Travels with my Ancestors #24: The German Connection
This is one of a series of posts in which I explore stories of people from the past: individuals in my family tree. Up until recently I was researching and writing about my father’s side of the tree; now I am digging deep into the heritage of my mother’s ancestors. Mostly, these were people whose family beginnings were from England and Ireland, with one known exception.
You can read the first post about my mother’s German great-grandfather here.
Above: Scenes from Kirn, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, in September 2025.
My sister and I have just returned from a trip to Europe during which we spent a week in the Rhineland region of Germany. We travelled here hoping to learn something of our German ancestor’s homeland, before he emigrated to Australia in 1861. For me this kind of travel is less about family history research (think hours spent poring over old documents in archives) and more about stepping on the land on which my forebears had lived.
What did I know about Christian Übel* before travelling to his place of birth? Very little.
I knew he’d been baptised in 1838 in the Evangelische (Protestant) church in the small town of Kirn, west of Mainz in the Rhineland-Palatinate. Today, the town is medium-sized (about 8,500 residents). It lies in a valley between two rivers: the Nahe and the Hahnenbach, on the edge of the Hunsrück hills.
His father was a clothmaker in the town and the family lived in Haus 139 am Hahnenbach. His paternal grandfather had been a farmer. Christian was number four in a family of nine children; though two older brothers had died within six months of their birth, leaving Christian as the oldest surviving son.
I wondered what effect this loss of children, so common at the time, might have had on parents and siblings? Did Christian grow up in the shadow of his dead brothers? Or were they never discussed – did his parents believe it best to put those losses behind them and move on? There would be few families who had not endured the death of infants or children, in an era where accident or illness could suddenly and indiscriminately strike down a young life.
A Google map search showed that there is a neighbourhood, or municipal area called Hahnenbach, about 10 km to the northwest of Kirn itself. Was this where the family lived?
When he arrived in Sydney by steamer in 1861, Christian was a baker, but I don’t know when and where he obtained that trade and if he worked in a bakery or even had his own business, before leaving Germany.
I didn’t necessarily expect to find answers to these questions during the visit to Kirn, but I did hope to get a feeling for the town and its surroundings. This was certainly achieved during my brief time there.
To begin with, we paid a visit to the municipal History Library, to meet a man with whom I had previously exchanged emails about archival records that might be available. He had very kindly prepared a copy of Christian’s birth certificate and presented it to us. I was thrilled, as I had not seen a copy of this proof of Christian’s birth anywhere in the online databases I’d searched from Australia.
Another helpful person was an employee in the information booth in the main part of town, who provided a map and – crucially – the suggestion that the Übel family home was likely to have been located on one of the two streets that align the Hahnenbach river that runs through the centre of town. There is a ‘right’ and a ‘left’ Hahnenbachstraße, or Hahnenbach street, one of which would probably have been the location of ‘House 139’ where Christian was born, back in the 1830s.
What a gem of information! It provided my sister and I with a starting point, as we wandered up and down the two streets on either side of the narrow river. Nearly two hundred years ago, it was probably a quietly flowing stream; today it has been straightened and its sides built up with concrete, presumably to conrol the flow of water and as protection from flooding.
Above: The Hahnenbach river and its adjacent streets in Kirn.
It’s left and right streets appeared peaceful; a mix of old and newer housing. Not an especially affluent neighbourhood, but close to the old town, the town square, the Catholic and Protestant churches and Jewish synagogue. In the 1800s it may have played host to an array of tradespeople such as Christian’s father, the clothmaker.
From here, we found the Protestant church where Christian had been baptised in 1838. A solid, cream and red brick building with a tower that dates to the eleventh or twelfth century, it was cool and peaceful inside. We photographed the font where Christian’s small head had been wet with baptismal water; the high pulpit where the minister would have delivered his sermons each Sunday, and the decorative arched ceiling.
Above: the historic Protestant church in Kirn, where Christian Übel was baptised in 1838.
I love nothing more than ambling through a street and buildings where, many years in the past, people from my own past had walked. In that respect, my trip to Kirn was very satisfying. I came away with some sense of the place, and a feeling that I could now write a little more confidently about my great-great-great grandfather Christian and his place of origin.
Oh, and before we left Kirn, we went to an excellent local bakery and, in honour of our ancestor, purchased a very beautiful loaf of fresh, crusty German bread.
*In Australian records, Christian’s family name is spelled Uebel.
All photos by the author, September 2025.
Christian’s story will be continued in future Travels with My Ancestors posts.
If you are connected to the Australian Uebel family, I would love to hear from you!
Please subscribe if you’d like to receive updates. I usually post weekly, with a mix of book reviews and posts about all things history.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.
Source: By Adam Carr at English Wikipedia – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34552576 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?
Source: https://germanculture.com.ua/german-bread/german-bread-the-heart-of-germanys-baking-culture/ 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.
Barricades at Alexander Platz, Berlin,
Source: By JoJan – Own work; photo made at an exhibition at the Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, Germany, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17630682I 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.
The pickelhaube, symbol of Prusso-German militarism from the mid- nineteenth century.
Source: By G.Garitan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25768801Even 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 – ZIt’s complicated: ‘Germania’ by Simon Winder
This is not a new book: first published in 2010 and one of a trilogy of books about Central Europe, Germania is described as a personal history of Germans ancient and modern.
Why did I pick up a fourteen-year-old book about Germany?
Because, in my investigations into my family tree, there is one individual about whom I know very little: my mother’s 3 x great-grandfather, Christian Uebel.
In a tree made up of mainly English and Irish branches, Christian Uebel is an outlier, on a branch of his own. He emigrated from the Rhineland region of the country we now know as Germany, arriving in Australia in the 1860s. I realised that I knew so much more about British history and culture and almost nothing about Germany, so Germania was my first step to correcting this.
I quickly realised that the history of central Europe is much more complicated than I had imagined. I knew that the German nation did not exist until the unification in 1871, and in the centuries leading up to that, there were endless squabbles between and about the many, many small and large states that made up the German-speaking parts of Europe.
Germania traverses the history of this region from the days of the ancient tribes in the forests, all the way up to 1933, when the Nazis took power. I wondered about this timeframe until I realised it was for an entirely sensible reason. The dark shadows of WWII have so dominated German history, that apart from the first World War, many people know very little about what came before it.
This is not simply a book about history, although of course that is an important theme. It’s also a travelogue of a particular kind; one where the author indulges his pet loves – and hates – about a country and culture, and describes these in a very amusing – even humorously disrespectful – way.
Here’s an example: in discussing the appearance of a particular abbey, which gives a sense of an ancient and brilliant culture, but whose main interior unfortunately looks as though something has gone horribly wrong involving a collision with several trucks filled with icing sugar, having had an extreme rococo makeover to mark its seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. (p65)
There are plenty of gems like this, along with more serious discussions of the ups and downs of German history. On this, we are told that there were three points at which it was the worst time to be alive in central Europe’s past: the 1340s (famine and plague), the 1630s (the Thirty Years War) and the 1940s.
No prizes for guessing why that last one is on the list.
I was grateful for the map of Germany and its neighbours in central Europe at the front of the book, flipping frequently back and forth in my quest to learn more about this fascinating and (to me anyway) somewhat bewildering region.
Winder’s analysis of the themes and movements, great and small, of European history is thoughtful and thought-provoking:
But, as with so many aspects of Central European history, there is such an amazing spread of unintended consequences that only a form of political paralysis can substitute for the actual kaleidoscope of decisions which generate the oddness of European history – a small, bitter and crowded landscape somehow incapable of (indeed allergic to) the broad-ranging uniformity of the Chinese Empire or the United States. It is unfortunate that what seems in many lights so fascinating about Europe should also, as a spin-off, be the basis for so much rage and death.
Germania p273
Germania was published by Picador in 2010.
How the heart survives: ‘The Tolstoy Estate’ by Steven Conte
The Tolstoy Estate is described as ‘a novel for people who still believe in the saving grace of literature in dark times’ and literature – particularly the work of Leo Tolstoy – is at its heart.
During the ill-fated German assault on Russia in the winter of 1941, military doctor Paul Bauer is assigned to a field hospital established at ‘Yasnaya Polyana’, the ancestral home of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. We quickly realise that Bauer’s heart is not invested in the ideologies of the Nazi Reich, though he does feel loyalty to his comrades and to his mission as a doctor.
On arrival at the estate he meets Katerina, the guardian of the property which has great cultural importance for Russians. In Katerina’s youth, she was a passionate supporter of the Revolution; this conviction has faded over the years, replaced by what could best be described as a critique of its methods and results, mixed with a deep love for her country in the face of the invader’s army. She is – understandably – hostile towards the Germans, but Paul recognises her fierce intelligence and a shared love of literature, and a friendship develops between them, despite the difficult circumstances.
Paul’s job is to treat and repair the damage done to German soldiers on the front. He and his colleagues work under appalling conditions, made particularly hard by the brutal winter cold – with temperatures as low as minus 41 Celsius – inconceivable to someone like me, who lives on one of the warmer continents on Earth.
The author is unflinching in describing the kinds of operations Paul and his colleagues perform, with enough authentic detail to make the scenes in the makeshift surgical theatre feel visceral. The waves of injured, sick and frostbitten soldiers keep on coming throughout the novel; the horror of the conflict always there. Even eyelids could be lost to frostbite, apparently: a prospect too awful to contemplate. The German troops were ill equipped to wage war in a Russian winter, with winter clothes late arriving, so that the soldiers were wearing summer uniforms well after the onset of cold weather.
The theme of literature’s role in society is explored throughout, contrasting with the butchery taking place on the battlefields. Paul’s commanding officer Metz (who is experimenting with new drugs to ‘sharpen his soldierly performance’ – with awful results) boasts to Katerina that:
‘Deeds, not words, gnadige Frau, are the currency of greatness…with his rifle our humblest Landser shapes the world more profoundly than your Tolstoy ever did.
To which Katerina replies:
‘How odd. You sound rather like him in War and Peace -the dull bits: the little man as mover of Great Events. But you’re mistaken. Lev Tolstoy’s books certainly did shape history. He’s still at it, in fact, tipping the war in our favour.’
The Tolstoy Estate p28And of course, the events of War and Peace are foregrounded, as the fate of the German army replicates that of Napoleon’s, on his unsuccessful invasion of Russia a century earlier.
This novel is a celebration of the human heart and the beauty of words and ideas, even when surrounded by the very worst of human behaviour. Paul is certain of this when he says to Katerina:
Yes, what do is important. For the individual it’s vital. But the body is transient, we all know that. It’s stuff. You writers, you forge culture, and culture is eternal. Or as good as…I believe {literature} is beneficial…And enduring. Even the worst of it survives its author, and the best outlives the language it’s composed in. I can’t imagine what it must be like to … know that in fifty, one hundred, two hundred years there will be someone, somewhere reading your books.
The Tolstoy Estate p175The Tolstoy Estate is published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing, in September 2020.
My thanks to the publisher for a review copy.
