Europe. These peoples, gathered together as tribes or clans, were known more for their movements than for stability of place. What accounted for the difference, the change? I admit this thought hadn’t dawned on me, but now I’m interested in learning more on this question.
His third thought arose out of the fact that his “Germanic identity” had three components, and that this complexity prevented him from assuming a simplistic self-image. He grew up surrounded by Volga Germans (Germans from Russia), and although he was not one of them it is true that their cultural outlook heavily flavored how he perceived his early years. As for his own family, identity was complicated by the fact that his parents were of different cultures, Bohemian and Pomeranian. Here again, I can identify with this author. My Germanic identity comes from 18th century “Palatine” immigrants on one hand, and then from 19th century immigrants from Mecklenburg, Saxony, and East Prussia. To someone from non-Germanic families they all classify as “German,” but for me they represent widely different backgrounds.
The author’s fourth set of ideas came from an interest in character development and the transmission of cultural traits and social inheritance. What stereotypes were thus associated with his different Germanic cultures? And from all of this came the premise for his manuscript:
The four ideas began to mesh into the question of: “What would have made these seemingly identical people, Germans all, into persons who exhibit such varying characteristics?”
The “different characteristics” he cites revolve around such fundamental North-South factors as religion (Catholic vs. Lutheran), language (High German vs. Plattdeutsch), and even mythology (Roman gods vs. Norse gods). Suffice to say here that there is, indeed, a strong difference in Germans who are rooted in different parts of the Germanic world.
And so I close by asking of you who are “multiple flavors” of Scandinavian, Irish, or even descended from different New England colonies and/or peoples:
“What is it about your different strains of a supposedly uniform _____ identity that complicates your understanding of who you are??”