ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column groused a bit about how information my late mother’s surname line has been mangled in American publications for more than a century.

Which is a shame because the Germans have had the Hiester / Hüster line figured out well back to the 1500s, using a variety of records, some of them obscure, from the village of Elsoff in the former countship of Wittgenstein.

The people of Wittgenstein, indeed, are lucky that a premier historian Jochen Karl Mehldau has digitized the area’s church records as well as finding data such as rudimentary censuses and other house listings to supplement the religious registers.

Among the nuggets he dug up about the family:

• A 1737 tax listing showing that oldest immigrant brother Johannes had already been gone for several years.
• My ancestor, middle immigrant brother Johann Jost, was a Dutch soldier in 1737, perhaps a temporary gig as he was deciding whether to follow his brother to America.
• While the family line has no proven relationship to any famous Hiesters in Europe (as has been picked up time and again in various publications), property records trace the pedigree of the three immigrant brothers this way: They were sons of Johannes Hüster (born about 1663) and Catharina Marburger; their grandfather was a Jost Hüster (born about 1631); great-grandfather a Mannus (or Hermannus, born about 1596); and great-great-grandfather Henrich Hüster (born about 1559), who was the son-in-law of Eberhard Breusing (born about 1534).

 Elsoff’s church records go back to the early 1600s, which is a fairly early date for Germany since in many areas no registers have survived from before the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648.

While the church registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths are the backbone around which German genealogy research is built, the residential and tax records and excellent at filling in both generational gaps as well as interesting details (In the case of the Hiesters, it appears the immigrant generation left Elsoff illegally … so much for the later generations’ prominence as politicians).

In addition to the Hiester side of my lineage, some years ago I was fortunate enough to find documentation showing that my immigrant Johann Jost Hiester’s wife—called Elisabeth Strunk in unsourced printed genealogies—was Anna Elisabetha Strunk, daughter of Weymar Strunk of Sprendlingen in the Rhineland.

A trail of indirect evidence secured her as part of a large family that came to American in 1744 and was generations-deep in Sprendlingen.

One of the documents in America that knitted together that lineage was Johann Jost Hiester’s will, in which he refers to his wife as Annalissa (a good contraction for Anna Elisabetha) and has hints that she was significantly younger than her husband (which she indeed was by more than 20 years).

Documentary evidence indeed!