GENEALOGY IN EUROPE: PART II

Two days after our visit the bridge at Flavigny, my husband and I drove over the border to Germany.  There we spent the day in Losheim Am See, the small town where many of my mother's ancestors once lived.  In effect, we transferred our attention from my Brennan relatives, on my father's side, to my Schulien relatives on my mother's side. 

We had set a meeting time of 10:30 at what the Schuliens call the "Little Castle,"  a building that two Schulien brothers built in the 1890s. 

There we met Janine, who is a distant cousin of mine, as well as her mother, Birgit, and her aunt, Claudia.  Her 5 year old daughter was there as well.   Janine led us through a tour of the little castle, which as recently as the 1980s was home to some Schulien descendants.  She also pointed out that the building next door, which is now a simple storefront, was once another home built by the Schuliens, and had a glamorous façade.

We then had lunch at a very nice brewery (picture below) next to the hotel where we would be staying that night, and then returned to Birgit's house where we had tea and cookies, met Janine's sister in law, Sarah, and examined photographs and genealogy books. 

After meeting with Janine and her relatives, I had a much better understanding of the Schulien family, as regards genealogy.  For instance, I learned that we are all descended from Mathias Schulien (1790 - 1868) and Elizabeth Jung.  This couple had ten children, five boys and five girls.  Three of the sons (Michael, Johann Adam and Mathias) came to the United States.  Two stayed in America (Michael and Mathias)  but Johann Adam returned to Germany.  However, most of the children of the three sons remained in the United States and raised families there.  I also learned that there are at least three spellings of the surname:  Schulien, Schuligen, and Schulgen.  These may exist because of the way the priest spelled the surname in the baptismal registry, at a time when most of his parishioners could not read or write. 

Michael (1813-1883), the eldest son of Mathias and Elizabeth, used the spelling Schulgen, married Anna Reinert and had 8 children.  This family settled in Illinois, near or in Chicago.

Johann Adam (1818-1896) Schulien married Susanna Klesser or Glasser and had 5 children.  His sons emigrated before he did and settled in Chicago.  His son Peter married and had a daughter, Susan, but he died in an accident in the Idaho territory and his orphaned daughter was adopted by his brother, Mathias.  The youngest brother, Joseph, married Mary Egle and had five children.  Joseph settled in Chicago and opened a pub, which remained in the Schulien family until recent years, though the location was moved twice.  Johann Adam returned to Germany where he died, but his sons remained in the United States, though Joseph did return to Losheim for a number of years in the 1890s. 

My ancestors are descended from Mathias Schulien (1816-1870) who married Maria Petry.  Mathias and Maria were both born in Germany, as were their four eldest children.  My great grandfather, Joseph, was their youngest child and he was born in Ohio.  He married Mary Gertrude Frecker, also from a German family.

Joseph was the father of my grandmother, Mary Bernadine Schulien Mueller.  I never met him, but my mother always told me how much she adored him.  He had been an engineer at the city waterworks plant for many years, and later was an entrepreneur, opening a foundry with his sons.  During WW II, a number of German prisoners of war worked in Joseph's foundry, and on Sundays, his wife, Mary Gertrude, would cook a German meal for them. 

I recently discovered that Joseph had also gone to Colorado at one point to try to make his fortune in a gold mine, but had to return home because he could not tolerate the altitude.  He did carpentry in his spare time, and I have in my possession a doll cradle he made for my aunt when she was a child. 


Returning to Mathias and Elizabeth Schulien, I learned that one of their sons, Jacob (1810-1890) remained in Germany, married Maria Treinen and had six children.  One of those children, Johan (1857-1888) married Angela Jacobs and had four children before his premature death.  This is the family that Claudia and Janine descend from.  A picture of Johan is below.

 


Claudia's father (and Janine's grandfather), Reinhold, is the grandson of Johan.  Reinhold wrote a comprehensive genealogy of all the families in the town of Losheim.  It comprises three volumes, and it is from these pages that I have gathered much of my information on the Schulien family. 

The visit to Losheim was most interesting and informative.  The women we met - Janine, Birgit, Claudia, and Sarah - were lovely and could not have been more hospitable. 

It would have been wonderful to stay a few more days and visit, but we were on a strict time schedule and had to depart the next day.  I do want to emphasize how much a visit to distant relatives in the ancestral home of one's family can help one understand not only the genealogy of a family, but also the culture in which they lived, and the cultural elements they brought with them to the "melting pot" of America.  Though travel to ancestral homes is costly, if one can afford it it is well worth the trip. I now have found relatives in both Ireland and Germany, with whom I am acquainted and can correspond and that is priceless. 

GENEALOGY IN EUROPE: PART I

My husband and I just returned from 3 weeks in Europe and, having now had three weeks to recover, I am ready to share some of the amazing experiences we had, especially as they relate to family.

The family part of the trip occurred in the third week, but I must take a few lines to talk about the first two weeks. 

The first week was spent in Paris.  I had never been there before and wasn't prepared for all that I saw and encountered.  Paris has a well deserved reputation for being one of the most glamorous and sophisticated cities in the world, and in fact, Paris truly is magnificent.  My only wish was that I had been able to appreciate it when I was a little younger and more mobile.  Paris is not made for older people.  Still, there was so much to see that in one week, you could barely begin.  We visited two gardens: the Tuilleries and Luxembourg.  We saw three museums:  the Orsay, the Pompidou, and L'Orangerie - home to Monet's famous water lilies.  We visited two departments stores, two cathedrals, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.  We ate at an amazing assortment of restaurants and took a Seine River Cruise.  All were wonderful.

On one of the days, we took the train to Bayeux, in Normandy, where we saw the 1000 year old Bayeux Tapestry which records the victory of William the Conqueror in the longest  piece of embroidery in the world. 

We traveled to Lyon to take a river cruise for 7 days.  We saw Roman ruins, sampled the foods of Provence, went to local wineries, saw the Papal Palace in Avignon and an intact medieval village dating back to the 1200s.  It was a remarkable week.

Then we rented a car and drove up to the Lorraine region of France.  Here is where the genealogy part of our travels began.  We had made arrangements to meet a very colorful Frenchman by the  name of Jerome.  Jerome has dedicated much of his life to helping people remember WW II and the sacrifice made by so many.  He has built a museum that houses countless artifacts from the war, and has created many replicas and miniature displays.

 Jerome spent the day with us and took us first to the bridge at the town of Flavigny where a cousin of mine, Ralph Brennan, died in September of 1944.  There is a plaque on the bridge with Ralph's name on it. 

Because I was the first of my family to visit the memorial, the mayor of the town and a few other dignitaries came out to greet us and have pictures taken for the local paper. 

 

Jerome then drove us around the area and introduced us to a 93 year old man whose father had been mayor of Flavigny when Ralph's brother, Dominican priest Father Robert Brennan, asked if he could have a cross carved into the newly rebuilt bridge where Ralph died.  Decades after the cross was carved into the bridge, a plaque was finally placed on the bridge in Ralph's honor and a new bronze cross inserted into the space where the old cross was once  the only reminder of what had happened on that bridge. 

Basically, the story of Ralph's sacrifice is this:  On the night of September 10-11, 1944, Lt. Ralph Brennan was leading a group of men to try to retake the only remaining bridge over the Moselle River. (Having been wounded a few months earlier, he had only been back at the front for 3 days.) The Germans had destroyed all the other bridges in order to prevent the Allies, who had landed in Normandy a few months before, from marching further into France and ultimately to Germany.  Lt. Brennan and his men crossed the bridge at night and were supposed to be followed by tanks and reinforcements. They hoped these support units would help them in fighting the Germans who were waiting on the other side.  As so often happens in the fog of war, the reinforcements never came and the young lieutenant and most of his men were ambushed and either killed or seriously wounded.  Lt. Brennan was mortally wounded, though he didn't die immediately.  Having lost an arm and a leg, he lay dying near the bridge when a fellow soldier offered him a last cigarette.  He died that night and was buried in St. Avold, at the Lorraine American Cemetery very close to the German border.

 

When my husband and I planned this trip, we had hoped we would have time to visit that cemetery, but our schedule was so packed that we simply couldn't arrange it.  However, the next day, when we were driving to a small town in Germany to see some distant relatives on my mother's side of the family, we got lost.  When our GPS finally got us headed in the right direction, we found ourselves in front of the cemetery.  Though we didn't have time to visit Ralph's grave, we felt that fate had somehow taken us by that cemetery.  And in finding myself there, looking at the final resting place of a man I never knew but have heard so much about, I felt a closeness not just to Ralph, but to the entire Brennan family who is proud to count this hero as one of them.