Ever since I was a little boy, I have wondered why in the world my ancestors came from South Dakota. Even when I went there as a four year old I wondered, and I was standing right in the state. There I was in Aberdeen, South Dakota, discovered by the cops in a phone booth trying to phone my daddy back in Washington so he could come and get me.
South Dakota. They couldn’t have picked New York, like my mother’s side of the family did. Or sunny Florida. Or anywhere warm for that matter.
It has remained a mystery for the last 50 years. Until now. Last night, I was closing out my ancestry.com account. I haven’t done much research in the last year, given the whole moving back to Seattle thing that’s been going on. I wanted to cut my expenses, so ancestry.com was on the chopping block.
All that research on the site was not for naught. I exported it all and dropped it into a nifty little program on my Mac, MacFamilyTree. I say nifty because it does a lot of things that Ancestry doesn’t. It allows you to mix and match the tree in different forms. You can even see the average life span of all your relatives.
Well, I just won’t go there. It’s not all that favorable for Zerr men. But as I played with the different charts, I happened on one called a fan chart. It reopened the mystery of the South Dakota connection and finally closed it.
I knew that my father’s side of the family was from the Alsace region of France. It’s the German part of the country, having see-sawed back and forth between France and Germany, according to who won the last war.
Times were hard there. My ancestors were peasants. Given the chance to resettle in the Odessa area of Russia, they took it. Each family was granted about 30 acres of land, a house, farm animals and some basic household goods.
It was a hard life. Just getting there took a journey few of us would take. They had to sneak out of Alsace, crossing the Rhine under the cover of darkness. They then made a 10 day voyage by boat to the Austrian capital of Vienna. There, the head of the household, my fourth great grandfather, was received by the Russian Ambassador and presented with visas. Then the real journey began. They trudged for days through Trurignia, Saxony and Silesia. Finally, they arrived in Radzilvillov where they were quarantined in makeshift huts for a month.
All told, the journey took them three months. They traveled 1,500 miles with only basic comforts, horrible hygiene and dwindling supplies. Many died on the trip to the promised land.
Promised land it was not. Life was hard in their new home. There were epidemics, fevers, the locals hated the colonists and there were ongoing incursions by the Turks. The land was barely habitable.
My great-great-great-great-great grandfather helped found the town of Franzfeld in Russia. It is now known as Kacareva.
Still, they prospered. Eventually these German settlements became very successful and their residents quite well off. They worked the land and built towns and then cities out of nothing.
Success came at a cost, however. The Russians began to train their eyes on this prosperous land. Eventually, it would become collectivized as the Russian Revolution came to be. The private lands were put under government control, but not without a fight. There are chronicles of great battles between the government troops and the insurgents who tried to hold out.
I suppose many of my ancestors were caught in this crossfire or perhaps even bravely fought on the side of the insurgents who were severely outnumbered and outgunned.
But the journey of my direct descendants takes another turn. My grandfather left eight years before the Russian Revolution. I’m sure he would have stayed in Franzfeld much longer, but the Catholics there did what they do best, made a more Catholics, i.e., children. As such, there wasn’t enough land left to deed to the offspring of the generations of Zerrs that came before him.
Like most sons and grandsons, George Zerr, my grandfather, sought greener pastures. It was not a difficult choice. His mother had abandoned him, marrying a new husband who already had children. The local priest cared for him and his brother. It turns out the priest took favor on them because they were cousins of the Bishop there. Yes, one of my ancestors, albeit a cousin, was a major league Bishop of the Catholic church. This simple fact probably saved my grandfather’s life. Without the help of the priest, who fed, clothed and tended to my grandfather, he probably would have starved on the streets of Franzfeld.
Instead, the priest shipped him off to America. It seems that a new land agent was at work, once again promising a glorious life, this tim ein the Americas and Canada. It was like being back home in Odessa they told my father and others like him. Come to America and live the good life.
The place they were describing was North and South Dakota as well as the hinterlands of Canada just to the north. The climate was just like Odessa, and so was the fertile fields awaiting the immigrants.
My grandfather never farmed there. But he came with the rest of the Alsatians who had grown up in the Odessa area, creating a new world for German born peoples, to create yet another one in the United States.
It was an arduous journey for this part of my family. Compared to the other side, which descended from kings, the Zerr side seemed to have had a rough time of it, largely because they took the lesser known path in live.
Knowing this story makes me feel like I belong to something I never really fully understood. In many respects, I am my ancestors, more than I ever knew. It has made me wonder how much of our lives is nature and how much is really nurture.
Not bad for being a mutt, I do say.
In the Emerald City, thinking I need to go on a walkabout to my ancestral home,
– Robb