The village in Germany, from whence the Blankenbühlers came to America, is Neuenbürg. The only problem this poses is that there are two villages with this name, and they are separated by only twenty-three miles, a good day’s walk. I feel that I have located the correct one, but the burden of the proof is on me, since that village has only a Catholic Church. People who have appeared in this village and asked where the Protestant church is are told that they have the wrong village.
To distinguish these two villages, let’s call one North Neuenbürg and the other South Neuenbürg. The northern one, the smallest one, is northeast of Bruchsal, while the larger one is southeast of Pforzheim. Our village is the northern one. When the church records were microfilmed, the data for the north Neuenbürg was combined with Unteröwisheim and with Oberöwisheim, two villages that are only a couple of miles from Neuenbürg. Of course, the person who made the association may have been confused so we should not rely on that.
The church records for three different churches do record the marriage of some Blankenbühlers. Matthias Blankenbühler married in Oberderdingen. This is closer to the northern village than it is to the southern village, but by itself the evidence is not overwhelming. Another Blankenbühler, from Neuenbürg, married a lady from Landhausen, which is a few miles north of the northern Neuenbürg. This is good evidence. Nicholas Blankenbühler married Catharina Barbara Wayland in Unteröwisheim. This is very close to the northern Neuenbürg. Taken together, the three marriages suggest that the northern Neuenbürg is the one where our Blankenbühlers lived.
The compelling piece of evidence is the naturalization of Zacharias Blankenbühler, who said he was a citizen of "Neuenbürg in the lands of the Catholic Church". I have seen two historical maps for this area (one of them is in " The Times Concise Atlas of World History "). This map shows that the northern Neuenbürg is on the church lands, while the southern Neuenbürg appears to be in Württemberg.
This also helps explain how two close villages could have the same name. They were in different political jurisdictions. (Today we have a Kansas City in Missouri and one in Kansas, and the distance between them is the width of a river.) Today, both villages are in Baden-Württemberg. If you do a search for them in the Mormon geographical index, you would look in Baden for one (ours), and in Württemberg for the other. This was their location in 1872, which has become the reference time for locating geographical features.
This discussion has been taken from an article in the last (May) issue of Beyond Germanna and is a continuation of the previous note.
If your map is not detailed, you can point to the location of "our" Neuenbürg which is twenty miles due south of Heidelberg, and twenty-four miles, and almost due west, of Heilbronn.
(01 May 01)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.