Update to the Brick Wall of Johann Stumpf

I busted a brick wall!!

Background

In my third blog post, "This Side of the Brick Wall of Johann Stumpf," I lay out my journey to the brick wall of who are Johann Stumpf's parents.  I list my sources of information and what they tell me and lament the missing records that could solve my mystery.  I conclude with my best guess as to who are the parents of Johann Stumpf.

New Access to Archival Records

Snippet of map used to navigate to villages and their archive holdings in the Presentation of Church Register of the Archives of Vojvodina. Displayed in Cyrillic Serbian, lower left is Zrenjanin (Großbetschkerek); Klek is to the northeast, then Ravni Topolovac (Kathreinfeld) and Žitište (St. Georgen am Bega).

The Archives of Vojvodina has digitized the church books of the Vojvodina region, including Serbian Banat, and made them available online in their Presentation of Church Registers web portal.  You need to register to use the site and search the images, but it’s free to do so.  Also, currently, it is necessary to use their Cyrillic Serbian version, but Google Translate will put the page into English.  Oh, and I needed to turn off my touch screen capabilities in order to zoom in on the images.  The gap years still exist, but I am able to view all the pages myself and can gather all the Stumpf entries for my Database of Stumpfs in Kathreinfeld and Klek in the Banat.

Method for my Madness

In order to add Stumpf individuals to my RootsMagic database from St. Georgen, I went through all the Catholic church books available for the village, first the marriages, then the baptisms, then the deaths.  The years available for this village were roughly 1862 to 1895, with 1868-1869 and 1874-1880 missing.  I kept notes in Microsoft’s OneNote note taking program for each year I searched and the result.  I was able to construct a few families, add missing children, and connect children I had with their parents in my database.  I was also able to find the parents for Michael Rager who made an appearance in Benjamin Moore's book The Names of John Gergen (see post "A Book Review, Mike Rager & St. Louis Stumpfs").  I was pleased with myself and better understood how to navigate the website and the church books.

Getting Results

Then I moved on to Klek.  But instead of starting at 1850 and going through the books like I did for St. Georgen, I jumped to 1862 to see what was there.  I am looking for my Michael Stumpf, the son of Johann Stumpf and Katharina Hoffman, who was born around 1862 or 1863 as well as his parent’s marriage.  Katharina was from Klek, and Michael was born in Klek, but Johann is from Kathreinfeld as are Michael’s siblings, so the family settled there.  I have had researchers in Serbia look at the books a few years ago and they didn’t find him.  The solution was that Johann and Katharina must have been married and Michael born in Klek in the 1858-1861 gap years in which the church books are missing.

Well, I found no marriage in Klek for the couple in 1862 or 1863.  Jumping over to the baptisms - lo and behold, I find Michael, illegitimate son of Catharina Hoffman, born in 1863!  There he is right there!

Katharina and Johann weren’t married yet when Michael was born!!  Well, that explains why he wasn't found as the son of Johann Stumpf.

Now I’m excited and no way am I waiting.  I jump over to the Kathreinfeld church books, go to the marriage book for 1863, and bam! There they are.  And their parents are listed!!  Oh happy day!

So who are the parents of Johann Stumpf and Katarina Hoffman?  I made guesses, I looked at the families available and the known Johanns and Katarinas in the villages to puzzle out which ones were mine. 

But no, Johann’s parents listed in the marriage entry didn't make sense.  There was another Johann who married a Katharina Jenisch (another Katharina), who goes with these parents.  Could they have been two Johanns from that family? One after the other, or twins?  No, that doesn’t make sense.  I go to the marriage of the other Johann in the church book in the following year and find out he has been assigned to the wrong family in the Kathreinfeld family book!  Johann Stumpf who married Katharina Jenisch is the son of Johann Stumpf and Anna Maria Putz.

So there we have it.  My Johann is the son of Michael Stumpf and Margaretha Kollinger!  So now I can  track our exact lineage back to Melchior Stumpf who came to the Banat with his brother Jakob in 1764, and who came from Dörlesberg in Baden!

Katharina Hoffman is the daughter of Johann Hoffman and Marianna Salmon.  I thought this might be the right family for her out of the 3 eligible Katharina Hoffmans in Klek who were about the right age.  She's listed in the Lazarfeld & Klek family book [1] in her parents' family with some siblings, but the parents' parents weren't listed.  Here is my final note as I was puzzling it out: 

This is also probably the right Katharina because no decent info is given on the parents.  She'd fit right in.  :/

What's next?

I worked with limited scraps of information to puzzle out Michael's parents for 12 years, and then 5 more years for Johann's parents!  Seventeen years!? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya [2], I've been in the research business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life. 

Well, maybe that's an exaggeration.

My RootsMagic Stumpf database is updated, straightening out the Johanns.  I'm committed to getting the Stumpf families all sorted.  Next steps are to go through the archive's records for Klek and Kathreinfeld, scouring them for Stumpf entries.  I'll note the corrections on the CompGen wiki page for corrections to the Kathreinfeld family book as appropriate, especially the families of the two Johanns.  I'll update my Stumpfs of Kathreinfeld and Klek online database as well and perhaps some of my blog posts.

My remaining big mystery is: when and where did their son, Michael Stumpf, die? Oh, and where was he when he was in the U.S. from 1907 until either he died or returned to Europe?

Footnotes:

[1] Kühn, Josef. Familienbuch der katholischen Pfarrgemeinde Lazarfeld im Banat : und ihrer Filialen Klel (KkL.) und Jankahid (Jhd.): 1800-1834/1852. Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany: Josef Kühn und Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Veröffentlichung Banater Familienbücher, 2004.

[2] Inigo Montoya is a character in The Princess Bride. If you didn't know this, please watch the movie, it's a classic.

A Book Review, Mike Rager, & St. Louis Stumpfs

How I spent July 3rd, 2022 sending myself on a fool's errand.

Book Review

Image by Trish Stumpf Garcia (scan)

Last July, I was reading the book The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in Early Twentieth-Century St. Louis by Benjamin Moore.  This interesting study on a Donauschwaben immigrant starts when the author comes upon some 1917-1918 schoolwork in a dumpster.  This dumpster-retrieved treasure led to a quest to find out who the young student was who created them.  Moore discovers John Gergen was a German-Hungarian from  Nagyszentmiklós / Groß St. Nikolaus with a complicated identity, in that Gergen was his unofficial adopted name.  In addition to John Gergen's life, chapters cover things like the immigrant neighborhood in St. Louis called Soulard, the treatment and exploitation of immigrants, education and its failings in the early 1900s, immigration from Europe in the early 1900s especially the steamship passage, how ethnic German immigrants from Hungary were not fully German nor Hungarian, socialist and workers movements in the early 1900s, and the forgetting of these individuals and their lives by their families.   The author uses a lot of social history to string together the unknown parts of the lives of the subjects.  In the end you feel like you know about John Gergen without really knowing him.

I do recommend the book to anyone who finds any of these things interesting, even though it was a slow read for me.  It is also a good example of how to write about a person who didn't leave a lot of personal context to their lives.

My Quest for the Day

The book mentions Mike Rager who ran the Soulard saloon and dance hall called Neumeyer's Hall, which was named after its original owners.  It was a gathering place for Banat Schwabians in St. Louis (135).  

I recognized the Rager name as I had a Michael Rager in my database of Stumpfs of Kathreinfeld and Klek.  I was excited that a Stumpf descendent was chronicled in this book, even it it wasn't with the Stumpf name.  Maybe it gave me a sense of something tangible from the Stumpf line.

Listed in the Kathreinfeld family book is Elisabeth Stumpf married to Johann Rager and their kids (Anna *abt 1877, Michael *abt 1888, Barbara *09 Jan 1894, Elisabeth *18 Aug 1895).  This family book uses baptismal records starting in 1894, so births before this date are either not listed as they are unknown or they come from other sources, such as marriage, immigration, or death sources.  Anna's info likely came from a marriage entry.  Michael was listed as one of their kids, also without a birthdate, along with the detail that he went to St. Louis (Egert, 210).  Dave Dreyer's Ship Data says he was going to St. Louis to his uncle, Anton Stumpf.  The mother Elisabeth has a nephew Anton Stumpf who went to St. Louis.  The inclusion in the family book is likely from this information.

Looking for Confirmation

I spent that July 3rd tracking down Mike Rager in the U.S. records to confirm his parents. I found a passport application (parents are not listed), a passenger list from 1924 when he returned from a visit to his homeland, his naturalization application (after paging through the digitized images, parents not listed of course), and a FindaGrave page that didn't make sense when I first saw it.  The FindaGrave page says he was born in Germany; he shares a headstone with his brother Nick and his sister-in-law; he was the son of Nick Rager and Katrina Andra and a restaurant proprietor.  Was this the right Mike Rager?  On his WWI draft card, he gave St. Georgen as his birthplace rather than Kathreinfeld.  At the literal end of the day, I came upon his 1940 death certificate.  His brother Nick was the informant.  Although Mike and his parents' place of birth is listed as Germany, which should be Hungary - or, in 1940 Yugoslavia, his parents are listed as Nick Rager and Katrina Andra, agreeing with the FindaGrave page.  I'm figuring if Mike's brother Nick was the informant, the parents' names are probably correct.  

Source: Findagrave photo by frankseyffardt, used with permission.

Some Disappointment

So, Mike Rager, proprietor of Neumeyer's Hall, the gathering place for Banat Schwabians in St. Louis, is not the son of Elisabeth Stumpf.  In the Kathreinfeld FB, Michael was likely added to the Johann Rager family based on the immigration record and some assumptions.  Based on some of his U.S. documents, especially the WWI draft registration, it is likely he was born in St. Georgen, which does not have records available — outside of the archive — to  review.  

Sigh.  Another pit of unavailable records.

Was he really the nephew to an Anton Stumpf?  

Checking for Stumpf Deaths in St. Louis

So, now that I know where the Missouri death certificates are, I searched them for St. Louis Stumpf deaths.  I found one that matches with one in my database, Josef Stumpf who married Magdalena Stein, and added that information.

I also found Frank Stumpf, born 1908 in Yugoslavia, who died in 1969. He was married to Katharina, and was the son of Joseph Stumpf and Elisabeth Hoffman. I can find nothing else on him in general searching, so I don't know where in Yugoslavia he was born, and none of these people are already in my Stumpf database.  (In case I need it again. Content warning: suicide)

It looks like Ancestry.com also has the Missouri death certificates.  I didn't have access to that last July.

Disclaimer

Other than driving through St. Louis in 2011 which hardly counts, I don't have any connection to St. Louis and, as far as I know, I don't have any ancestors who were in St. Louis.  

Books Cited

Egert, Roswitha, compiler. Familienbuch der katholischen pfarrgemeinde Kathreinfeld im Banat: 1893/1895/1915-1947 (Teil 2). Villingen-Schwennigen: Herausgegeben von der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Veröffentlichung Banater Familienbücher (AVBF), 2006.

Moore, Benjamin. The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in Early Twentieth-Century St. Louis. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2021

Other sources are hyperlinked in the text and not fully cited here.