Our Close Call with History

Finding your family history in a small, now unknown town in Romania

Today I write for the Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: RABBIT-HOLE RESEARCH, a small tale of how my Dad and I discovered the history of our family and the tragedy we avoided. I will return to the fiction short stories in the near future as farm work subsides! If you enjoy my writing please

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Back in the early days of the primitive internet, 32 years ago, you had to pay a service in order to ‘plugin’ to all the new great things out there on the Web, whatever there was, or is. Remember AOL? I still see the odd email address (@AOL.COM). There was another similar service called Prodigy. One Sunday, in the two inch thick morning paper, they advertised the craziest thing ever - you could get a new computer simply by hustling down to a store called BestBuy and signing up for a two year subscription to Prodigy. I thought why not. I paid for six months up front and gave my Dad a new computer with Prodigy installed.

And it sat there in the remodeled basement and looked like a computer, but actually did little if any computing. When I visited, which was quite often, Dad and I would sit at the computer and look around at stock prices, stuff like that. One day trying to come up with something more interesting we tried to find immigration records, and voila! Ellis Island had a site and information. It was an amazing thing. We found both his Mother and Father on the site and the days of their entry, the ship’s name, all of it, written out long hand. And then there were others, too. Cousins, Aunts and Uncles, in-laws. This occupied us for several months. But soon we were looking for something new, because that’s what the internet does: It prods you to keep looking for something new.

There were primitive sites out there on the 90’s Web, about all manner of topics, and since we were on the trail of our origins we looked for any information about the Donauschwaben. My paternal grandparents were German, but they came from eastern Europe, what is now Hungary and Romania. Donau is German for the river Danube, and ‘Schwaben’ refers to a region in Southwest Germany, Schwabia, the natives of which are known as the Schwaben. The Donnauschwaben may not have all been Schwaben, but they left Germany from a Danube port in Schwabia called Ulm, and were from that moment known as the Donauschwaben. From Ulm they floated to the Banat, a region between the Danube and the Tisza (Donau and Theiss) rivers. My Grandmother, born Susan Kartje, and Grandfather, Johann Foydl, emigrated from villages in the Banat, Timisoara and Pardan respectively.

Why Germans found themselves in eastern Europe far from their homes in, my family’s case, Alsace, is a whole other history concerning the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at Vienna in 1683, and the later Treaty of Passarowitz in the early 18th century that opened the Banat to immigrants. The idea, especially encouraged by Queen Maria Therese who took the thrones of Hungary, Austria and Bavaria in 1740, was to repopulate the area with farmers after the long and devastating war. I also suspect it was a way to move stubborn Roman Catholics out of southern Germany, a nation quickly reforming as Protestant, although towards the end of the emigration in the late 18th century there were some Lutheran emigrants, too. My Grandfather traced his family’s emigration to the time of Maria Therese.

The Donauschwaben were a hardworking people. They drained the swamps near the river, establishing canals and roads, building a society in a wilderness. For all their trouble and suffering, they were coerced in the late 19th Century, after the creation of the Austro/Hungarian Empire, to adopt the Hungarian language, Magyar, and its culture. This led to a fair amount of ethnic trouble as you can imagine, and in the early 20th Century both of my grandparents, just teenagers, emigrated to the US with their parents and siblings, ending their journey in Southeast Michigan.

One of the sites we found in our Donauschwaben search had a contact page and I posed a question about emigrants from Pardan, a village in the Banat, with the name Foydl. A friendly man name Nikolas Bruck responded and sent us the following book. It is a short history of the Pardan village and its German settlers, and their tragic end. It is only by the grace of God that our family found itself in the United States before the two World Wars, both of which were devastating to the Donauschwabens, especially WWII. Several people with the name Foydl are listed, a few fled to Germany ahead of the Russian army, but several died in the year after the war in camps run by the local governments, a minor holocaust. Among those who died were two Foydls listed as musicians. This doesn’t surprise me as both my father and grandfather were great lovers of popular music, and Dad could carry a tune.

Pardan My Home, published in Vienna, 1959, by Nikolas’s father

Nikolas also sent us the names of several Foydls who fled to Germany, mainly Stuttgart, ahead of the Russians. We were able to contact some of them by email, but the well eventually ran dry. And after all the maps were rewritten again after WWII, the town, whatever is left of it, is now in Romania!

Going down the rabbit hole is normally a lost cause, but in this case, searching in the darkness of the primitive Web, we found out that our grandparents had, through the hardship of their emigration to the United States, done us a great favor, for we are here, and alive! Thank You always, Johann and Susan, and on my mother’s side, Leandre and Clementine.