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	The Sixth Generation Johannes Schwenk, Saddler/Innkeeper
	Little baby Johannes drew his first breath of air on July 5, 1798. He was the first-born of Conrad and Felicitas Schwenk. What kind of world greeted him? Well, there was a lot of talk going around then about a certain Napoleon Bonaparte, a young 29 year old general not far away in France. When Johannes was age two, Napoleon's armies began warring with the Austrians. The Danube River valley lay only a few miles due south of Mundingen and had served as a corridor for armies through the centuries. And thus, some of those French troops, as well as Austrian, found their way to this little out-of-the way village seeking the requistion of horses and cattle and bread, as well as lodging. In 1797, just before Conrad took over the Hirsch Inn, his future father-in-law Elias Fischer was paid nearly 40 Gulden to provide lodging and food for some French officers. And because this conflict between the French and the Austrians went on through 1805, culminating in a battle in nearby Ulm on Oct. 16, in which the French Army was victorious, it is very likely that Johannes' Father also must have waited on French and Austrian soldiers passing through this village. At about this time, the Duchy of Württemberg became an ally of the French, and Napoleon elevated the Duke to the rank of King. And so Johannes grew up a subject in the Kingdom of Württemberg. Johannes' life was somewhat similar to that of his father's; he learned the skills of the brewer and innkeeper from his father (in Conrad's case, from his step-father) and left his home village to start a business of his own, although Johannes would wander a bit, as we will see. In the year 1828 in Dettingen (on the Erms River), a town located about 32 kilometers northwest of Mundingen, there lived a Johann Friderich Lieb and his wife Maria Agnes. He was a prominent member of that community; he was a member of the town council and had served as mayor in 1819. His occupation and main income derived from the ownership of an inn, also named The Hirsch. Hirsch is the German word for the antlered stag, and this was a symbol, a trademark, of the House of Württemberg. Therefore, nearly every community in old Württemberg had an inn carrying the name of Hirsch. Whether Herr Lieb had put out the word that his inn was for sale, or that he needed someone to operate it, we do not know. The only event we can document is that Johannes went to Dettingen sometime around 1828. He, like his father, fell in love with the daughter of a Hirschwirt and in that year in Mundingen and Dettingen, Johannes and Maria Barbara Lieb proclaimed their intentions to marry. This is documented in the marriage entry of the Mundingen church books and the Family Register later established in Dettingen. The wedding took place in Dettingen on Nov. 16, 1828. The Mundingen document shows Johannes as Hirschwirth zu Dettingen ." The Dettingen Family Register, prepared probably sometime in 1834, shows his occupation as Sattler, auch (also) Hirschwirth ". And this same dual occupation appears in the birth registers in 1830 when their first child was born. It seems thus very likely that Johannes learned the skills of making saddles and harness before he arrived in Dettingen. Johann Friderich Lieb had died in June, five months before the marriage of daughter Maria Barbara to Johannes. He left a widow with three daughters and a son (these younger siblings of Maria, then age 20) to take care of. The widow, Maria Agnes, did not remarry until 1840, so it seems likely that Johannes became, more or less, the "head of the household" there above the Hirsch Inn in Dettingen. On March 6, 1830, baby Maria Agnes Felicitas was born. On April 8, 1831 grieving filled the home with the still-born delivery of a male infant. On July 21, 1832, their first-born son arrived; they named him Elias . As mentioned earlier, Johannes' sister, Elisabeth, came to Dettingen to serve as Godmother at the christenings of babies Maria Agnes and Elias. Then on May 8, 1834, Johann Friedrich joined his brother and sister. A sketch of the lives of these children, as well as those of the subsequent siblings, will follow near the end of this chapter. Sometime between May of 1834 and December of 1835, Johannes, Maria and their three babies moved to very small community called Rosenau, at that time consisting of only one house, and this owned by the neighboring village of Hagelloch. This is on the northern edge of the city of Tübingen, 25 kilometers due west of Dettingen. It is very likely that Maria's mother and juvenile siblings moved there with them. The reasons for this move we will probably never know. Had business at the Hirsch Inn turned sour? What was it which drew them to this hamlet? The only fact we know for certain is that Maria's mother married a Jacob Müller there in Rosenau in 1840, about five years after this move. We also know that Maria Barbara's sole surviving brother (out of 15 children born to her parents), Jacob Friderich, married in Entringen, right near Rosenau, in January of 1840. And a younger sister, Christiana, married sometime in this period in Hagelloch, the village directly adjacent to Rosenau. A baby Johannes was born on Dec. 20, 1835 there in Rosenau. He died - as concluded from scribbled and blurry entries made some five years later in Mundingen - after only two days of life. Then on Christmas Eve, one year later, baby Luise joined the family. Sometime between then and January of 1839, our Johannes, Maria and children moved to a small village of Kayh, located on Highway B 28, about 8 miles NW of Tübingen and Rosenau. Although not yet documented, it is likely that Johannes went there to do farm work. The economic conditions in So. Germany at that time - crop failures, overpopulation, and industrialization in Northern Germany and in England - had led to desperate times. And those conditions lead to waves of emigration; and that is, in part, why we grew up in America and are reading this in the English language. There in Kayh on the 23rd of January, 1839, baby Johannes was born. On August 3, 1840, in the same village, Carl August made his entrance. Six years then passed before the last child of Johannes and Maria was born. This was baby Elisabeth , born on August 6, 1846 in Mundingen! She died 13 hours later. Mundingen? The home village of Johannes! Had he moved back there? Did they travel the considerable distance from Kayh just for this delivery? No is the answer on both accounts. They had moved to Neuburg probably shortly after the birth of Carl August in 1840. Luise, born in 1836, would tell her children many years later in America, that she was born in "Neuburg, Oberamt Ehingen." And this was probably because her first memories stemmed from her childhood in Neuburg. Neuburg is a hamlet (population of 68 in year 1854, according to a letter from Dr. Kiess in June, 1995), which lies on the north bank of the Danube River right near where the Lauter River joins the mighty Danube. Mundingen lies just north over the hill from Neuburg. This little community was then nearly 100 percent Catholic (according to the same Kiess letter, only four of the 68 were protestants in 1854 - those probably were Johannes, Maria and two of their children , age 14 and older). Mundingen, Dettingen and the other communities where the Schwenks had lived were all Lutheran. Whether a person was of the Catholic or Protestant faith, had been determined by which duchy, principality, sovereignity one lived in. In 1534, the Duke of Württemberg elected to join Martin Luther's "break" from the established Church, and thus all his subjects within his territory or duchy had to henceforth adhere to this new denomination. Had the village of Laichingen been situated a bit farther eastward, and not within the Duchy of Württemberg, we Schwenks today may well have been raised in the Catholic faith. Neuburg lay in a sovereignty just outside the boundaries of old Württemberg, and its secular sovereign, Austria, had elected to "stay with the Pope." And so it is somewhat a puzzle why Johannes, Maria and their six small children moved there sometime shortly after August, 1840. Why not back to Mundingen, just over the hill, where his parents and brother still lived? The reason probably lies in that fact that Mundingen had a saddle maker then and Neuburg apparently none (Oh why didn't these people keep diaries and hand them down, cries out the family history researcher!!). There is no evidence to indicate that Johannes continued to earn a living as a Wirt , innkeeper. On the contrary, the Family Register filled out in around 1840 in Mundingen reflects the only occupation as that of saddler.

All six of the surviving children were confirmed in the church in Mundingen as each reached the age of fourteen. These events are recorded in the Family Register of Johannes and Maria, a copy of which appears directly below. Apologies for the poor quality. Life Sketches of the Children of Johannes and Maria Information about the lives of four of these children has been handed down to, gathered and preserved by Juanita Schwenk, wife of Darrel Schwenk in Excello, Missouri. We owe her a great debt. These four children were the ones who left their homeland and emigrated to America: Maria Agnes; Luise; Johannes and August. The other two, Elias and J. Friedrich remained in Germany; information about their lives had to be extracted almost exclusively from the church books, as was the case with all the preceding generations. We will sketch their lives in the order of their birth, leaving Johannes or John, for the seventh generation chapter. Maria Agnes Felicitas was born March 6, 1830 in Dettingen. She married a John Pankratsius Baumeister on May 8, 1854 somewhere in Germany.** A search in the Mundingen church books showed they did not marry there. They arrived in Chicago on July 8th of that year "after a voyage of 35 days." They had thirteen children. One of those was named Elias. She died on March 5, 1917 just seven weeks before the death of her brother Friedrich back in Mundingen, and is buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. That is really all that is known about her by this writer. It seems odd that more is known of the parents and two brothers who remained in Germany than their siblings who settled in America! Apologies are made by the writer to those descendants of Maria Agnes, Luise and August who may someday read this story; more information was simply not available for your American "clan founders." **In November of 1996, some many months after writing the above, it was learned that John Baumeister was born in the village of Buchay near Riedlingen, some seven miles SW of Neuburg. This is most likely where he and Maria Agnes Schwenk married. The current phone books of Germany show two Baumeister listings there (of a total of 1295). Elias was born on July 21, 1832, in Dettingen. He became a baker, then married a Rosina Catharena Berthold in Ulm on May 5, 1863. They had five children together, four of which survived. The last born child was Johannes Elias, born in 1870 in a hamlet called Urspring about 20 kilometers west of Ulm. In the following year on Nov. 26, 1871, Elias died in the city of Pfullingen, not far southwest of Dettingen/Erms. As the reader can see, he died young at the age of 39. His cousin, Elias, son of Konrad, also died young at the age of 30. And Elias, born 1869, son of Elias (son of Konrad) died in 1908, without any surviving children, at the age of 39. One could say - if one were superstitious - that the name of Elias, which had stemmed from a beloved Elias Fischer, had a curse attached to it. It seems peculiar that the knowledge of the existence of Elias did not get handed down by his four siblings in America. The "archives" in the home of Juanita and Darrel Schwenk did include the name of Friedrich, their other brother, but nothing about Elias. One could speculate that Elias was the blacksheep of the family who ran off to Ulm and married a woman who then had a child, age 5, born out of wedlock. And to bring "more shame" , their first child was born about 7 weeks after the wedding ceremony. And then again it could be simply that the information about this brother Elias merely slipped through the cracks of time and thus failed to be preserved in Juanita's "archive". Johann Friedrich was born on May 8, 1834 in Dettingen. He went by the name of Friedrich. On Nov. 3, 1863, he married Anna Katharina Mayer in Mundingen. He made a living with cloth, having become a tailor. Whether he learned this in Neuburg, where he grew up, or went to Mundingen and apprenticed there, we do not know. But he remained a tailor and lived out his life in Mundingen. There were seven children born of this union. The first child arrived about 21 months before the vows of marriage were said. Two of the sons emigrated to Swizerland; two sons died before the age of marriage; only one of the three daughters married or remained there in Mundingen. The one, Katharina, married her second cousin Elias Schwenk in 1901. Their only child was born dead. And so there were no male descendants of Friedrich to carry on the family name in Mundingen or take over the business. In spite of that, a Gottlob Schwenk was born within this family on Christmas Day in 1896. The mother was Maria Barbara, age 18, unmarried and the youngest daughter in the family. It is fairly probable that Gottlob was raised in the household of Friedrich and Anna. The Family Register shows Maria Barbara as the mother; it also shows her subsequent marriage in 1906 to a Wilhelm Bühner, whose homeland was in northern Germany. It is very likely they then moved out of Mundingen, for they established no family register in this church. Gottlob is shown as being confirmed in Mundingen in 1910. It must have been heartbreaking for Friedrich when, on August 12, 1916, this child died on the battlefields of war in the Somme Province of NW France while serving his nation, this only "son" who had not left Mundingen to put down roots somewhere else but had gone off to war. Gottlob's name appears along with seventeen others from Mundingen on a war memorial plague in Mundingen, which is depicted on page 63 of the Kiess book. So we see here a picture emerging as to why the Schwenk name did not survive in Mundingen. It was a poor village and times were very difficult there in the middle of the last century; why else would young people pack up their belonging, leave their parents, their hometown, and sometimes even their homeland? And on that subject, there is an interesting story about Maria Barbara, mother of Gottlob, which begs to be told. In July of 1995, a Frau Straub in Mundingen found a poem in her husband's papers; she gave a copy of this to Dr. Kiess, who then sent it on to this writer. This handwritten, poignant, beautifully rhymed and metered three-page poem was written on Jan. 11, 1904 by Barbara in "St. Ludwig", (Ludwig = Louis, hence, St. Louis, Missouri) and sent to a Maria Gerster who would marry a Theodor Straub the following month in Mundingen. The bride-to-be was Barbara's first cousin. This same Maria Gerster had served as Godmother for baby Gottlob in 1896. Barbara's mother Anna, and Maria's mother Maria Barbara were sisters, two of ten children born to Johann Georg Mayer and Anna Barbara Kauther of Mundingen. In the poem she mentions the passing of her own mother in November of the prior year, and also of the death of the mother of the poem's recipient, nearly two years earlier. She also rhymes her regrets over not being able to attend the wedding. What is particularly interesting here is that Barbara had gone to America sometime after December, 1896, and returned to Mundingen sometime before her own wedding in 1906. Who did she live with there in St. Louis is our logical question? Since the facts are, at the present, not available, let us speculate. Her Aunt Maria Baumeister was then living, reportedly, in Chicago, Illinois or environs. This older sister of Friedrich - Barbara's father - is most likely the American relative that Barbara lived with for a few years. But then again, she had an Uncle August living in the Kansas City area and an Aunt Sophie and cousins in Bloomington, MO. And was it the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock which precipitated her visit to America? We can only surmise.

This poem appears below. It needs to be preserved. To the best of this writer's knowledge, it is the sole surviving document passed down to us from our Germanic past; that is, something written by a niece of our "four immigrants" in the German language. The beauty of the rthym and cadence is missing in this translation into our language of this touching poetry . Nevertheless, this writer has decided to include below the English translation of the original poem as well as the German version. St. Ludwig Jan 11 1904 Dear little bride, today many gifts flow to your home. Everyone wishes to please you and seeks for you the loveliest; For lamps, for table adornments, for the kitchen, such embellishments. To find something new was difficult, but because I know you so well, your plain and simple taste, I wanted only to give you something useful. Thought about this a long while. Finally I found it. No one would have come across this idea. And there my gift lay so close at hand. In the evenings when you both stretch out your tired limbs, if the room there in your homeland house is not real cozy, then take this blanket to warm yourselves and shortly you will slumber in peace. For the dear thoughts I harbor for your happiness, may they entwine you in your dreams. And by day the blanket will decorate your abode and will remind you of the love and fidelity it once gave. And now to the approaching wedding day, I wish you happiness and well-being. May one always see in you both, contentment and the very best. Oh how I would love to share with you this joy on that day. But many miles separate us. Because of that the yearning for you is great. Beloved bride, the time is near where you each extend the hand, and at the wedding alter pledge your bond of love. Nearly two years have passed since she lost her mother. And now as replacement, she has found her beloved Theodor. The Lord will bless your doorway and protect your home; where love and fidelity meet, there He will also pass in and out. And now adieu you dear ones, for I cannot come to you. And so good luck and also think back happily on Babette Schwenk. St. Ludwig, d. 11.1.1904 Liebes Bräutchen, viele Gaben, strömen heut zu Dir ins Haus. Jedes will Dich hoch erfreuen, sucht für Dich das schönste aus; Für Beleuchtung, Schmuck der Tafel, für die Küche, welche Zier Etwas neues noch zu finden war fast schwer, o glaub es mir. Doch weil ich so gut Dich kenne Deinen einfach, schlichten Sinn Wollt ich nützliches nur spenden, und sann lange her u. hin Da hat endlich ichs gefunden niemand kommt auf die Idee Dabei lag sie doch so nahe wenn ich mein Geschenk hier seh Strekt Ihr abends weich u. wohlig Eure müde Glieder aus. Tat das Zimmer nicht recht vollig in dem Heimatlichen Haus Dann nehmt Ihr, Euch zu erwärmen diese Deken noch dazu, Und nach einer kurzen Weile schlummert Ihr in süsser Ruh. Denn die lieblichen Gedanken die ich heg für Euer Glück Euch im Traume noch umranken auf Euch ruht ein Segensblick. Und am Tage schmückt die Deke friedlich Euer Lagerstatt Mahnt Euch an die Lieb und Treue die sie einst gespendet hat. Und nun zum nahen Hochzeitsfeste wünsch ich Euch Glück und Wohlergehen Zufriedenheit, das aller beste möge man stehts bei Euch nur sehen. Wie gerne würde ich auch teilen mit Euch die Freud an diesem Tag, Doch trennen mich gar viele Meilen schon deshalb Euch mit Sehnsucht nach. Geliebte Braut die Zeit ist nahe wo Ihr einander reicht die Hand Und feierlich am Traualtere gelobet Euer Liebesband. Beihah 2 Jahre sind verschwunden seitdem die Mutter sie verlor Nun als Ersatz hat sie gefunden ihren Gel. Theodor. Der Herr woll Euren Eingang segnen und auch behüten Euer Haus; Wo Lieb u. Treue sich begegnen da geht auch er mnit ein u. aus. Und nun Adje, Ihr lieben alle denn zu Euch kommen kann ich nicht, So lebt denn wohl u. denkt im Glück auch an Babette Schwenk zurück. CONTINUE