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.