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George: Boyhood and Leaving

Boyhood

Georg Wilhelm Ehrenfried Wesemann was born at the Thran mill on 30 July 1838, at two in the afternoon, and baptized at Kemnade on 2 September(?) 1838. The entry names his father as “mill leaseholder at Thran” and his mother as “born Brand,” aged twenty-nine. His godparents were Marie Johanne Henriette(?) Wilhelmine Albrecht, born Müller; “Georg Alexander(?) Ludewig, master miller at Thran”; and Johann Ehrenfried Rödeling(?) of Kemnade, whose trade cannot be read. George’s third name, Ehrenfried, came from that godfather, as the family’s children so often took a godparent’s name.

The entry does not give his parents’ names, but the details fit only one couple. The tenant of the Thran mill was Heinrich Christian Ludewig Wesemann, the only member of the family ever recorded holding it, and a mother born Brand who was twenty-nine in the summer of 1838 fits Johanne Caroline Wilhelmine Brand, born on 16 July 1809. The birth date and hour agree with George’s emigration record and with his military file of 1860, made twenty-two years later by another office, and the entry is an ordinary numbered baptism. George’s parents were almost certainly Heinrich Christian Ludewig Wesemann and Johanne Caroline Wilhelmine Brand.

The second godfather is a puzzle. A man entered with three forenames and no surname would normally share the surname at the head of the column, so this may have been another Wesemann styled master miller (Mühlenmeister) at Thran, a title of an owner, where George’s father is always the lesser mill leaseholder (Mühlenpächter) in the Thran records. The reading is weak, and he was most likely George’s grandfather, Georg Ludewig, entered under Thran because that was where the household lived. That a second Wesemann miller lived at Thran in 1838 is a theory only, not proven, and unlikely. The household had not vanished from Linse in the year of George’s birth: a “machine-miller’s daughter,” his aunt Luise, stood godmother there in 1838.

George spent his early boyhood at Kirchbrak, where his father leased a mill from 1840, and the household was probably still there in 1847. By his early teens the family was back near Linse, landless. His mother died in March 1852, when he was thirteen.

Linse counted him as one of its own. Its church book for 1815 to 1853 carries a bound-in name index that lists “Wesemann, Georg Wilh. Ehrenfried” at page 123, in the confirmation section, with no birth page beside it, since he was not born at Linse. The same index places other Wesemann confirmations on pages 100 (his father, Heinrich Chr. Ludewig), 102 (his uncle Heinrich Wilhelm), 107 (his aunt Dorothea Friederike Louise), 110 ([Caroline C. L.]) and 112 ([Christian Fr. Wilhelm]); his brother and sister of 1833 and 1836 are not among them. A parish confirmed children it regarded as its own. George was probably confirmed about 1852. The confirmation pages themselves, 86 to 125, are missing from the only scan of the volume, so his entry cannot now be read, though the book survives.

Leaving

George trained as a miller, but there was no mill for him. In 1859 he stood in the military levy of the district of Eschershausen and drew lot number 92. He was released “because of his intention to emigrate.” A chronic chest ailment, treated by doctors without success for three years, would in any case have exempted him whatever number he drew. His decision to leave dates from 1859 at the latest.

On 24 January 1860 the Holzminden district office (Kreis-Direction Holzminden) petitioned the state ministry at Brunswick for his dispensation, and the ministry approved it on 28 January. The file places George “near Linse” that January. It does not name his parents. It is plain about the family’s circumstances: “the family owns no property” (die Familie besitzt kein Vermögen), and George himself was “without any property” and could not do wage labor because of his chest. The case for letting him go was that he was going to someone who could support him.

That someone was an uncle. The file first calls him “a near relative on his mother’s side” and then, more exactly, his uncle: George was going “into the house of his uncle, settled in America for years already and of means” (bemittelt). The file calls the petitioners “Wesemann and wife” four times: in the petition’s subject line, as “wife Wesemann” on page 4, in the recommendation on page 5 and in the ministry’s reply, which copies the subject line. This was the office’s standing form for a household petition. George was almost certainly unmarried: the family’s own registers hold no marriage of his, and he married in America in 1866.

The family that had held two of the three mills on the lower Lenne in the 1830s owned nothing by 1860. His grandfather had died in 1855 as a “former” master miller, and his father was a lodger by 1852. That is why a miller’s son of this family left as a journeyman instead of inheriting a mill.

Who the uncle was is not known. Strictly, an uncle on his mother’s side was a brother of his mother, a Brand, or the husband of one of her sisters, who would carry another surname. A brother of his grandmother, a Sporleder, would be a great-uncle. Any candidate must fit both of the file’s words: settled in America for years, and of means.

George’s mother’s three brothers are ruled out. Johann August Christian died at Linse in 1822, Heinrich Ludwig Wilhelm died there unmarried in 1847, and Heinrich Friedrich Christian stayed at Linse, married George’s aunt Dorothea in 1846 and was still there in 1857. The Wilhelm Brand and Ludewig Brand, “half farmer’s sons,” who stood godparent at Linse in 1832 and 1838 were probably her cousins of the Grupe household, Carl Friederich Wilhelm and Heinrich Friedrich Ludewig, though the Ludewig of 1838 was possibly her youngest brother, then sixteen. A Wilhelm Brandt, half farmer of Linse, whose will survives for 1884 to 1886, was probably that Grupe-line cousin, who married at Linse in 1853, not an emigrant. Two Brands who did leave do not fit: Ludewig Brand of Halle, a shop assistant who received consent to emigrate on 4 September 1854 aged 18, was too young and a wage earner, and Heinrich Brand of Bremke, a day labourer born in 1817, emigrated only in 1860.

Of his mother’s sisters’ husbands, one is ruled out and one is not. Justine’s widower, Carl Conrad Anton Dörries, married Justine Wilhelmine Amalie Elisabeth [Reuse?] at Rühle about 11 March 1841 and was still master miller at Rühle in June 1854, when his son Carl Franz was baptized there, so he was probably not a man long settled in America by 1860. His family’s only emigrant in the Holzminden lists is Caroline Eleonore Henriette Dörries (1814 to 1896), daughter of the Rühle miller Johann Carl Anton Dörries, who left about 1871 and died at Hoboken, New Jersey; Johann Carl Anton was probably the groom’s father Carl Dörries, and Caroline possibly his sister. The other sister, Hanne Wilhelmine Charlotte, born in 1812, did not marry at Halle in the years that can be read, and no record names a husband of hers. Her husband, if she had one, is the one candidate not excluded, and that the uncle was a sister’s husband is the one theory that fits all the exclusions. The other reading, that the clerk used “uncle” loosely for an older relative on his mother’s side, such as a Sporleder great-uncle or a cousin of his mother, stays open; whether that loose use was usual in Brunswick in 1860 is not known. Two Sporleders of Linse, Conrad and Friedrich Wilhelm Conrad, appear in the district’s list of emigrants, but they are not placed in the family.

The state’s card index of emigrants from the Duchy of Brunswick records him as a journeyman miller (Müllergeselle):

His birthplace, Thran, lay in the Weser valley about 100 kilometers west of the city of Brunswick. The consent date is not a sailing date. Seven weeks later, on 12 March 1860, George arrived at New York on the ship New York from Bremen. He is the only Wesemann in the district of Eschershausen’s record of emigrants. His life in America, including his marriage in 1866 to Fredericka Bauer, is told in the George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907 section; her own family’s story is told in the Bauer Family section.

George kept his German military discharge among his emigration papers, and it survives in the family. It has not been fully transcribed, so whether it records completed service or a release from the obligation is not known; read alone, his release of 1859 and his chest ailment describe a man who did not serve. The family’s uniform portrait, which family tradition takes to be George (see George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907), shows a young man in uniform, with a stand collar, a single row of close-set buttons, plain cuffs, a belt with a plate buckle, and a sword, a cut that fits mid-nineteenth-century European infantry generally. No shoulder straps show on this reading, but the photograph’s transcript describes small shoulder straps and light-colored cuffs. Brunswick’s main army branches wore black by 1858 and 1859, but whether the uniform is Brunswick’s is not shown.