Travels with my Ancestors #23: ‘Dear Christian’

After several years of Travels with my Ancestors posts and a book, all about my father’s side of the family tree, at last I come to my mother’s side. Mum was, if anything, even keener than Dad about all things family history, so if she were still with us she might very well be saying About time, too!

My sister and I are looking forward to a trip later this year to explore the place where our mother’s great-great grandfather originated. He’s the outlier in the family tree: the only person I know of whose roots did not lie in England or Ireland (with the exception of one other as yet unconfirmed possibility who may have been born in France.)

Our 3 x great-grandfather arrived in Australia in the mid-19th century but I know so little about his life before then. When I sat down to write about him, I felt a bit stumped. How do you tell a story when you don’t know its beginning?

Rather than make things up, I decided to write a letter, of sorts, expressing my dilemma. Here it is.

Dear Christian,
(or perhaps I should call you great-great-great-Grandfather,
but that’s a little wordy)

There is so much about you that I don’t know. I’m doing my best now to rectify that, but it is difficult to dig about in records from another country when I am so far away, here in Australia. I know plenty about you since you arrived in Sydney in 1861 – where you lived, what you did for a living, who you married, your children, when you died and where you were buried. But before that? Not so much.

For example, there is the business of you being Prussian­—or not. On your New South Wales Naturalisation document of 1880 your original citizenship was described as Prussian. When I found Kirn, the town where you were born, on Google maps and saw that it’s located in the Rhineland-Palatinate region (on the other side of the country from Prussia)—well, that was confusing.

I revisited my history books and learned that several of the many little states and kingdoms that later became Germany were controlled by Prussia at various periods, including the Rhineland at the time you lived there.  One mystery solved.

Other questions have not been so easily answered.

Such as, why did you leave your homeland?

Your father had been born and lived near Kirn, and was a skilled tradesman: a tuchmacher or clothmaker. You likely grew up within a comfortable home, along with your six siblings. Your family was of the Protestant faith and you were baptised at the Kirn Evangelisch church in September 1838.

You did not take up your father’s trade in the cloth industry. Instead, you became a baker. Another skilled trade, but one involving flour, yeast, salt and sugar rather than wool or linen.

Your working day would begin early, well before dawn, as you loaded the ovens with wood and filled the heavy mixing bowls with flour. There must have been satisfaction as you brought out the dark rye loaves or sweet apfelkuchen, arranging them on the wooden shelves each morning, ready for customers. Your bakery would be redolent with the savoury scent of caraway seeds and the warming aromas of nutmeg and cinnamon.  As you wiped your floury hands on your apron, did you give a nod of approval at another day’s good baking?

Or were you wanting something different? Was Kirn, its small-town sights and familiar faces, too confining or commonplace? Did you dream of bigger horizons, new people and customs, adventures across the seas?

Or—and here historical events may have played a part—there were very different motivations for you to leave. Your homeland was experiencing seemingly never-ending turmoil, political and economic. In your father’s time it was the devastation of the wars wreaked by Napoleon Bonaparte. Then confusion as the Rhineland came under French control for a time.

You were just ten when the first of several uprisings began across Europe, led by people demanding more freedoms in how they were governed, and—amongst the German-speaking states—national unity. This was long before a German nation was planned and at a time when most Europeans were governed by autocratic, conservative rulers and officials.

I wonder how your parents felt about this push for more freedoms for ordinary people, or if they even knew about the demonstrators and the movements’ leaders and their demands? Did they agree or did they just want to get on with their lives and be left in peace?

The revolutions largely failed but the effects lingered as new political ideas took root and grew. Economically, life was difficult for many. The spectre of famine hung over villages and towns with crop failures in the countryside.

Was Kirn affected? Perhaps you struggled to get flour for your bakery. Customers may have fallen away as money for a daily loaf of bread became harder to find. You could no longer see a prosperous future there.

Even worse, you may have dreaded the call of conscription into the Prussian military—then a requirement for all able-bodied young men. Given the number and ferocity of wars and internal conflicts in your lifetime, it would be understandable if you’d longed to be somewhere where these were not constant threats.

Maybe your family were among those who harboured a dislike of the militaristic nature of Prussian rule. If you had inherited such feelings, you may have decided that leaving was preferable to submitting to such authoritarianism.

---

Whatever your reasons, you embarked on a ship to New South Wales. As far as I know, you had no contacts or family already in the colony. You might have come as part of a government-sponsored immigration scheme, though so far, I have found no record of that. I don’t even know the ship you arrived on!

Recently, at lunch with a Uebel cousin, another of your descendants, my sister and I were stunned when our cousin mentioned a version of your arrival story which had you jumping ship here during the gold rush days. We looked at each other, amazed. How had we never heard this family legend? And my mind immediately went to the question: how can I find out whether that story is true? If so, you would have been amongst many hundreds of others, literally gambling on finding a fortune on the messy chaos of the goldfields.

I still hope to find those details, and to learn more about your travels here. However you came, what must you, born and raised near the river Rhine but otherwise nowhere near a body of water like the vast oceans you voyaged across, have made of that long journey to this southern continent?

I think you came alone—a young man of twenty-three. Within five years, you’d married an English girl from Plymouth, and with Sarah you had eleven children. You continued your trade, opening a bakery and shop in Sydney’s St Peters.

You had some tragedies in your life here—losing two children before they’d had a chance to fully grow—and you never saw your native Kirn again.

But I am grateful that you took that ship from Germany and gambled on a better life here, because otherwise I would not have existed. I hope you did not regret your decision to come.

I will continue my search about your life before you left Germany.  I want you to be more than just a name on my family tree. Yours is a good name—Christian Uebel—and both names have been handed down through subsequent generations. Still, I want to be able to see your name and feel a connection, to feel that I know something of you, not simply your name.

With thanks, from your great-great-great-granddaughter,

Denise

Sources:

NSW Certificate of Naturalization No 866 1880 for Christian Uebel
Death Registration 10554/1906 for Christian Uebel
Einwohnerbuch Stadt Kirn 1544-1900 Teil 4 Familiennamen Schr – Z