George Rödiger, Immigrant (to Ohio), pt. 1--Life in Germany

I have changed the name of the post, because I made a silly blunder in entitling it "George Rödiger, Last Rödiger-Eichenauer Immigrant to Ohio." Thankfully, a reader connected with John Henry Roediger's line corrected me in the comments. For an explanation of the change see the comments at the bottom of the post. I ALWAYS appreciate feedback and corrections. I have been known to make mistakes. Sometimes I catch them and sometimes I don't. And while catching that mistake, I realized that I had been twice wrong. Not only was George not the last, he was also not the next to last. So to recap the order in which our ancestors arrived:

Tobias Eichenauer arrived in 1867
Conrad and Adam Eichenauer in 1880
Conrad Tobias Rödiger in 1881
Justus (Gus) Eichenauer in 1883
George Rödiger in 1888
Johann Heinrich Rödiger in 1893
Lizzie Eichenauer in 1896.

So George was in fact, the third to last to emigrate!

Now that I have set the record straight, I will just write about George, and about his family prior to emigrating.

If you have been following this blog, you will wonder why I am not following up with "The Eichenauer Geography, pt. 2"? It ain't ready yet. And I just spent all morning looking for George Rödiger's passenger list record--so it is fresh in my mind. So just bear with me. I shall do the follow-up on the Eichenauer Geography. Soon. Hopefully.

George Rödiger, the subject of this blog post, was an older brother of my great grandfather, Conrad Roediger. George was the next to last of the Eichenauer-Roediger clan (that I know of) to immigrate to the USA, George's nephew, Johann Heinrich (John Henry) Rödiger being the last. This George did in 1888 with four of his children. I made a brief mention of George when I wrote a post about his first wife, Anna Martha Scheuch, on May 29, 2017 entitled "The Baptismal Record of Anna Martha Scheuch".

George Roediger (clipped from his second marriage wedding photo)

George Rödiger was born in the village of Tann, in the District of Hersfeld-Rotenburg on 24 May 1854. He was the third child of Johann Tobias Rödiger and his second wife, Anna Margaretha Eichenauer. He had an older stepsister (25 years older), Anna Katharina Rödiger, who married his mother's brother, Johann Friedrich Eichenauer. That makes his stepsister his aunt as well. (I'll wait while you work that one out . . . Got it? OK good!)
He also had a four full siblings, two older and two younger than himself: Katharina Elisabeth (5 years older), Gustav (Justus) (3 years older), Katharina Elisabeth II (3 years younger) and Conrad Tobias (11 years younger).
All of his siblings reached adulthood and married, which I must tell you from my experience indexing records in Tann and neighboring villages during this time period, was rather unusual. Unfortunately, as you will soon learn, George's own family more or less followed the normal pattern.

Evangelische Kirche von Rohrbach

George married Anna Martha Scheuch on 1 June 1873 at the Lutheran Church of Rohrbach, just a few kilometers up the road from Tann.
Over the next 13 years, Anna Martha gave birth to 9 children. Sadly, as often happened, three of their children died less than three months old, another at age two, and a fifth child at age six. To add to George and Martha's sadness, on 1 May 1886, their house and barn burned to the ground. And even after much investigation, the cause of the fire was never discovered. (An account of this event was recorded in the book, 650 Jahre Tann, Geschichte und Brauchtum, p. 375)
Then, on 5 June, just a month after the fire, Martha gave birth to her last child, Anna Katharina, and on the 6th, Martha died during "Wochenbett" a period of 6-8 weeks following delivery. Usually this means that there were complications resulting from childbirth (from what I have been able to learn from the good old internet) probably due to unsanitary conditions. Their last child, Anna Katharina died just 2 months later, leaving George with four children, ages 13, 9, 5 and 2 and no home for himself, nor his livestock. The book, does say that within a year a new abode was built. The German text is unclear to me. Perhaps Regina could weigh in on this. The text reads, "Der durch diesen Brand erforderlich gewordene Neubau würde in den folgenden Jahren nachhaltig mit dem Schulneubau in Verbindung gebracht." My reading of this might mean that his new house was built in conjunction with the building of a new schoolhouse, or that his new house was attached to the new schoolhousel.
There was a story in our family that George Rödiger helped build the schoolhouse in Tann. The article in the book about the fire and the subsequent rebuilding lends credence to that story. When mom and I visited there in 2014, we saw the schoolhouse, which today is a community center. And ironically, the fire department is now attached to this building.

Yep. That is me, touching the former schoolhouse. The Fire Department is attached to the far end, but out of the frame

Nevertheless, George soon decided to join his younger brother, Conrad Tobias (my great-grandfather) and his cousins in Ohio.

So, in November of 1888, he packed up his belongings and headed for the port of Bremen. In the Subsequent Remarks column of George's baptismal record someone wrote (and I roughly translate): "On June 1, 1873 George married Anna Martha Scheuch, who died in 1886 on the 8th of June. In November 1888 he emigrated to America with four children."

And according to his obituary, George and his children arrived in America on December 6, 1888. When searching for the passenger list, I relied on Ancestry.com to provide the image just by entering a few of the known factors into the search parameters. I got nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but nothing that had anything to do with this George Rödiger. There is a George Rödiger who immigrated in 1878. That has me curious, but I have forced myself to ignore that record for the time being.

So, I did it the hard way. And by the way, sometimes it takes some heavy lifting or pure luck to find a record. In this case it took me about 4 hours. This is the process I used (just so you know I am actually WORKING on this stuff).

Originally, I did not know which port they departed from, nor did I know which port they arrived in, Stateside. Since all of the New York and Baltimore Arrivals are indexed, and George did not appear to be in them, I decided to go start with the possible ports of departure. Usually, our German immigrants either left from Hamburg or Bremen and occasionally from Amsterdam or Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Since all of the Bremen Passenger Lists from that time period were systematically destroyed after 3 years to make room for new ones--I'd like to have a heart-to-heart chat with the bureaucrat who made that policy. Grrrr--I started with the records from Hamburg. They are also indexed on ancestry.com, but a search did not return any correct records. So, I began going through each passenger list of each ship bound for the US during the month of November. Then, since I got no satisfaction, I continued on until the end of 1888. Nada, Nichts, Zilch. Grrrr again.

So, I turned my attention back to the arrival passenger lists. Eenie, meenie, miney, mo. How come spell check is going crazy all of a sudden? Anyway, I had to choose between the two most obvious ports of arrival, New York and Baltimore, and just hope George didn't decide to do the New Orleans route. That would really make me growl. Still, it was a toss up, and fortunately for me I chose Baltimore. On December 3, 1888, the SS Hermann out of Bremen docked at Baltimore Harbor and listed the passengers that disembarked. On page 10, the Rödigers were indexed as the Pridiger family, passengers #549-553. I have offered a correction to the Index Committee, so maybe in the future it won't be like pulling teeth for others to find this record.

There is more to the right of this image, but to provide the entire record would make the important stuff too small to read. So, I will summarize what you can't see. The Rödigers, who were housed in Steerage, left Germany and were arriving in Maryland as "protracted sojourners" with one, count them, 1 piece of luggage among them. Talk about starting over from scratch.

In case the above script is still a bit illegible, I will transcribe:

#549--Georg Rödiger, age 34, male, occupation: Blacksmith

#550--Nicolaus Rödiger, age 15, male, occupation: none

#551--Conrad Rödiger, age 11, male, child

#552--Elisabeth Rödiger, age 9, female, child

#553--Margaretha Rödiger, age 4, female, child

I was surprised to learn that George was a blacksmith. I hadn't seen that occupation associated with him before. And everyone arrived safely. That didn't always happen, and with their recent difficulties, well ...

And the date of arrival was three days earlier than the date given in George's obit. But close enough to make it findable.

We will probably never know the actual departure date since the records from Bremen are gone, but a the arrival link in the chain serves us pretty well.

I was planning on continuing on with their saga in Ohio, but since this is already lengthy, another "Pt. 2" is in order. I'll get back to it, I promise. George's woes are not over (sort of like "A Series of Unfortunate Events" in real life, sad to say). So, until next time, or maybe the time after that ...