Women’s History Month/52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #12 ~ A Letter to and from 8th Great Grandmother Anna Mueller Rubeli~

This week’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge during Women’ History Month is 12. For my 12th challenge, I am choosing to write a letter to an ancestress.

Dear Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother Anna Mueller – Rubeli,

I am fascinated by your struggles, your family’s migration, and your the time period in which you lived. Because you were born at a time of religious strife in current-day Switzerland, I am keenly aware that had you and your husband not made a life-altering decision for your family, you may have not survived.

I think you may have been born in 1622 in Wattenwil, in the Canton of Bern but am unsure. Therefore, I am unsure of the names of your parents. I know positively that you married my 8th great grandfather Christen Strubel – Rubeli in 1642 in St. Alban’s Reformed Church in Oberdiessbach, Canton Bern.

I know you had 10 children, 8 of which survived to adulthood. My research told me that in the winter of 1672 you took your 6th youngest children with you to the German Palatinate because your Anabaptist faith made it dangerous for you to continue to live in the land of your birth.

Unfortunately, one of your daughters was again made to leave a country because of her faith later in her life. Did you know Madlena was sent to America in 1733 with other Mennonites living in Germany and also died in a foreign country like you? Did you know your son Peter went back to Switzerland after your death and was imprisoned? He was to be sent to America as well.

Thank you for choosing to leave.

What can you tell me about how the choice was made and about your life in the period leading up to your family’s flight before and after 1672, when I discovered that you, my 8th great grandfather, and your children Barbli, young Anna, young Christian, Hans (my 7th great grandfather), Nicholas, and Madlena appeared on a list of refugees kept by the minister of a Mennonite parish near Fischbach bei Dahn, in the German Palatinate?

Sincerely,

One of your thousands of descendants

Dear 8th Great Granddaughter,
Our survival depended on our flight.
From the time of my childhood, believers had been practicing in secret. Authorities were always coming down from Bern to make sure we were attending THEIR church and having children baptized THEIR way. My father would say it was only because the military companies of the nobles they rented to foreign countries were in such disarray did the authorities actually care.
Your 8th great grandfather Christen was a very independent-minded man. His uncle was an Anabaptist preacher named Christian Gungerich who was imprisoned twice for practicing what wasn’t the approved religion. He had been executed in prison the year before we fled. My mother-in-law was not even allowed to keep one piece of furniture from his house. The town officials took all his property with plans to sell it and keep all of the proceeds.
Then, a few months before we left our homeland, men from Bern came to Oberdiessbach and demanded all believing men in the town swear an oath as to their faith – or recant. When your 8th great grandfather refused we feared they would take my mother-in-law or one of your 7th great grandfather’s sisters to prison in Bern as ransom until the men of the family took that false oath. We knew then we could not stay in the canton and thought of perhaps going to Holland.
We were hearing the stories from brethren that if you were able- bodied, the authorities in Bern were taking believers out of the prisons and selling them like livestock to Italian merchants as galley slaves. Leaders like Christian Gungerich, instead of being executed, were being whipped or branded to then be taken away on carts and left at the border with their wounds.
We believed our sons would suffer the fate of being sold to Italy. When winter came our house had already been seized by the authorities. We were given a choice to leave or face branding or slavery. We were homeless. It was not much of a choice. Our survival depended on it.
We hid for a short period of time in the Oberland, and left with the clothes we were wearing following another group of believers. On our way we were given help and encountered others suffering our fate. Most were very young, very old, or lame. Those that traveled with horses did so with the slow, old animals because the authorities had taken their faster valuable livestock. Some men and women traveled without their families. Of the very old, most traveled alone. Would I have the courage at their age I asked myself?
It took us about 4 weeks to make the trip to the Palatinate during the winter.
After we arrived at Fischbach, your 8th great grandfather, and your 7th great grandfather Hans worked daily as laborers on a farm. When we saved enough money, your 8th great grandfather, your many times uncle Peter, and many times uncle Nicholas purchased farmable land and built a small house near Otterberg, Germany and gave it the name Messerschwanderhof.
In 1689, a cruel king in France sent armies to burn the lands of the Palatinate. Before your 8th great grandfather and I could re-unite with our children and grandchildren, who were hiding on an island in the Rhine until the French left the valley, I died in that foreign land – hiding as I did when we left my homeland.
Your 8th great grandfather wandered a bit before he made it home where his sons were beginning the rebuilding of their farm. My grandson Balthasar Rubeli, your 6th great grandfather, was born shortly before the firing of the farm. He became an important man in the village when he grew. He was a Gerichtsschoffe.
I hope my daughter Madlena and son Peter were sent to a welcoming place.
As we received kindness in our flight, please remember it. Tell of how our children could have been ransomed by a corrupt government, and will you, as my descendants, show the same strength and sense of humanity to those like us in your time.
Keep up your hunt for more like me in our branches. They too are waiting for their stories to be remembered.
Sincerely,
Your Ahnfrau

–cinziarosagenealogy@comcast.net

Women’s History Month: A Letter to and from My 9th Great Grandmother Kunigonde (Surname Unknown)

Dear Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandmother Kunigonde,

You have the most interesting name in my tree and your last name is not known to those of us researching you.  You were the mother of my ancestor named Michael Kempf.  He lived in a town named Hornbach.   I have discovered that you were Roman Catholic and the historic church in Hornbach contains the bones of St. Pirminius.  You must’ve worshipped there.

I didn’t know Kunigonde was even a name until I found you.  I looked up the meaning and origin.  It is from the Old High German and sometimes spelled as Kunigonda.  The name dictionaries call it a two-element name.  Kunni=the tribe, the clan.  Gund=the fight, the battle.  I really dig the two-element meaning of your name!

Apparently there was a St. Kunigonde and she was the daughter of King Bela of Hungary. She is the patroness of Poland and Lithuania where she is known as St. Kinga.

Was Kunigonde a family name in your family?

Did you know your third great grandson was named Heinrich Leies and he traveled across the ocean to the United States of America in 1848 with his family to have a farm in Wooster, Ohio?  His brother Jacob Leies came three years later to the greatest city in the New World called New York City.  Your fourth great grandson named Peter Leies joined the Union Army during the nation’s Civil War and died at a battle called the Battle of Antietam.  He was only 21 and he was born in Nunschweiler, not far from Hornbach.

Another fourth great grandson followed Heinrich to Wooster, Ohio.  His name was Johann Leies and Heinrich was his uncle.  He was my ancestor.  He ran saloons in Chicago and was a piano dealer.  He had very religious sons.  One became a Roman Catholic priest and died in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Did you know you probably have thousands of descendants across the ocean in America perhaps due in part to Heinrich’s emigration?

You are named in a book called the Rubenheim Register from Zwiebrucken.  I would love to see that book.  But, what can YOU tell me that the book doesn’t.  What was Hornbach life like?

Sincerely,

One of your thousands of descendants

 

1550 Hornbach, via Wikipedia

 

Dear 9th Great Granddaughter,

Females rarely learned to write in my day unless they took a religious order.  My good friend Sr. Marie Radegonde Belina is writing this for me.  What an angel she is too to be able to translate English to our dialect and back to English for me.  She was a half English/half French orphan the good Sisters took in.

Thank you for digging my name.  I don’t know what you mean by “digging.” 

What can I tell you about my life?  I was born at a time of a long religious, political, and terrible war – The Thirty Years War.  We would hear from the priests there was a peace and then another peace.  But it would not end.  Then a few years later there would be word of another peace. 

We did not care about those far away princes fighting for power.  We were more concerned with having food on our tables when the winter was through.  Half the men in my family were gone and another quarter of my family uprooted themselves and were never heard from again.  We just wanted it to end.  

When I married, the war was coming to an end.  My husband (your 9th great grandfather) and I lived near Hornbach at a time the entire surrounding area was almost devoid of citizens and buildings due to the many years of war.  The country-side had been devastated due to famine, disease, and theft.  The old town wall of Hornbach and our church were some of the few things left.

We were ruled by the Duke of Zwiebrucken. 

Before the war, Hornbach was once surrounded by rich vineyards.  Nobody came back to re-plant them.  Instead, after the war, the Dukes invited people from the Swiss Cantons and from Tyrol to our area to farm.  They were rumored to be excellent farmers. 

Some of my descendants married the descendants of the Swiss immigrants.

My husband Johann Kempf and I had a farm.  We had 8 children:  Matthias, Anna Christina, Michael, your 8th great grandfather, twins Kunigonde and Johann, Maria Katharina, and twins Regina and Anna Margaretha. 

Michael was my second born son and he was trained to follow his father as a farmer. 

I died before I could see Michael’s children be born.  

I died before France took control of the Hornbach-Zwiebrucken area in 1680.

Yes, I heard about Heinrich and the others.  Nunschweiler was very tiny in my day. 

Heinrich Layes (that’s how Sr. Marie Gertruda spells the surname) left Germany at a time when liberal nationalists pushed for civil liberties here.  The cost of the war I lived through and cost of that war on our people was ingrained in their minds.  

In 1848, these forward thinking men had to flee their homeland for your country –  a country that had established those ideals when those in power began to silence their democratic plans.

Keep shaking those female branches of my tree in Germany.  You aren’t even close to finding all of my descendants in America.  

Signed,

Your Ahnfrau