ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I spent a column describing my probable itinerary for a trip to Germany a month ago to the “Roots & Branches” readership, there was one stop I left off the list because it was “iffy” at best.

That was the village of Helmershausen in Thuringia, the hometown (in German, Heimat) of the Bardorf family, remnants of which came to America in 1709 with the first mass migration of German-speaking people to North America.

These are also known as the “Hank Jones Germans” since researcher (and former Disney child actor) Henry Z Jones Jr. spent long years along with assistance from many other genealogists on both sides of the Atlantic tracking down the origins of these families, finding success for about three quarters of the 800-something families.

A family that had eluded Jones and his team for decades was known in America as the Batdorfs (and various other D and T spelling variants—those two letters sound much alike in German).

But some years ago German genealogist Klaus Petry redirected the search for this family away from the areas in the southwestern Germany states to the unlikely backwater of Thuringia, from which very few 18^th century emigrants hailed.

And the key to solving the puzzle is that the Batdorfs … were really Bardorfs! Only a slender number of documents in America had used a spelling with an R and therefore they had been (unwisely as it turned out) ignored.

What everyone thought was a “typo” of sorts turned out to be the authentic name!

What I found when I got to Helmershausen was truly a German village from central casting. A medieval looking church? Check. A stream flowing through the center of town? Check! Half-timbered houses by the dozen? Double check!

About the only thing Helmershausen lacked was an outdoor café to enjoy a beer or glass of wine in this village from which my ancestors left more than 300 years ago.

And then when I posted pictures of the day, I found in the most “small world after all” of revelations that my fellow “Genealogy Quick Start” regular Michael John Neill has ancestry in this town, too.

The cherry on the sundae was provided by my American German colleague Nancy Myers who verified that Helmerhausen’s church registers, which stretch back to 1559, are available online on Archion.de and that I should be sure to check the family register, which is a compilation of the baptisms, marriages, burials, etc., from those acts’ individual registers.

When I got a chance to go to Archion and look at those registers, I found the Bardorfs were in the village from the beginning of those records, back to an Enders Bardorf born about 1530 … less than a decade short of half a millennium!

Holy Heimat, Batman!