Reunited With Conrad Tobias Roediger's Sister
Death Record of Catharina Elisabeth (Rödiger) Lotz
Gibb's Rule 39
Gibb's Rule 39 Revisited
In this Post, I intend to expand on those Posts with information which I have been able to glean from the Bochum Church Record. My primary purpose is to consider whether descendants of the Tanner Rödigers who moved to Bochum might still inhabit the Bochum environs today.
Since 2017, I have learned that in addition to Katharina Elisabeth, at least two of her first cousins also moved there. They were Nicolaus and Jacob Rödiger, sons of Justus Rödiger and Anna Katharina Goßmann. I have endeavored to create a chart that illustrates their relationship without the clutter of all their other relatives. The three who moved to Bochum are highlighted with a yellow star:
Nicolaus' second wife, Anna Margarethe Falls died on 7 April 1882 and Nicolaus married again on 3 September of the same year. His third wife was Anna Elisabeth Schneider, 16 years his junior, from Heddersdorf, about 14 miles southwest of his hometown of Tann. They had four children, three of whom "appear" to have survived into adulthood (see red lettered paragraph above).
There is some doubt about the gender of their third child. The birth and death records from this time period do not bother to state the gender of the child. In most cases the name provided makes the gender obvious, but in this case, I am not sure. The death record gives the name as August and the birth record, as Auguste. The first is a boy's name and the second, a girl's. As this child died at age two, there will be nothing to determine the gender unless civil records are found. In either case, he or she died without issue, so I need not make it one (an issue, that is). But that is why the child has a green background rather than blue or pink. Just so, you know. [RH pointed me to a baptismal record I hadn't seen which indicates the name of one of the baptismal sponsors to be Auguste Wallis. Therefore, their third child was a daughter. Danke!]
I realize that it is difficult to read due to the small print. If you want a more legible copy, send me a comment to that effect and I will email it as a PDF file.
Since I have already spent four posts on Katharina Elisabeth, I will just mention a couple of additional facts. Since 2017 I have learned that her husband, Jacob Lotz was born in 1844, in Allmershausen, as were three of his siblings. Then, around 1850, his parents, Conrad Lotz and Catharina Elisabeth neé Krauss moved to Tann, where 4 more of his siblings were born between 1852 and 1857. Then sometime between 1857 and 1862, his parents moved to Bochum, where his youngest sibling was born in September of 1862.
With this information in hand it is apparent that Jacob Lotz and Katharina Elisabeth Rödiger would have lived in the same village (Tann) for at least 7 years and perhaps as long as 10. If Jacob's family moved from Tann to Bochum about 1860, he would have been about 15 and Katharina E. would have been about 11. Bochum was a large industrial city. Jacob's father had taken his family there because jobs in factories and coal mines were available. But living conditions were squalid. Many children died from diseases and even many of the adults, whether working in the coal mines or elsewhere contracted TB, lung fever, and cholera. In addition, the inhabitants of Bochum spoke Low German, a different dialect than what the Tanners (people from Tann) were familiar with. In spite of these negatives, Katharine was willing to move 150 miles to a big city to marry. One might surmise from that that they had had a special affection for one another while they were living in Tann, and kept up some kind of communication from about 1860 until 1873 when they wed.
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| Tann to Bochum via roads today |
As was stated in a previous post, Katharina Elisabeth died in 1873 from TB, one day after her first and only child died from Cholera Infantum. Thus she has no descendants to research. Jacob remarried and had a number of children, but as they are not kinfolk, I will not begin down that road. Suffice it to say, that between Jacob and his brothers, there were Lots of Lotzes and some still reside in Bochum today.
This brings us to Nicolaus and Jacob Rödiger. I discovered Nicolaus in 2017, simply because he was married on the same day and in the same church in Bochum as Katharina Elisabeth, so their marriage records were back-to-back. At the time, I presumed that they were related but had no idea how. Since then, I have traveled to Kassel to sift through the church archives of Tann, and more recently, I have been able to examine the Tann Lutheran Church records from my office chair, via archiv.de. As the diagram above shows to those with magnifying glasses, Nicolaus and Jacob were Katharina's first cousins through her father's brother, Justus Rödiger.
It is probable that Nicolaus and Jacob Rödiger and their wives came to Bochum at the same time. After they moved to Bochum, Nicolaus and Jacob became coalminers (German: Bergmann). In every birth and death record of their children, their occupation never varied. And, though I have learned little of the occupations of Nicolaus' sons, I do know that Jacob's sons also became coalminers.
Nicolaus Rödiger married his first wife, Anna Margaretha Grunewald in Tann in 1867. Together, they had five children. The oldest outlived his four younger siblings and yet he died at the age of 4 years and 10 months. (For those of you that are paying attention--yes, two of his siblings were twins, so it is possible). Four of the five were born in Tann, but the fifth was a stillborn daughter who was born in 1872 in Bochum. Her mother died 4 days later from birthing complications.
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| The family of Nicolaus and Anna Margaretha (Grunewald) Rödiger |
Obviously there were no succeeding generations from this marriage. But Nicolaus married again. His second marriage was to another native of Tann, Anna Margaretha Falls. They were married in Bochum on the same day that his cousin, Katharina Elisabeth Rödiger married Jacob Lotz. They had four children. The two youngest died in early childhood, but it appears that the two oldest lived into adulthood. I say "appears" because I have found no death record nor marriage for them.
You should be aware that my research has been stymied in this regard because there are no church records available on archion.de for Bochum after about 1905, and no civil records on either ancestry.com or familysearch.org for Bochum at all. So, at about 1900 I hit a brick wall and can learn almost nothing more about the last 100 years.
Did the two older children marry and have children? Until more records are made available online I may not be able to break down this wall. But this is how Nicolaus' second family appears in my tree at this time:
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| The family of Nicolaus and Anna Margarethe (Falls) Rödiger |
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Another thing to notice, is that all of Nicolaus Rödiger's children who were born after leaving Tann, were born in Altenbochum, not Bochum proper. This lies southeast of the larger city of Bochum and was later incorporated into the city of Bochum in 1926. Because of the industrial makeup of Bochum, it became a target of Allied bombing during WWII and may explain why records after 1905 do not seem to exist. The fact that any exist at all is something of a miracle as all but one of Bochum's churches were destroyed during the war.
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| Thank you, Google Maps |
Altogether, Nicolaus Rödiger had 13 children, only 5 of whom "appear" to have lived to adulthood. Three of the five were boys who could carry on the Rödiger name. Whether they did or not remains to be discovered.
Nicolaus' younger brother, Jacob Rödiger also emigrated to Bochum in the 1870s soon after he married Anna Katharina Böttner in 1873. She was born in the village of Rohrbach, which lies less than 1 mile southeast of Tann. They moved to the Bochum area where Jacob worked as a coalminer.
It appears that Jacob and Anna Katharina may have moved around a bit. The birth records of their children indicate that their first two were born in Bochum, their third in Altenbochum, their fourth, fifth and sixth in Grumme (see the map above--Grumme is a city north of Bochum), and their seventh and eighth back in Bochum. The exact address where their last child, Maria died in 1893 is "I Parallelstraße 22, Bochum". You can find its exact location using Google Maps. The "I" is like a Roman numeral for 1. There is also a II Parallelstraße in Bochum.
Of their eight children, five appear to have reached adulthood. I have marriage records for the first two, and birth records for two children of Jacob's oldest son, George Valentin Rödiger. Jacob and Anna Katharina' third child, August Heinrich was one of 16 miners who lost their lives in a firedamp explosion on 25 July 1895. He was just eighteen years old.
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| Family of Jacob and Anna Katharina (Böttner) Rödiger |
After his uncle Walter passed away 2017, my third cousin made the comment to me in an email that there were no more Rödigers in Tann. What was left of them were now all in the USA. And certainly it is true that there are no longer any Rödigers in Tann. And if my great grandfather, Conrad Tobias Roediger, his brother, George and their nephew, John Henry Roediger had not emigrated to Ohio, there would be none in the USA either.
However, the question of whether the male line of Johann Henrich Rödiger and Anna Sidonia Schneider has been extinguished in Germany may still be open for debate. In 1900, there were 4 male descendants of Jacob Rödiger and 3 male descendants of Nicolaus Rödiger living in Bochum and Altenbochum. It is extremely possible that their male lines have continued to the present day.
A look at the city directory of Bochum in 1940 shows listings for 15 different male Rödigers, even one living on I Parallelstraße, though at House 13, not 22 where Maria Rödiger died:
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| excerpt from 1940 Bochum city directory |
And the current phone directory of Bochum shows 4 male and 1 female Rödigers residing there.
Now before anybody gets too excited, there is a caveat or two.
First, other than contacting each of these people personally and hoping that 1) they know who their great grandparents were and 2) that they are willing to share that information with a complete American stranger, there is no way for me to know if these current residents of Bochum are indeed descendants of the Rödigers who lived in Bochum in 1900. For all I know, they may have moved to Bochum from Berlin in 1996 and have no discernible relationship to "our" Rödiger ancestors.
Second, and more frustrating to me, is that there were other Rödigers living in Bochum in the 1870s and 1880s that I have not been able to connect with the Tanner Rödigers. Indeed, there was a Friedrich Hermann Ludwig Woldemar Rödiger who married in Bochum in 1872. His parents were from Naumburg, which is about 120 miles east of Tann in the present day state of Saxony-Anhalt. [My mistake--which was pointed out by RH, a very trustworthy researcher in Germany. The correction is that Naumburg is about 18 miles west of Kassel, in the district of Kassel in the state of Hessen. Still no known relationship to the Tanner Rödigers but RH says that Friedrich Hermann Ludwig Woldemar Rödiger's wife's father is her great-great-great granduncle. That is a pretty amazing coincidence.]
Others were:
1) Nicolaus Rödiger and Anna Margaretha Baltz had a child in 1880. This could not be the Nicolaus Rödiger I have discussed in this blog post even though the wife's name looks very similar to his second wife Anna Margaretha Falls. I almost fell for this, but soon realized that Baltz was not a misspelling of Falls but that they were two very distinct persons with different birthdates and parents.
2) Adam Rödiger and Anna Catharina Eisenbrand had a child in 1882 and in 1885.
3) George Rödiger and Maria Theis (who was a Catholic) had children in 1885, 1887, 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894 and 1897.
Any of these Rödigers could be the progenitors of the Rödigers found in the 1940 City Directory and the present day phone directory and may not be relatives at all. On the other hand, they may be relatives that I have somehow missed in my searches.
Then there is this guy. While I was double checking records on FamilySearch.org, I discovered a Hermann Georg Roediger who was born in Bochum on 24 February 1907, son of Louis Roediger and Emilie Pfaff. This is his travel document allowing him to travel to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, dated 17 October 1949. I haven't found a Louis Rodiger in the Tann records. And neither did I find one who married or had children in Bochum prior to 1900. However, there was an Anna Katharina Pfaff who married a Karl Hildebrand in Tann in 1894, so the Pfaff name is not entirely foreign to the Tann area. Furthermore his residence when applying for this travel document was Eisenach which is only about 35 miles east of Tann. Is it possible that one of our Rödiger cousins has continued the Tanner Rödiger line in Brazil. Hmmm...
OK. It appears that to try resolve this question, I am forced to write letters to the five Rödigers who currently reside in Bochum, and hope that one of them will take pity on a poor potential American cousin who is worrying this like a dog with a bone.
If I discover anything of interest, I promise to report.
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