Urban TANNER, Part 8:
Julius Gruenwald pointed out that I had missed four important words in the Baptismal Record (I had sent him a copy). Two of them were in Latin but I can’t blame the Latin for missing them as I do have Ernest Thode’s dictionary. Still the exact words escape me except that I can see they mean married couple, I think. Possibly, they refer to only one of the partners but in either case the really important words are “ab Argersheim”. The net result is that one or both of the parents were from Argersheim.
Mr. Gruenwald made a search for Argersheim in atlases old and new with negative results. He did find a place called Ergersheim. I was able to locate that place in my map book. The place is very small (perhaps it is nothing more than an estate farm) but the more interesting point is the location. It is about thirteen miles from the town (Neustadt), which has the most Blankenbuehlers of any town in Germany. It is eight miles from Dottenheim, where some of the early Blankenbuehlers who emigrated from Austria lived. It is about twenty-five miles from Dietenhofen, where it is said that eight hundred people emigrated from Gresten in Austria (the home village of the Plankenbuehlers in Austria). In other words, this region in Germany was a hotbed of emigrants from Austria, especially in the middle of the Seventeenth Century.
My second resource person, Elke Hall, sent me some information that suggests that the Tanners may have been emigrants from Austria. She noted that the name Urban is unusual in Germany but occurs several times in Austria. In the group of “exiles” from Austria, there was a Christian Thanner, who left in 1688, and Hans Thanner, who left in 1691. She found a mention of Thomas Tanners in Austria from Robans who was listed as “newly converted”, i.e., he said they had converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism, but many did this as a way of stalling for time. (Lutherans were not welcome in Austria and were forced to leave.)
One of the pastors who had to leave Austria was Daniel Danner/Tanner who came to Regensburg in Bavaria in 1624. David Tanner held the last church service with communion on 13 October 1624. Elke named several other Tanners.
This certainly opens up some new areas for research, not all of which are easy to pursue. Many church records in Bavaria are to be found only in the archives. Protestant records in Austria are hard to come by and reliance must be made on civil records, some of which are privately held.
A word of warning. There is an Ergersheim in Elsass-Lothringen which has both French and German records in the church and in civil offices. Some people who lived for a while in Germany (before emigrating to America) came from Switzerland by way of Alsace-Lorain, especially Anabaptists.
(05 Jun 2007)
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.