Page 100 of Edenkobern.Home.Site
LETTERS CONNECTED TO EDENKOBEN FAMILIES
The following is just one of the many responses I've received via e-mail.
JUNK BOX REVEALS FAMILY SECRET
[Reprinted here with Sue Webb Bodishbaugh's permission]
by
Sue Webb Bodishbaugh
Families of ERION / KAYSER / BODISHBAUGH
My mother-in-law cleaned house to move from a large home to a retirement home and gave me three boxes of what she called "family junk." Each box was a treasure in itself: one was wood, handmade and beautifully carved by my husband's grandfather and namesake, when he was in shop class in grade school. One black and red tin box (grandpa's money box in his 1923 grocery store) later was found to have come from Germany in the 1800s and inside were the treasures including more than 100 letters, birth certificates, German smallpox inoculations dated in the 1840s (giving the city/township where great-grandpa was born and his age, as he was "9 months of age at this time"), Civil War letters written to and from the battlefields. I digested and gloried in this new information for a month but, as usual, so many answers produced so many questions. Then three of the oddest things happened.
First, I went to our Family History Center and asked for help obtaining copies of microfilms from Edenkoben, Germany. "Edenkoben?" the nice lady asked. "Yes," said I. "Well, why don't you just ask Charlie Doll. He's over there. His family is from Edenkoben." As DOLL was one of the names mentioned in the letters, and Edenkoben was a tiny dot on the German map, I was floored. Not only did Mr. Doll have the microfilms on hand, but also he gave me the address of his cousin who authored the history book 1600 YEARS OF EDENKOBEN, so we could correspond, and he helped me with my beginning German language reading. Like any good teacher, he didn't do it for me; he just showed me the way and picked me up every now and then when I faltered. I am still amazed when I remember that night. "This genealogy stuff is a piece of cake," I thought. Ha! It was a classic case of beginner's luck.
Second, after stumbling over the tiny writing in faded purple and blue inks written forward, sideways, and between the lines in a foreign language, I passed a few copies through my law firm's International Department. The paralegals, all of whom knew German, assured me these were not written in German. A month later, I lunched with three letters spread before me, pondering my next step, when my boss passed behind me and laughingly said, "That person writes just like my mother!" Both daughter and mother are from Baden-Baden but it just so happened that mother was a teacher in a private girls' school in a certain short time period in Germany during which three forms of the German language were required to be "proper." One was Sutterlin/Zutterlain, the language of these letters. So, in her mid-80s, with one good eye and a very large magnifying glass, dear mother translated my letters to her daughter who typed them on her laptop and brought them to me on a disk. Mother would only accept a very small fee for the letters brought many delightful memories of Germany. She not only translated but, ever true to her teaching background, gave me historical information I otherwise never would have known: "When she says, 'I knew you since you first got your three little scars . . .' she is saying she knew him when he was nine months old, as that is the age at which children were vaccinated for smallpox, and in Germany, they made three little cuts or incisions, one above the other, not like they do here with the round poking," and, "When he says he is looking for a place in St. Louis, he means he is looking for a job. That's how we said it." What a blessing.
Third, family stories were told but I could not find to verify great-grandfather and great-grandmother's marriage record or their son's birth record. Late one sleepless night, propped up in bed with my reading light on, I poured over the letters in the three boxes on my lap. I was noting the dates and franking on the envelopes, trying to put them into some sort of order and silently cursing my husband's uncle, as he had just told me, "Those old letters? Mom kept them in the attic and on rainy days we used them to play school and made paper planes out of them, sailing them out of the attic windows into the mud. There were a bunch of them at one time." Ugh! I removed them from the box one by one. The bedside light struck the bottom of the box from a side angle and all of a sudden I noted a line of stitching - black box outside and in, black bottom, black stitching?
All envelopes immediately came out and in the bottom I found, form-fitted and hand made so perfectly as to fit the box bottom so tightly that it took a letter-opener and tweezers to get beside and gently lift out a black leather pouch that held. It contained the marriage certificate and birth certificate. They showed that grandpa was well on the way when the couple used great-grandpa's railroad passes and eloped to a town where no one knew them. How they explained this 10 - pound child's premature birth is unknown. The beautifully decorated, elegantly written marriage certificate could not be displayed on the wall, for folks were known to count months on their fingers and they might talk.
For grandpa's entry into World War II to train American pilots, and with his "German sounding last name," great - grandma had to do a lot of things, one of which was to file a delayed birth certificate. I found it right away and it, of course, contained "the" family history, doctored to fit the need.
My mother-in-law got the biggest kick out of this, as her mother-in-law was so prim, proper, and always such a perfect lady. She'd died in the early 1950s and for 50 years the family had passed the boxes around from Arkansas to Florida to Maryland and back to Florida, stored in great-grandma's dresser, without finding that "hidden treasure."
After all these years, we finally unraveled the threads of the ERION / KAYSER / BODISHBAUGH family story. (Had to do it -- pun intended!)
