Part 4: where it all began

On Saturday, 2 August 2003, we American Leinbachs had a 10 a.m. date with a bakeoven in Gerterode, the village where our ancestor was born. So we left the Hotel Columbus by 8 a.m. and were driven along the valley of the Kinzig, until there was no more Kinzig, and then we crossed the watershed to the headwaters of the Fulda.

When I observed that we were passing the city of Fulda itself and it wasn't being mentioned, I dashed to the front of the bus and grabbed the microphone and explained that we were passing the place where St. Boniface had brought Christianity to Germany and had founded an abbey, where he was eventually buried. Laurel had asked me to prepare some commentary on the Leimbach locations we would be visiting that day, so this was a way to get used to the speaker system. I got a little addicted to it as the days went by, I guess, but people were polite and expressed appreciation for the stuff I said.

Now, speaking of countryside I've been longing to see for years -- wow. Here we were (after passing Bad Hersfeld and turning off at Friedlos/Reilos to follow the little Rohrbach, along the Tannerstraße) in territory that I've lived in and thoroughly explored in my mind. Here's where Henrich's father Abraham sired and raised 9 children, and where he died and was buried.

The tiny villages strung along the valley all have their own stories: Rohrbach, Tann, Gerterode, Nieder- and Oberthalhausen, Beenhausen, and finally Ludwigseck Castle itself.

It had been my impression, from maps and a few photos, that Gerterode is not much of a place. Well, while it probably has no more than about 200 or 300 inhabitants, it is definitely a real place. The village bakeoven, our destination, is beside a delightful brook, the Lingelbach, which is not even the principal stream of the village. One of our number, Gail Lineback, decided to replicate the Bachtanz we were told about in Langenselbold, and she plashed about in a refreshing way. I took some wonderful pictures!

Our timing was not quite right to see the actual insertion and removal of the loaves, but the kind baker repeated the actions for our cameras, and the loaves posed quite competently.

Now the rest of this day gets complicated in my mind. We were in Gerterode several times (joined by Alfred and Rosemarie Deiss, who travelled with us and gave us a lot of local color), and I'm not sure at which time I saw and did what. But I do know now that this is the second of the churches in which I got to play the organ. This time Don Lineback found a Pachelbel version of "Ein Feste Burg" which was more satisfying to play than had been the unfamiliar couple of hymns I played in Hochstadt. I only wished I had more time to experiment with the stops, but it still felt good to have played in a church where my ancestors worshipped (and at least one of them became an organist himself).

Further, I was impressed by the fact that this tiny village had access to public transportation, and that two bus shelters were available in its very center. It was also fun to talk to the neighbors of the bakers, who spoke of their friend who lives near Pittsburgh! I felt very much at home in Gerterode, and wish I could go back and follow some of the trails that are marked on a hikers' map that is displayed right next to the bus shelters. Especially since one of them goes to an abandoned village of Leimbach (about which I had previously known), on a brook called the Lehmbach (about which I had *not* previously known). This adds all kinds of fuel to the ongoing conjecture about the origin of the family name.

Events that happened this day included our visit to Ludwigseck Castle and our exuberant lunch in Tann with a passel of local Leimbachs. But I don't remember what sequence they happened in, so let me just tell you first about the Riedesels. Our Henrich's marriage record, from Langenselbold, states that he came from "Gerthen-Roth im RiedEselischen," which was finally resolved as Gerterode in Ludwigsau -- since the territory that is now Ludwigsau had once been subject to the Riedesels, the noble family who occupied Ludwigseck Castle.

Some things I've learned: the name Riedesel, which means literally "marsh donkey," supposedly originated thus. An emperor was out hunting when, for some unexplained reason, he suddenly fell into great danger of his life -- at any rate he was seriously lost. A knight saw him and was able to direct him back to safety. In gratitude, the emperor promised him all the land he could ride around in three days on a donkey. The knight set out at once, and managed to ride around a very large amount of land indeed. The emperor then gave him the name "Rittesel," for the "Ritt" or "ride" on the donkey, which eventually got transformed into "Riedesel." He was also given the image of a head of a donkey to serve as his family crest -- and to this day the Riedesel "Wappen" or coat of arms features at least one donkey's head.
Now that's only one piece of Riedesel background you'll need for the rest of this day. Another is that during the Thirty Years' War (about 1637) the castle at Ludwigseck was sacked and burned by the Croatian troops who were fighting for the Hapsburg emperor, and was not occupied by the family until it was rebuilt in 1680. Now bear in mind that Henrich was born in 1648, so that the Riedesels he claimed to be subject to were not living in the castle at the time. The Deisses pointed to a "Hof" -- a farm -- called Trunsbach, between Gerterode and the next village to the northwest, Niederthalhausen, which they said had been used by the Riedesels as a residence while the castle was in disrepair. That is an interesting fact in light of the next story.

In the year 1654 (our Henrich would have been about six years old), three men from Gerterode, the brothers Hans and Adam Paul and Georg Krode, had gone to the mother church of the district, at Beenhausen, where they performed their annual obligation of doing some work on the church or its grounds. In the course of the day they got a bit tipsy, and returned toward Gerterode. At Niederthalhausen they encountered the young Wilhelm Georg, heir to Ludwigseck, who was out hunting with a guide, Hans Walter -- and they too had enjoyed a sufficiency of liquid refreshment during the day.

Hans Paul had recently returned from the wars in Spain, and he wished to question Wilhelm Georg Riedesel about a property of his father's that had been seized in lieu of taxes by Riedesel's late mother. Wilhelm Georg was quite willing to consider returning the property and made an appointment to see Hans the next day to work it out. Paul's companions had hung back, as had Riedesel's hunter companion, and it appeared to Adam Paul that an argument was in progress. Things got complicated, and tempers ran high, and it ended with Hans Paul having been struck by the flat of Hans Walter's sword and rendered unconscious on the ground.

Riedesel, in a panic, fled toward Ludwigseck (or so says the historian who tells the story; I'm wondering whether this might have been a mistake -- the whole incident would have happened practically on the grounds of the Trunsbach Hof that may have been where he was really living at the time), and didn't stop until he was in France where he joined the French Foreign Legion.

In the meantime Adam Paul and Georg Krode went into the village to fetch a ladder which they could use to transport Hans to safety and treatment. It took them half an hour, and by the time they returned Hans Paul was dead. As the case developed over the next days and weeks, it was the opinion of the villagers who witnessed the event that Wilhelm Georg must have been guilty of murder, as demonstrated by his flight. But eventually it was decided that he was at fault for the scuffle and for his flight from the scene, but was cleared of murder. It took four years to get that settled; by 1658 he was finally allowed to return home.

Two things happened that I find interesting. One is that in 1656, perhaps in part related to this incident (called the Unglück, or the accident, in Riedesel lore), householders in villages all over the territory surrounding Rothenburg shifted their allegiance from the Riedesels to two sons of the Landgrave of Thuringia. The record of these new alliances -- the "Huldigungslist" -- constitutes an invaluable record of who lived where at the time -- and it is from this record that I first learned of the existence of Abraham Leimbach as the only Leimbach head of household living in Gerterode.

A second is that when Henrich was confirmed, in 1661, the other two Gerterode boys confirmed at the same time were the sons of Adam Paul and Georg Krode! That brings this old piece of distant history very close to home. It also makes me ask the question of why Henrich, at the time of his marriage some years later, apparently made such a point of his connection to the Riedesels, even though he was now some distance from their territory.

All of this story I was telling to my long-suffering captive audience on the bus while we were passing through the very place where it happened. We stopped in Niederthalhausen and drove on up to Oberthalhausen, where the Huldigungslist showed two more Leimbach heads of household, a Johannes Sr. and Johannes Jr. -- fascinating to our family, where Henrich's son Johannes Sr. also had a son Johannes Jr., who happens to be my 4xgreat-grandfather.

We drove through Beenhausen, where our plan was to attend church the next day, and made a brief detour to Ersrode, where another Leimbach lived during Henrich's time, and finally arrived at Ludwigseck Castle. Ludwigseck is now a private residence, but its owners graciously allowed us to traipse through important parts of the building. The owner's mother, in fact, had been "born a Riedesel," so although the male line of this particular branch of the Riedesel nobility has died out (as of about 1995), the family connection is still present. Several people in the group, proving that they had been paying attention to my stories, pointed out to me that above the gateway to the castle were several sculpted heads of donkeys!

I was surprised -- Ludwigseck is a far more impressive structure than I had supposed it would be. The family is resigned to the probability that, in order to maintain it, they will soon be required to open it to paying tourists.

As the owner of the castle was taking us around, I suppose most of us had our attention most effectively caught by the privy, which is an oriel structure sort of pasted on to one outer wall. He told us of the groundskeeper who used to watch the output of this device, which was captured for agricultural purposes in a container below, and who would sometimes say, "Ah, yes; that is the countess."

At this point I must skip -- maybe if some of you are *really* interested I can someday be persuaded to talk about Sterkelshausen and Braach. I have transliterated and intensively studied the Kirchenbuch of the latter place, which had a number of Leimbachs present from 1656 well into the 1700s, and whose mayor in 1967 was himself one Wilhelm Leimbach -- and the organist who was practicing in the church when we stopped said a Leimbach family still lives just around the corner from the church.

But I can't leave this installment without talking about "lunch" in Tann. To our astonished delight, it turned out that we were to be joined for this meal by about a dozen local Leimbachs, from the place called Reilos! (They told us that about half the village of Reilos was thereby present with us!) Now not all the folks were still named Leimbach; some of them were born Leimbach and had married, especially a wonderful family called Gossman.

We were industriously stuffed with *huge* plates of food. Each of us was served, it seemed, a good half of a good-sized pig in the form of ham which melted off the bone (I surrendered my vegetarianism for the occasion -- although a massive pile of mashed potatoes made it apparent I would not starve in any case). I found myself in the uncomfortable position of, as supposedly one of the "bilingual" members of the group, serving as interpreter at one table where one couple -- in fact it was the bakeoven couple from Gerterode -- spoke no English, and the rest spoke no German. Somehow no one was irreparably insulted as a result, it seems. Whew.

After we had been sated, it was time for Gerhard Gossman to bring out his own genealogical charts so we could try to make a connection between our respective families. The dates were just that far apart so a connection could not yet be established, but it will be a good project to keep working on. And then it was time, as the vibrant young Torsten (“Toss”) Gossman put it, to "raus gehen! Bild machen!" And cameras got very busy for a while.

What a fantastic day it had been. We drove on to Ronshausen, east of Bebra, where we checked into the Waldhotel Marbach and somehow found room for the dinner that was included in the tour arrangements.

I hope I have not gotten the day's events *too* badly mixed up. The next day we would go to church at Beenhausen, and then become immersed in the von Leimbach hearth. If the Rohrbachtal is the homeland of our direct ancestors, the presence of the name Leimbach dating at least back to 1220 is pervasive throughout the area, and especially at a place called Haydau, on the Fulda near Altmorschen. But that's tomorrow's story.

[composed on Thu, 21 Aug 2003 00:06:41 -0400]