Week 1 2022: Foundations #52Ancestors — Making Sense of it All

One of my most favorite people growing up was my Nana – Catherine Josephine (née Spencer) Maier. I’ve written about her before. She was a tough old broad, but I still loved her to pieces. I wish I’d asked her more about her family and her husband’s family (her husband died two months after my parents married so I never got to know him).

My grandfather, Charles Peter Maier, Jr, was the second of that name as his older brother died at twenty months old and, of course, his parents had to give him the exact same name. I’ve researched the Maier family for many years and through that I have, happily, gotten to know a second-cousin on that side of the family.

I traced the Maier family back to Bodnegg, a rural village in Ravensburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.[1] I can’t find much on modern Bodnegg, other than it has about 3,200 residents and Google Maps shows that it is in a beautiful part of Germany. I’m also not having much luck in finding much about the history of the village. One stumbling block is that while the Bodnegg Catholic church records on FamilySearch go back to the 1600’s, you can only view the older ones at a FamilySearch affiliate library or Family History Center. The center nearest me has been closed since March of 2020, but the Mid-Continent Public Library system in Kansas City is an affiliate. Since last Saturday was a gloomy day here, I decided to go to the Red Bridge branch of the MCPL and work on these Maiers (or “Mayer” as the name was spelled most of the time).

One of the cool things about FamilySearch is that you can export the data from your search into an Excel spreadsheet. I’d done this before and it’s gratifying to be able to put together family units in one town. Let me explain what I did:

First, I searched for all people with the last name Mayer/Maier in the church records for Bodnegg. The time-frame for births, marriages, and deaths varied, but generally 1650’s to 1850’s. My search resulted in a bit less than 500 records. I downloaded my results into a spreadsheet and then sorted them by birth, marriage, and death. I then was able to create about forty-five distinct Mayer family groups.[2] By doing this, I could more easily see the connections between the brothers and some of the sisters. It was especially interesting to see the connections between the Mayer/Maier family and the Füx/Fuchs family as many of them intermarried.

Here are a couple of the discoveries I made – one small and one HUGE:

My great-aunt was Grace Creszentia Maier and I found that middle-name going back in the Maier family to a Crescentia Mayer, born in July of 1770 to Anton and Sabina (née Sterk) Mayer.[3] Nice.

The big discovery I found was that my 3rd great-grandfather was not a Mayer. I knew something was fishy with him because when he married, the record did not note his father’s name and identified his mother as a Mayer, which should have been her maiden name. As it turns out, it was.

Born 3 March 1807 to Cäzilia Mayer, Johann Baptist’s baptismal record notes he was illegitimate.[4] The Catholic priests kindly noted that Cäzilia herself alleged the father was Johann Baptist Ekler. I wrote about German marriage restrictions some time ago. To refresh your memory, in the nineteenth century, the poor in Germany did not have the freedom to marry whomever they wished. “Marriage restrictions [had] a long tradition in many German states extending back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”[5] These regulations were intended to address increased pauperism and the commensurate increased public support for the poor. You can see the effect these restrictions had by looking at the one page where Johann Baptist’s baptism was recorded: of the nineteen baptism listed, three were of illegitimate children.

I have many questions about what this record is telling us. First, why did Cäzilia need to make this allegation? None of the other illegitimate births note this. Was her relationship with Johann Ekler not consensual? Did he skip town or deny his fatherhood? Second, I cannot confirm that Ekler was his last name and, while his residence is noted on the baptismal record, I cannot read what it says (maybe Weingarten?). Another 2022 project!

Cäzilia was one of twelve children born to Joann Mayer and Maria Anna Füx. Only nineteen when she had Johann Baptist, she died in June of 1807, three months after his birth.[6] While I need to do much more work on this family, it appears that two of Cäzilia’s sisters likewise gave birth to illegitimate children.[7]

Am I surprised to find a hidden branch of my family tree? On the contrary; I am thrilled!

____________________

[1] Located in South-West Germany, near the border of Switzerland and closest – as the crow flies – to Zürich.

[2] I could not create family groups for all entries, especially for the females whose names changed after marriage.

[3] "Deutschland, Württemberg, Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Katholische Kirchenbücher, 1520-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:D7SQ-5P3Z : 8 September 2021), Crescentia Mayer, 1770. I posted a picture of Grace Creszentia back in June of 2019.

[4] "Deutschland, Württemberg, Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Katholische Kirchenbücher, 1520-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:D7SQ-8VMM : 8 September 2021), Johann Baptist Ekler, 1807.

[5] John Knodel, “Law, Marriage and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Population Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (March 1967), pp. 279-294, image, JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2172673 : accessed 11 January 2020).

[6] "Deutschland, Württemberg, Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Katholische Kirchenbücher, 1520-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3HK-SSS1-5?cc=3499252 : 4 January 2022), > image 1 of 1.

[7] "Deutschland, Württemberg, Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Katholische Kirchenbücher, 1520-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:D7S3-8Y2M : 8 September 2021), Johannes Mayer, 1812. "Deutschland, Württemberg, Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Katholische Kirchenbücher, 1520-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:D7S3-8R3Z : 8 September 2021), Joseph Mayer, 1810.