To the best of my knowledge, Margaret James Squire was the first to find who “ the mother of my wife ” was. The reference, of course, is to Mrs. George ( Anna Barbara Majer [Volck/Folg] ) Utz. This was a surprise to many people.
How did she find this information? She was looking through the German Church records when she came across the information. It was not her family, but she recognized the name, and knew how it fit into the Germanna picture. Did she have any special talent for reading these German records? Not that I know of. I believe she was self-taught, and developed her skills through practice. She also found the people who came from Neuenbuerg (the Fleshmans, Scheibles, Thomases, Schlucters, and the Blankenbakers). And she worked on the Zimmermans (not the Carpenters) from Sulzfeld. Sponsors for one of the Zimmerman kids included a Ludwig Fisher, and an Anna Barbara Fisher. This certainly set my imagination running in high gear.
The records in Hüffenhardt, for the Volcks and Utzes, say that Hans Georg Utz came from Haundorf. I don’t believe that Mrs. Squires followed through on this, but Gary Zimmerman and Johni Cerny, of Lineages, Inc., did. They found the Utz family in Haundorf and the adjacent villages of Seiderzell, Kühnhardt, Mosbach, and Bergnerzell. They added to the history of the Utz family from there. These latter five villages are in Bavaria, though not by much.
I had the good fortune to visit these villages last May. In Bergnerzell, I asked if there were any Utzes living there. A man, of whom I asked this, sort of laughed, and went into the inn to get a telephone book. Then he showed me about a page and a half with the name Utz.
I spent a few hours recently trying to read some of the old German Church microfilm. In the baptismal records, the name of the child was easy. Some of the names were written rather strangely, such as Hanss, with the "double s", e.g., Hanß. The given names of the parents were not really bad. The surnames, which varied a lot, and many of them I had never seen before, were harder. I was looking for a particular surname, Maier, as they spelled it. That was not too hard, and I was able to find four children and the marriage of the parents. I found one child, which was interesting to me, especially, but then he had died at the age of two. The hard part of the record was reading the names of the sponsors. The pastor started getting sloppy in his writing, and it was almost impossible to read these. The same was true of the marriage records, after the names of the bride and groom. But, perhaps, the most important thing is to practice, practice, and practice more. Now just to find the time to do this.
(30 Nov 02)
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.