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.

How It's Going: to Find All the Stumpfs in the Banat

RootsMagic to the Rescue 

I overcame my aversion to the daunting task of entering all the information from the large notecards with the Stumpf families into a new RootsMagic database [1] and just did it. I'm glad I did. I then scoured the genealogy databases and requested scans from the FamilySearch Family History Library [2] for Stumpfs in family books to add or connect in the database.  I was casting a wide net to find sources for Banat Stumpf folks.  I was meticulous with citing each source, but usually added it to the person’s name as opposed to each fact. That made more sense with a family book entry anyway. 

Thus far, I have cited 105 sources, on 842 people in 254 families in 41 trees, and 149 locations. 

Having it all in the database lets me easily navigate through the families as well as search for a name, including seeing my options for a given name. 

Partial List of Michael Stumpfs in the RootsMagic Database. 

I can see I have holes of missing data in what I have collected. I’m sure there is more STUMPF information in St. Georgen, Kathreinfeld, and Klek in the mid-1800s that is accessible in the regional archives. 

Ultimately, what I found were that two (most likely) brothers Jakob and Melchior Stumpf from "Pflaz" are the forefathers of the Stumpf families in the Kathreinfeld and Klek area. More on this in later posts. 

There are a few other STUMPF men who settled elsewhere in the Banat who don’t seem to be part of this group. I’ll write a post summarizing them as well. 

I uploaded the database to a RootsMagic webpage as well. You can explore here. There are 698 people in 196 families and 31 separate family trees.  By the way, all the citations I added at the person level did not load into the website for some reason. 

I didn't mean to, but I now have a wealth of information on the Stumpf families in the Banat. I started this blog to communicate what I have discovered and maybe even connect with interested family researchers.

Footnotes

[1] RootsMagic is a genealogy database that runs on your computer, as opposed to online trees that are in the cloud on a website (e.g. Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org).  RootsMagic lets you manage your own file with data on people, places, and sources.  

[2] You can make requests from the FamilySearch Family History Library on their online request form.