Who We Come From

Who We Came From                                                                      5/8/2019

              When my mother, Eleanor Burns, was in Germany, 1978 – 1983, she went to the Obermeister’s office (like the mayor’s office) at Oberndorf am Neckar, the town my grandmother said her mother came from.  Rosa Haaga was actually from Beffendorf, a suburb of Oberndorf.  The obermeister gave her the names of the family for two generations back, including a list of her brothers and sisters, and which ones stayed in Germany and who went to the US.

              When the Burns family tree I am developing on Ancestry.com is on its side, Rosa Haaga is at the bottom, which seems appropriate because she is the root of our family.  She was the mother of Bert, Ann, Gussie, Carrie, Marie, Lily, Minnie and John Kintz, who are our grandparents, for all of you who are my second cousins.  Of my own 8 great-grandparents, 6 are from Ireland, yet it is my grandmother and her French and German background that have influenced me the most.

              Thanks to Ancestry.com I have been able to take things back a little further.  The earliest date I have been able to get is for Christian Traugott Hoffler, born 7 Dec 1763, died 28 Nov 1850.  He would be our 4^th great grandfather (great-great-great-great grandfather!).  He was the father of Johanne Luise Hoffler (and at least 7 other children), who was the mother of Karoline Schleehauf, who married Lukas Haaga and became the mother of Rosa Haaga, our great grandmother.  I know on some of the TV shows they take families farther back than this.  I have a friend who has traced his family back to the wrong side of the bed of one of the English kings.  I think that’s possible for those who are related to kings, but for those of us who are German/French peasant stock, the documentation just dwindles out.  Still, 260 years is pretty good.

           I get annoyed by people who say they were born in the wrong time, that they should have been born in the Victorian era or 1700s France or some such.  We have been born in the best of times.  We have come to expect our babies to survive and our children to grow up.  It wasn’t always like that.  Rosa Haaga was one of 12 children.  The eldest, Karoline was born in 1853 followed by Pauline in 1858, Emilie in 1859, and Berthe in 1861.  Those 4 lived to grow up.  The first Rosa was born March 12, 1863 and died July 19, 1863.  Our great-grandmother, also called Rosa, was born June 21, 1864, less than one year later.  One of the frustrations of genealogy for me is getting the facts but not the story.  Why did Karoline name the next baby Rosa after the one who died?  When people lost so many babies, it wasn’t uncommon apparently, but still, I think it would make it hard to grieve for the lost baby, if she didn’t really keep her own name.  Each of the babies back then was baptized before they were a week old.  Did her husband or priest try to talk her out of it?  My grandmother said her mother often said how awful it was to be named after a baby who had just died, and that she would never do that to one of her children.

              After Rosa, Otto was born in 1865 and died at age 4 months.  Maria was born in 1867 and died at 2 months.  Josef was born in 1868 and died at one week.  Anna Maria was born in 1870 and died at 6 months.  Hedwig was born in 1873 and Louisa in 1874.  They both lived to grow up, marry, and have children.  So Lukas and Karoline Haaga gave birth to 12 children, only to have 5 of them die in infancy.  I didn’t get to bear my children.  I cannot imagine the pain of carrying a child for 9 months, only to watch it die, and to do it again and again.  But that is the way it was prior to World War I, with infant mortality.  So when people say they were born in the wrong time, I know I was born in the right time.

              And it was the same for Rosa herself.  Mommom (my grandmother, Minnie Rainey) often expressed her regret that she didn’t talk to her mother more, or listen to her stories.  Since she was the youngest daughter, and the second youngest child, by the time she came along her mother spoke English, so she didn’t learn German.   She did, at the age of 77, step on an airplane for the first time and go to Oberndorf and Beffendorf, and help piece together her mother’s story.  Rosa was sent away from home at the age of 12, to be a servant for a rich Jewish family in Strassbourg.  There was a lot of anti-semitism in France back then, and Jews were actually prohibited from living within the city limits of Strassbourg, so apparently the family lived in Eschau, outside of Strassbourg.  Jewish families liked having some Christian servants, because they could do things on the Sabbath prohibited to the Jewish people, like lighting lanterns and fires and heating food.  In Alsace, Rosa Haaga met Augustin Kintz and fell in love.  The family story is that he was a French soldier.  This was one of those times that Alsace was taken over by Germany.  Our great-grandfather was a baker in the army, so he was told to take off his French uniform, put on the German uniform and return to the kitchen.  Supposedly he punched the Sargeant and fled, ultimate getting his wife and child and coming to the states.  When my mother used a French genealogist to try and find some proof of this, the only thing she came up with was the intake and honorable discharge from the German army.  So much for family stories. 

              Still, I like the stories better than the plain facts, and I wish we had more of them.  For instance, when and where did Rosa and August get married?  Rosa and August arrived in the US October 19, 1887, on the ship “Switzerland” sailing out of Antwerp, Belgium.  Rosa travelled under the name Haaga, not Kintz, but she is listed on the passenger list as “wife”.  August is listed elsewhere, since the list is alphabetical.  There is no documentation of a marriage in France or Germany, but there is at least one census record that lists them as being married in Germany.  As a servant in a private household, an employer would not have tolerated a servant who had a baby out of wedlock in the 1880’s.  She would have been sent away, and she wasn’t.  The only documentation of a marriage was in Camden, New Jersey in 1892, which would be after the births of Rosa, Amelia, Bertha and Augusta.  My grandmother was shocked to think that her sisters might have been born out of wedlock.  I don’t think they were.  I have a friend who married someone with a green card and also got involved in the wedding of two migrant workers.  They were required to be married by a civil ceremony and both couples chose to follow that with a religious ceremony.  I think the Camden wedding must have been for immigration reasons, lack of documentation for the German wedding.

              After leaving home on her 12^th birthday, Rosa never saw her mother again.  She wrote to her regularly, but was never able to afford the trip back.  She always emphasized to her daughters that daughters were supposed to stay with their mothers until they left for their husbands' homes, and she kept her daughters close.  My grandmother preached the same thing to her daughter, that she must stay in her parents home till she was married, which pushed my mother into a somewhat disastrous marriage.  And the same pressure just pushed me to leave home my senior year in college, and leave Philadelphia immediately after.  So Rosa’s influence was felt for 3 generaltions.

              Rosa's sister, Donde, (Emily), and her husband, Wilhelm Knori had already settled in Philadelphia and invited Rosa and August to live with them initially.  Donde was the only relative they had contact with.  Another sister, Pauline, had moved to the US and settle in New York, but they never saw her.  They lived with Donde for a year, during which time August was sick and out of work.  The immigrant community watched out for each other, especially a Mrs. Klinker, who was a good friend of Rosa's.  At some point they settled in Manyunk because Rosa said it looked like Oberndorf.  Like Manyunk, the town of Oberndorf extends straight up from the Neckar river, so steeply that there are steps for pedestrians to go from one street to the next.  

              Rosa’s baby, Rosa, was born in 1887, and is listed on the passenger manifest.  She died after they reached the US, at age 3 months.  Amelia, the second daughter, was born in 1888 and died at the age of 7.  My grandmother said 4 of the siblings were lost due to diphtheria and one died of burns.  That makes 13 children, not 12. Bertha, the first child to survive to adulthood, was born in 1889, Augusta in 1891.  Ernst was born in in 1893 and died in 1899.  Anna Kintz was born in 1895 and Caroline in 1896, then Margarite in 1897, who died in 1899.  Marie was born in 1899, Lilian in 1902, Minnie (my grandmother) in 1904, and John, the last child and the only boy to survive, in 1907.  So Rosa had 12 (or possibly 13) children, only 8 of whom lived to grow up.  

              Augustin KIntz swore he was French not German, and taught his daughters to sing the Marseilles (the French national anthem).  He had bad migraine headaches (or maybe bi-polar disorder); he would leave work in the middle of the day, come home and lay down in a dark room.  Apparently he was a very good bread baker, because an hour or so later, his boss would come by and say “Rosa, when he feels better, send him back to work.”

              When my grandmother was 10 years old, she came down one morning to find her father dead in the kitchen, with the gas on.  The death certificate documented this as a suicide, but Rosa and my grandmother never believed that.  August had severe stomach pains that he called gastritis.  He would heat the metal burner plate on the gas stove, wrap it in a towel and hold it to his stomach to relieve the pain.  Rosa thought  that he had done that as he had many times before, but the burner went out, filling the room with gas.  She said he would never have committed suicide by turning the gas on with his wife and children in the house.  This was in 1914.

              That left Rosa Haaga Kintz with 6 children at home to raise by herself.   Bertha had married John Littel in 1910.  Gussie married Alfred Viet the same year August died, 1914, but I don’t know if that was before or after her father’s death (I suspect before, since August died in October).  Rosa cleaned people’s houses and took in laundry.  Every daughter went to work in the textile mills as soon as they could get working papers, which was age 12, until my grandmother came along and the child labor laws were changed.  My grandmother couldn’t start work until age 14.  She turned 14 on March 6^th of her 8^th grade year and her mother made her quit that day.  She said she cried at school (she went to the John B. Stetson School, which is now a charter school, in the same building), and her teacher walked her home to try to convince her mother to let her finish 8^th grade, but her mother said they needed the money she would make.  So she went to work as a winder in the textile mill.  But she and her sisters and friends were still kids.  They would work 12 hours in the mill on their feet and still go out dancing, and hang with friends, and go camping on weekends. 

              My grandmother said her mother was cheerful and fun-loving, despite everything.  She always set aside some money to have a family picture taken each year.  She kept company with a Mr. Schwartz who lived down the street, and there is a picture of her in his carriage.  She always managed to have a piece of meat for dinner, calling herself a "Fleischvogel" (a meat face).  Since it usually wasn't a very good piece of meat, she served it as sauerbraten with spatzles.  She would mix the egg into the flour, roll it thin and slice it into the boiling water.  When my grandmother moved in with me at the age of 94, she still couldn't look a noodle in the face, having grown up eating them every day.  Since August had been a bread baker, Rosa never did learn to make bread.  She lived with my grandparents at the end of her life, and died in 1929 when my mother was 4 years old.  Rosa was 65.

              Rosa and her daughters were tough.  They lived in times much harder than we do and they were survivors.  And we are the product of many generations of strong women survivors.  I’m still glad I didn’t have to live through some of the things they did.