Genealogy Fascination Part 2
The French Connection
Learning my true family name only further sparked my curiosity, and it sent me down a deep rabbit hole, stranding me for years. I finished building out the rest of the family tree that I could using Ancestry and a few other resources, but could never really find information for the patriarch of the first US generation. It was at this time that I started using European genealogy resources to start researching the family names for both the patriarch and matriarch. Unfortunately, the name SCHUH us quite common in both Germany and France. I wasn’t able to find any solid hits on the name ‘Louis Schuh’, which led me to an information drought until I was fortunate enough to have my family tree found on Ancestry by someone with more information.
A distant family member from one of the branches of the first US generation reached out to me on Ancestry and shared information that would be critical with finding the European connection. They shared family stories about the origins of the first generation and revealed that the patriarch was from a town called ‘Rubenheim’ and the matriarch was from ‘Wittersheim’. It was also told that the towns were close to each other around the Rhine river that borders Germany/France. I was quickly able to locate Wittersheim:
Finding Rubenheim, on the other hand, was a little harder. I couldn’t find any reference to the name ‘Rubenheim’ anywhere near the Rhine river in that location. I resorted to what I thought might be the best way to search: manually looking at the map and village names. It took a little while, but by narrowing my focus to the surrounding area, I was able to find the village of Roppenheim, which sounded very familiar to ‘Rubenheim’.:
Both of these villages were in France around the time that both people emigrated and both are situated in the Alsace region, a region where people spoke both French and German. They are both located in the provincial area of France known as Bas-Rhin, Grand Est. This would help me narrow down research to confirm that these were the right villages.
The Impressiveness of French Records
Armed with potential major hits, I set out to track down French records to confirm I had the right people and villages. My first step was to research the best locations for finding French records, preferably for free. I stumbled across https://en.geneanet.org/explore/french-ancestors/ which gives some amazing information on locating French documentation. I also signed up for and used the website https://www.filae.com, which I would equate to Ancestry. Filae has direct searchability into many of the existing departmental records, along with French-made family trees, which helps tremendously.
The single best and most impressive source of documentation for this project was the Bas-Rhin Archives, which had civil documents from the past 200+ years: https://archives.bas-rhin.fr/. I could not believe how thorough the documentation was. Births, marriages, deaths, baptisms, and census data were all grouped by village/town/city and year. This made things very easy for me, as I already had the year of birth for both of the people I wanted to find. So I started my search with the patriarch using the two pieces of information gathered prior: 1868 (year of birth from Ancestry) and Roppenheim (suspicion based on family stories). I popped open the births register for the village of Roppenheim in 1868 and didn’t find a ‘Louis Schuh’, but I did find:
Ignace SCHUH? That actually tracks. Around this time in France, many men had birth names and were later given nicknames that became their primary names. Ignace (Ignatius in English and German) With that in mind, it would seem that I had confirmed the origins concretely
More to come in the following posts…