As
a genealogist, it’s frustrating to me that apparently all my ancestral lines
lead back to European peasants—records are scarce and entries in history books,
even local history, uncommon. Acknowledgement and documentation of an ordinary
life of hardship doesn’t often make it into print for descendants to discover
and exclaim, “here’s my ancestor, and what he did and how he lived.”
For
this reason, I was thrilled to read F. Warren Bittner’s recent article, a
winner of the 2011 Family History Writing Contest, “Without Land, Occupation,
Rights, or Marriage Privilege: The Büttner Family from Bavaria to New York.”1 Bittner does an outstanding job of
mining records and applying a knowledge of local social history and laws to
those records, resulting in an enhanced and documented picture of one Bavarian
family’s life in poverty.
Bittner
chooses the Büttner men’s efforts to marry as his springboard for examining
property, occupations, and rights of village residency. Despite couples’
attempts to legally wed, restrictions put in place by village, guild, and
district authorities resulted in illegitimate children; towns disputed each
other over which must take responsibility and allow the family group to settle
within the community. Repeatedly members of the Büttner family attempted to
break down barriers to a marginally better life.
In
the course of the article Bittner discusses sexual mores, the amount of land
needed to support a family, the social status of weavers, a change in laws and
courts in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the disadvantage of being bound
to the land and the far greater disadvantage of being landless. He draws on
tenancy records, maps, land files, marriage hearings, military papers, and the
usual church registers in the course of his research. Footnotes refer to what
appears to be a definitive library of eighteenth and nineteenth century
Bavarian social history, including titles such as Property, Production, and
Family in Neckarhausen: 1780-1870; and German Home Towns: Community,
State, and General Estate, 1648-1871; and The Village in Court: Arson,
Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848-1910;
and “Village Spinning Bees: Sexual Culture and Free Time among Rural Youth in
Early Modern Germany.”2 The result is a broad picture of the
miserable social and legal conditions in which the Büttners struggled to exist.
Bittner sums up their situation well when he writes, “Leonhard and Margaretha
lived in a different world in the same villages as their neighbors with higher
status.”3
Bittner shows us that world.
There
are two take-aways from this article: one, it is possible to learn—and say—much
more about those who lived “at the bottom of the village hierarchy”;4 and two, it takes a good deal of work.
The pay-off however is huge, for both the subjects’ descendants and others
researching the geographical area. This article is a model, an inspiration, and
a bench-mark. Thank you, F. Warren Bittner, for showing us so thoroughly and so
elegantly that it is indeed possible to document, describe, and honor the lives
of our peasant ancestors.
1 F. Warren Bittner, “Without Land,
Occupation, Rights, or Marriage Privilege: The Bütnner Family from Bavaria to
New York,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (September 2012):
165-187.
2 I marked twenty-eight of
the titles he refers to with the notations “read” or “look up”; I have Bavarian
lines of my own to research!
3 Bittner, “The Büttner Family from
Bavaria to New York,” 187.
4 Bittner, “The Büttner Family from Bavaria to New York,”
169.
Julie,
ReplyDeleteDitto! You captured my thoughts about this article perfectly. No wonder they left Bavaria when they had the chance. I was just blown away when I read it and have reread a few times since it came out. I had the good fortune to attend two of Warren's presentations at NERGC, one of which was about this article.