Merrily plugging in German names to my mother's paternal side of the family, I moved into Susanna Mergeler's family. Susanna married Christoph Krieger in November 1658. Easy peasey, lots of family trees, those Kriegers were prolific. I moved on to Hyronymus Mergeler and his wife Dorothea Eisenberger, now residing in the year of 1539.
The family trees kept popping up with information, all ten of us on the same family track.
Then I hit Peter Eisenberger, 1408 from Alemania. His wife Elisabeth vonBuches born, 1415, Salta, Argentina and her death recorded in 1495 in Salta, Argentina.
It's times like these that you have to decide just what you are going to accept as "truth" when you don't really have any facts to back it up.
I suspect that someone, plugged Alemania into google and came up with Alemania, Salta, Argentina, as I did when I checked it out. Might make sense, except the confederation of the Alemanni, is part of Swabia.
I'm not going to accept that Elisabeth was born in Argentina. I think she and Peter both came from Alemania, Germany.
It's interesting that the Franks absorbed the Alemanni in 806 and most of the tribe of the Suevi,Suebi, Sueben, or Schwaben had crossed the Rhine in 407 and traveled across Gaul and Spain. The Duke of Swabia went on to become the last great house of German Emperors, the Hohenstaufen.
As disputes go the contest between the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs raged over Swabia and then with victory in his cap, the Emperor Frederick II relocated his now inheritance in Sicily. Germany largely disintegrated, including Swabia. Wurttemberg and Baden became the major successor states. There were other small German states that derived from Swabia, like Leichtenstein and Hohenzollern and Alsace, on the left bank of the Rhine, was part of Swabia.
Many on my mother's side of the family come from the Alsace area. Parts of Alsace went to France at the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years war in 1648. Louis XIV began unilaterally annexing more of Alsace. Red flags started to go up when Louis XIV also took the Imperial City of Strafburg in 1681. The rest of Germany and Europe became concerned. Alsace was German, not French, speaking in fact Alsatian constituted a distinct dialect of High German. It also included a Jewish community. The Jews had been expelled from France in 1306 and until the 20th century were tolerated in Germany.
Turns out that Louis reallly only targeted the region because of the Rhine boundary that had belonged to ancient Gaul. Thankfully, Louis did not enforce his Revocation of the Edit of Nantes (1685) in Alsace, so the area preserved most of its religious freedom through the rest of the Ancien Regime.
When you are working on these names, especially in these early years you have to look at the generation before and after. Where did they live. My cousins, in Germany have written to us and told us that four generations have lived in the same town. When I checked Peter's son Walter Eisenberger he was born in Hessen, Germany and died there. His wife Else Siegwein was also from Hessen.
Hesse border the German states of Lower Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia.
As much as I would love to think that the TANGO runs through my blood. I strongly suspect that it doesn't and I'll just have to settle for putting on my little dirndle dress with the white apron and doing something that looks a lot like clogging.
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