OBERKALBACH, HESSEN, GERMANY
Village of my Berthold and Ullrich Ancestors INCLUDES INFORMATION ABOUT SURROUNDING VILLAGES Johannes Berthold and Eva Ullrich My earliest known Berthold ancestor, Kilian Berthold, was married in Hintersteinau in 1606. The church records are not extant before this time. In 1763, Kilian's descendant Johann Heinrich, was married in Wallroth. The son of this union, also named Johann Heinrich, came to nearby Oberkalbach, perhaps for his apprenticeship to become a joiner. He was married in Oberkalbach in 1803. After being widowed, he married Eva Schaefer, another Oberkalbach woman in 1817. I am descended through the second marriage. The first Ullrich recorded in the Oberkalbach christening records, which date back to October 1653, was Henrich Ulrich (note the spelling), son of Hans. He was christened on 5 February 1654. It could be that Hans was a man of some standing in the small community, since the pastor of the church, Henrich Appel, was named the godfather of the child, and Hans Schaefer, the mayor, held the child, since the pastor was busy performing the baptismal ordinance. |
My grandmother Eva Ullrich's father, Andreas, born in 1840, married Elisabetha Mueller, an Oberkalbach girl, on 19 February 1865. Eva was the 7th of their 9 children, three of whom were boys, of whom the first-born died 17 days before his 3rd birthday. Of the six girls, all except the youngest, who died at 8 months, grew to adulthood. Eva's father was a farmer. He was not blessed with a lot of sons to help him with his farming, which probably resulted in the girls also having to do a lot of the work in the fields with their father.
Eva was a pretty girl. She was referred to as "Schoe Ev" in Oberkalbach dialect. In high German, that translates into "Schoene Eva" and in English to "Lovely Eva". She wore her long braided hair wrapped around her head like a wreath. Being one of the youngest of the surviving daughters, she probably stayed at home with her mother, helping with the daily chores of cooking, cleaning, and laundry. She was not sent out to other places to work at the age of 14, although that was the tradition in this area, especially with larger families. Until she was nine years old. she attended school in the same schoolhouse as Johannes Berthold, her future husband. He was five years older than she. Children in this village attended school until they turned 14.
Johannes Berthold lived just a few houses down the street from Eva. She had to go by his house on the way down the hill to the schoolhouse. In this small town, they must have known each other all their young lives. Perhaps they started courting when she was in her late teens. Johannes fell in love with Eva and seriously wanted to marry her but her father was not in favor of the marriage and refused to give his permission.
At some point in time, Johannes and his father Heinrich were conversing. Heinrich asked Johannes how things were going. Johannes replied that they weren't going very well - that he had gotten Eva pregnant. Eva had just turned 20. Permission was finally granted and the couple married. They lived in the Berthold house with Johannes' father Heinrich. Johannes' mother, Anna Herbert, had died at age 39 in 1894, when he was only 18 years old. Heinrich was not a kind father-in-law to Eva, but there was no other place for the young couple to live. Being the oldest son, Johannes would eventually inherit the house and fields.
Eva was a fertile woman. Children came along every 13 to 18 months. She bore 15 children in 22 years - 7 boys and 8 girls. In order of birth they were: Anna 1901; Gertraude (called Gertrud) 1903; Heinrich 1904; Elisabeth (called Lisbeth) 1905; Katharina 1907; Eva 1908; Konrad (called Kurt) 1910; Johannes (called Hannes) 1911; Ludwig 1912; Maria 1914; Elisabeth (called Liese) 1915; Margarethe (called Gretel) 1916; Baltasar 1919; Andreas 1921; and Johann Heinrich (called Hans) 1923.
All the children lived to adulthood except Baltasar, who died at age 3 years and 10 months. Baltasar, who had never walked, had become seriously ill, and a doctor was summoned to the house. When the child saw the doctor, he panicked and began to scream in terror. The doctor gave the boy a shot and within minutes he had a convulsion and died on 22 June 1923. My mother's suspicion was that the cause of death may have been something like spinal meningitis.
When asked why she had so many children, Eva replied that every time grandfather hung his trousers on the bedpost, she ended up pregnant. When my mother, the 5th child, once asked her godmother why it was that her mother had so many children, the godmother replied, "Kind, dass kann ich dir nicht sagen. Kinder, dass sind Gottes' Gaben. Wer sie hat, der soll sie haben. " (Child, I can't explain that. Children are a gift from God. Whoever gets them was meant to have them.)
Having done genealogical research in the church records of this small village, I know that there was never before this time a family as large as this one in this place. Eva's life was one of hard work, with no modern conveniences. According to a carving in the wood under the eaves of the house, it had been built in 1727. It was built of wood and had never seen a coat of paint. In this day, we would call in a split-level. It sat perpendicular to the town's main street, the two levels near the road were the cow barn with a hayloft above it. To the left of the barn the ground sloped upward, so the living quarters that were attached to the house were on the level of the hayloft. These consisted of a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room. A curtained doorway in the living room led to a tiny room, called a "Kammer" (tiny room), large enough to barely accommodate a bed, a night stand and a chest of drawers. This little room was where Eva's father-in-law slept while he was alive. After he died in 1922, Eva and Johannes used this as their bedroom. Meanwhile, they used the main bedroom and kept the smaller children with them in their room.
The outhouse was outside the kitchen door in one end of the structure that also housed the pigpen. One time, when Eva was in the outhouse, she saw a rat. Terrified, she never again entered the outhouse without first banging against the door with a stick to scare away any rat that might be nearby. The air by the outhouse was unpleasantly odoriferous, additionally so because the huge pile of barn-cleanings of straw and cow-do leaned up next to it. And since every house in Oberkalbach had pretty much the same arrangement, this odor lingered in the air everywhere. Living there, one's olefactory nerves probably became accustomed to this. But for anyone coming there from a town or city where things were more sanitarily advanced, the odor was very unpleasant.
As the family grew, which it did very quickly, a small house next door to the main house with a roofed overhang in between was acquired. This additional house provided sleeping quarters for the older children, who slept out there 3 to a bed. As the children turned 14 years of age, they were hired out to work at other places. They were then boarded at their places of employment. Each month, Johannes went to the employers to collect his children's wages, which he used to support the family at home. This was the custom until each one turned 21 years of age, at which time they were free to live their own lives. Most of them did not return to their hometown to live because there was little opportunity to earn a living there.
Johannes was a farmer with few fields to grow food for the family and hay for his four or five cows. The boys worked in the fields with him until they were of age to be hired out. Eva occasionally had to help in the fields as well as the girls, who also had responsibilities at home helping with the younger children and the household chores. The children all had their chores to do at home, such as cutting and bringing in the firewood, milking the cows, cleaning the barn, sweeping the street and raingutters, etc.
Oberkalbach had no entertainment establishments, but there was a restaurant/tavern/inn across and down the street from the Berthold house. Johannes would occasionally go down there to socialize but Eva stayed home. Her only social life would have been on Sunday if she had time to go to church a short distance down the street, or if she stopped to talk to her neighbors on the way to the baking house to bake her many loaves of bread or to the cemetery to tend the family graves. There was a small store for buying basic items directly across the street from the Berthold house and also a small post office.
The house looked poor and lacked any kind of comfort. The kitchen was bare, with a large wood stove for cooking, which also heated the room. There was a container at one end of the stove in which water was always kept warm. There was a stone sink with a sideboard for food preparation. There was no sign of any kind of decoration to make it homey or pleasant. There was no money for that kind of thing. The family ate in the living room, where the table was in one corner with benches built onto the walls. In fact, benches were built-in all around most of the room. Besides these things, there was no furniture except for a stove for heating and a grandfather clock. There was no comfortable couch or easy chair. The floor was bare worn wood.
I'm sure Johannes and Eva enjoyed listening to their children sing when they gathered outside the house under the overhang and some of the neighbor children would join them to singng old folk songs in harmony. The Berthold children had been blessed with good voices and an ear for music. The whole neighborhood enjoyed listening.
My Aunt Gretel told of her brother Ludwig blowing into a basket to make music in the living room while some of the siblings tried to teach the others how to dance. Mother also told me that at some point in her youth her father and her older sister Lisbeth were in a community play. Mother was jealous and upset that she was too young to be in it. The whole family enjoyed the yearly fair when it came to town.
How did they support their family? Eva had a little garden at the back of the house where she grew vegetables. She spun flax into yarn and then knitted sweaters and socks for the family. Johannes raised and slaughtered his own pigs, making sausage from the meat. The cows, who were used to pull wagons and plow fields, also provided the family's milk. Johannes poured any excess milk into a large, probably 10-gallon container, leaving it on a ledge on the house by the street and a dairy farmer came by and picked it up to sell. In winter, Johannes worked at chopping wood and also at scraping the bark from wood to prepare it for use in building houses. In spring, Johannes worked as a "Steinhauer" (stonecutter) - shaping stones to be used for stone walls and cobblestone streets. He also made brooms out of twigs and sold them. On Fridays, he gathered eggs and butter from the townspeople and hitched a ride to a large city to sell them.
In this village, as in others in that area, people wore wooden shoes. Johannes carved the wooden shoes for his whole family. Although money was scarce, there was usually enough to eat, although sometimes it was only potatoes and "Matte" (similar to ricotta cheese) or milk soup made out of lumps of flour mixed with water and boiled in the milk. Vegetables came from their garden but fruit was a rare treat. Katharina remembered stealing some from trees of a neighbor.
When World War I broke out, Johannes was called to serve. The drafted men came marching through the village and Johannes and his brother fell in step with them. His father was still alive and living in the house with the family. While Johannes was gone, Heinrich ruled Eva and the children with an iron hand. At one point, he got angry with one of the boys and beat him over the head with a sharp pointed rake, injuring him quite severely. Eva became very upset with Heinrich and stood up to him for once. He also beat a cow who was delivering a calf during the night, because she was making too much noise.
Because Johannes had many children, he did not have to serve in the front lines but worked as a cook, traveling with his unit. Flyers would be brought to the villages giving news of the war. At the end of the war, 20 men from Oberkalbach had died and three were missing in action, but Johannes came back safe to his wife and children. One day, one of the children spotted him walking towards home and ran into the house to tell Eva. Needless to say, there was great joy that day in the Berthold house. Sadly, Johannes' only brother, two years his junior, had died in the war in France.
Raising so many children under such primitive conditions must have been stressful. Yet Eva mourned when her little 3-year old Baltasar died. When asked by one of her other children why she was so sad when she still had so many other children, she replied that every child was precious. Johannes, too, was a loving and patient father. He was strict, though. When the children were acting in a way that displeased him, he opened his eyes wide and stared at them and they knew that they had better straighten up their act. When discipline was necessary, Johannes was the one to administer it. Eva, when upset with her children, punished by not speaking with them. She sometimes kept some of their mischief from their father. She spent her whole life in Oberkalbach, probably never going more than a few miles distance in her lifetime.
During World War II, all of the Berthold sons served in the military. All except one returned home. The second youngest son, Andreas, was captured on the Russian front. He was placed in a prisoner of war camp near Samara, Russia, where he died of starvation in January 1945, at age 24, four months before the end of the war. During the War, a French soldier named Jean was captured by the Germans, held as a prisoner of war, and placed at the Berthold home to help with the farm chores until the war was over. Eva and Johannes liked the soldier and got along well with him despite the language barrier.
In April 1945, a month before the end of the war, as the American soldiers marched into Oberkalbach at the lower end of the village, a French prisoner of war, like Jean, ran out into the street. In French, he shouted at the Americans not to shoot these German people, that they were good people. Not understanding him, the bewildered Americans panicked and started shooting as they made their way through the village. They shot into homes and barns and set buildings on fire, destroying 17 homes and 33 barns and workshops, leaving 70 people homeless, six people dead, and some of the livestock burned to death. Eleven homes were partially destroyed.
The village pastor's pleadings with the Americans finally brought the attack to a halt before the village was totally devastated. Had more inhabitants been in the village, there would have been more deaths. But fear had caused many, having been warned by the German government what might happen to them when the conquerors came to claim their territory, to run into the fields to hide even before the attack began.
My mother had stored a wooden wardrobe containing my deceased father's clothes in the Berthold house. She was planning on having them made into clothes for my 12-year-old brother, Wolfgang, after the war. During the attack, a shot fired into the house went through the wardrobe and its contents, ruining the clothes. At the time of this event, my mother, brother and I were temporarily living with her sister's family in another village in order to escape the heavy bombing taking place near our home near Frankfurt am Main.
Years of hard work took its toll on Eva. By middle age she looked older than her actual years. There was no doctor or dentist in the village, nor money to get any medical or dental care. She lost many of her teeth. She also had a large goiter, the size of an apple, protruding from her neck, caused by the lack of iodine in the diet. With age she grew heavier, but when her health problems escalated, she became quite thin.
I still remember her being able to cook and make bread before we left Germany. When Eva made bread, with the help of my grandfather, she made large amounts. She divided up a huge lump of kneaded dough into several large flat baskets that she had set on the floor in one corner of the living room, each with a linen cloth in it. The dough rose and then the baskets were carried out to the community baking-house down the street. Each lump of raised dough was lifted out of its basket, placed on the paddle-end of a long pole, and shoved deep into the gigantic brick oven. They came out as big round dark brown loaves of rye bread, called Bauern Brot (farmer's bread).
During the last year of her life, Eva's health failed rapidly. As the Pfingsten holiday (Whitsun or Pentecost) approached, she commented that she thought the family's holidays would be spoiled. On Pfingsten, 24 May 1953, at age 72, Eva died of congestive heart failure. Her body, unembalmed, was laid in a wooden coffin and placed in the addition to the house, where friends and family came to pay their last respects. About a year later, my mother in the U.S. sent money she had saved to Johannes to purchase Eva's gravestone. After Eva's death, their son Hannes and his wife and two children came to live with Johannes to help with the work and take care of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.
The last time I saw my grandparents together was when we went to Oberkalbach to say goodbye before leaving for America in October 1949. The living room benches around the walls were all occuped by relatives who had come to wish us farewell. Mother insisted that I go around and politely shake the hand of each aunt, uncle and cousin and curtsy as I said goodbye. It was embarrassing for a shy 10-year-old girl but I did it. Grandmother looked at my mother and said, "Are you sure you want to go across that big water?"
We saw my grandfather one more time when we visited on our first return trip to Germany in 1955. He weighed me because he thought I was much too skinny at 16 and took on a personal project to fatten me up while we were visiting for 6 weeks. He survived my grandmother by 7 years. He passed away peacefully in 1960, sitting in the outhouse :-)
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