Part 5: the von Leimbach hearth

Before I start the story of this incredible day, let me share my discovery of the Gerterode home page. If you go to the menu on the left and click on "Bilder," you will find some wonderful pictures. The one at the top invites you to click on "Vergrösserung" -- do so, and you will be able to scroll/stroll almost on the very streets of the village. The second image, just under that, is the one that sticks in my mind as especially showing the "placeness" of Gerterode.

If I am reading the European date correctly, this page was just put up, or at least most recently changed, on 2 August, 2003 -- the very day after our group visited the village and had bread baked for us! I must write to the webmaster Helmut Hildebrand and find out what he was doing that day. The wedding couple are probably related to the neighbors of the bakeoven people; something else I must find out for sure. I note also the Gerterode song that was adapted by our friend and guide Alfred Deiss, whose fourth stanza is especially appropriate for our group (if you can't read German, this may give you an incentive to learn!).

Well, it is now Sunday morning, and we're off to church. The tiny church in the tiny village of Beenhausen, at the head of the Rohrbachtal, holds the exalted title of Mother Church for the entire valley -- and as such it served as the "Taufkirche" for the entire parish -- the one where babies were brought to be baptized, and where our ancestor Henrich must have been brought, all the way from Gerterode. Back in those days the Tanner Strasse, the highway that runs the length of the valley, did not exist; there were only tracks that occasionally transversed the valley, crossing the brook. So the journey could not have been an easy one.

The baptismal font that was in use at the time is now placed outside the church and is full of planted flowers. For all the scary dryness of this hot summer in Germany, the Germans will never allow their flowers to fade, so everywhere you look there are flowers, in window boxes or anything else that will serve as a planter -- even a medieval baptismal font!

After the morning service the pastor apologized because she had to leave to go to her next church. But all the villagers of Beenhausen brought their American visitors -- sunflowers! And a young man in the village, maybe about 15, excitedly came to meet us and practice his English, because he plans to come to America in a year or two. He also brought a copy of the local Sunday paper to share with us. Don Lineback was lost to us for about an hour when someone else in the village told him they knew of Leimbachs from Beenhausen who had emigrated to Chile, of all places -- he ran along to their house to be shown all the documents.

We felt warmly welcomed by the inhabitants of this place of such significance to the spirit of our family -- even though back in Henrich's day relationships may not always have been of the smoothest. The history on Herr Hildebrand's web page speaks of the constantly shifting jurisdictions under which Gerterode was placed, willy nilly, and of the complex schedule of obligations and rents and taxes the inhabitants had to remember. Beenhausen was also the local church of the Riedesel family, right there in Ludwigseck.

After an exhilarating morning, we were hungry, and we drove off to Licherode where we were served "lunch" -- these German midday meals would feed me for three days -- at the Alte Mühle. There the proprietor gave me the name of the local official who might be able to tell me whether any Leimbachs still live there, as descendants of the three who were shown on the 1656 Huldgigungslist.

And now we get into the somewhat fraught issue of -- the nobility. Some American Leinbachs got quite excited, some years back, at the discovery that there existed at least one knightly family in the Middle Ages called von Leimbach, and a standard reference work on such families even shows two different coats of arms supposedly belonging to them.

What has become evident, over the years that I for one have been investigating the matter, is that (1) there was indeed such a family, and (2) its documented holdings are thickly distributed right here in the very heartland of our ancestors. However, all references to the von Leimbachs refer to them as an "Abgestorbene," or extinct, family. On the other hand, the frequency with which the Leimbach surname appears, especially in the Kreis, or county, of Hersfeld-Rotenburg, both in church records from the 16th and 17th centuries and later, and to this very day in phone books throughout the area, invite inquiry as to where these folks got their name.

Were they perhaps serfs who, like so many American slaves, took their masters' name? Or, as surnames came into increasingly common use in the 16th century, did they merely call themselves by the village where they lived? (There are nearly a dozen Leimbach place names applied to villages that still exist, spread from near the Dutch border all the way across the central uplands of Germany to the Harz Mountains and beyond, and still more applied to abandoned villages.) Note that the more usual practice would be either to adopt an occupational name, such as Miller or Schneider (tailor) or Zimmerman (Carpenter), or else to add "-er" to the name of the place, such as Hamburger or Frankfurter or Wiener (Leimbacher, then, would be expected, and indeed that name does occasionally appear in phone books).

These always seemed to me to be the likeliest explanations -- yet once again on this very trip I was told by a local bearer of the name (one who married into it) that her in-laws insist that they are in fact blood descendants of the von Leimbachs. I'm not quite sure how that works out when a family name dies out in the male line. One can imagine younger sons who might have carried on the name, even though they had no right to the rank of their elder brothers (one reads of the "cadet branches" of a royal or noble family) -- but a peculiarity I've noticed in documents that refer to the von Leimbachs (who sometimes appear, e.g., as witnesses to transfers of rights and property) is that they often appear as *brothers*. So the earliest such document I know of (from 1220) is witnessed by "Hartradus Bertoldus et Ludewicus fratres de Leinbach," and other references in other sources often name two brothers.

This is not the place to get all bogged down in speculations like this. What this *is* the place for is to mention an important Wüstung, or abandoned place, named Leimbach, right on the Fulda opposite the village of Konnefeld and just upstream from Altmorschen. This is often cited as the seat of the minor knightly family known as von Leimbach, and one of the places where it is so cited is in the story of Gertrud von Leimbach, a "noble lady" who appeared to be a friend of Elisabeth, the princess of Hungary who became Countess of Thuringia, who lived at the Wartburg Castle, and who, after her husband's death, became revered for her kindness to the poor and was eventually canonized as St. Elisabeth of Hungary.

Gertrud is said to have visited her friend Elisabeth at a convent near Marburg, accompanied by her young servant Berthold. Berthold was quite a dandy, it appears, and Elisabeth commented unfavorably on the wordliness of his dress. He was contrite and eagerly accepted her offer to pray for him. She did so, and he seems to have fallen into a kind of feverish fit from which her prayers revived him -- and this is recounted as one of the 99 miracles which qualified her to be named a saint. She died of disease contracted from the poor people among whom she lived, outside the gates of Marburg.

Gertrud went on to be named the first abbess of a convent called Haydau (sometimes Heydau and other variants), just outside the gates of Altmorschen. Apparently this seemed a suitable post for her to the founders of the convent, named Spangenberg (more complicated than that, but if I don't move on I'll never finish) -- in part because of its proximity to her own family's seat at Leimbach.

Okay, with that background, let's get back to our travels. After we left the restaurant we drove first to Konnefeld, where we got out at a bridge across the Fulda (not strong enough to carry a tank, according to the sign, which Heiko promptly declared also included our bus) that leads to -- what looked like an empty field, there on the floodplain of the Fulda.

Soon we discerned, however, that there were a number of shallow depressions in the field, and one quite sizeable one. This was the site of the abandoned seat of the minor family of knights of the Teutonic Order named von Leimbach.

We felt strange. The vicinity was beautiful, and in spite of the heat there was something invigorating about it all -- even to the beautiful palomino horses in the neighboring field. We then drove on to Altmorschen, and back eastward along the opposite bank of the Fulda, and into the courtyard of the Kloster Heydau. This complex, founded in 1235 for Gertrud von Leimbach, has recently been beautifully adapted into a learning, conference, and cultural center, as well as a location for weddings and the like.

No prior arrangements had been made for our visit here, so we just got off the bus and wandered about, with someone wondering whether we could get into the church somehow. The door was locked and we wandered elsewhere, when someone appeared with keys and unlocked the door and welcomed us to see the church. The nave retains much original fabric and graphically shows the transition from Romanesque to Gothic that was happening in the early 13th century -- there are two adjacent arches, one round-headed and one pointed, that appear to have been built at the very same time.
Then we spoke to the kind man who had opened the church and asked him who owned the place -- and he answered: well, I do. It turns out he is the administrator of the property for the trust that owns it, and he was a most gracious and welcoming host to this unexpected throng of curious Americans. He confirmed the story of Gertrud von Leimbach and even distributed copies of an English-language history of the place that tells of her role.

Before the trip I had seen a web site which actually listed the performance, here at Haydau in 1998 by a local theater company, of a play called -- "Gertrud von Leimbach"! I asked him about the possibility of getting the script for this work, and he gave me a possible contact.

Then he showed us, through the cloistered walks and hallways, to a most welcome destination on this hot day: a cafeteria which offered cool drinks (not cold or actually iced, mind you -- this *was* after all Germany). And then the big surprise: he introduced us to a woman who was herself a Leimbach! Well, that wasn't quite the case -- turned out she had an aunt who had been born a Leimbach -- but because she was our host's wife, we delightedly applauded her anyway. And I noticed that her nose, in profile, exactly matched that of Don Lineback's sister Gail, so I insisted on photographing the resemblance (in addition that nose exactly matches the one that my mother bore in her lifetime -- so relative by marriage or not, I'm convinced that there was *some* connection there in the past -- everyone in this valley, according to the church records I've studied so intensively, turns out to be related to everyone else anyway).

The Kloster Haydau is definitely worth a visit, even if you're not descended from the brothers of its first abbess. And since we still don't know whether we are so descended or not, it was great to have a worthy destination and to imagine all kinds of things...

But the day was not over! We continued a short distance up the Fulda Valley and entered the Leimbach Hof. This is a farm that is now occupied by a family named Müller who have lived here since 1938. The old man is dejected at the impending loss of the farm: his son is not well and his daughters are not interested, and in any case it's almost impossible to make a living by farming any more (a depressingly familiar story all around the world these days). But from the Hof there is a view of the abandoned village of Leimbach, and I would like to learn more about what connection it might have had to the knightly family. I know that often in England one sees a "Manor Farm" in connection with a manor house; I suppose this might have been a similar arrangement.

Just to intensify the almost mystical Leimbach vibes that emanate from this location, across the road from the Hof is a truly mystical phenomenon: the Leimbach Born, or spring. We all drank, gratefully, from the cool stream that gushes out unceasingly from the side of the mountain here, now funneled through a pipe.

As I told people in the group early on, if you're going to get all excited over finding "nobility" in your ancestry, you must also be prepared for all the thieves and murderers and other scoundrels you will find -- and sometimes they are the same people! In fact, there is one von Leimbach story, connected with Sterkelshausen (which I said yesterday I didn't have time to write about), that points up the fact: there was a murder committed by a member of the von Leimbach family. My wonderful source and friend Marjorie Heppe, whom I have not yet introduced to you readers, gave me this information: "Hermann Scherzeling was 'Amtmann' in Rotenburg from 1297 to 1313. He was murdered by a member of the Leimbach family. As a result of this and other acts the brothers [*note again the mention of brothers] Werner and Ludwig von Leimbach were persuaded to give a certain portion of their income from properties in Sterkelshausen to the nunnery in Cornberg near Sontra."

There are so many tantalizing hints of tales about the von Leimbachs that would be available, if one only had the time and resources to collect them all in one place!
We drove back to our hotel at Ronshausen -- through Rotenburg, a place I need to investigate more thoroughly -- and had a nice dinner. Then Jay and I tried to escape the stifling heat of the valley by huffing and puffing our way up to the Panorama Weg -- and what a breathtaking view it was, even though we had no breath left to take! We could see perhaps 30 miles or so, all the way back to the Knüllgebirge on the opposite side of the Rohrbachtal. Even though the sultry air made it hazy, it was memorable indeed.

If you're bored silly by now, just be aware that I can't believe all the stuff I'm leaving out! As always, let me know if you've had enough and want out. Tomorrow, we say goodbye to our group and the bus -- at Bach's father's house in Eisenach. The trip then takes quite a different shape.

[composed on Sat, 23 Aug 2003 19:19:16 -0400]