ANNA — A 4-H project begun 20 years ago for the Shelby County Fair has grown into a full-scale genealogy presentation scheduled for Monday, July 31, at 7 p.m., in the St. Jacob Lutheran Church in Anna.
“Anna’s German Roots” by Anna native Erin Pence, now of Springfield and a photographer on the staff of Wright State University, and Jorg Bertsch, of Scherzheim, Germany, is free and open to the public. The research for it began in 1997 and has spanned two decades, countless Internet searches and emails and the discovery — in both directions — of long lost cousins in Germany and Ohio.
Pence, Bertsch and Pence’s mother, Sondra (Bertsch) Pence, of Anna, are cousins. Bertsch and Sondra are third cousins. Bertsch and Erin are third cousins once removed.
“It gets confusing,” Erin admitted.
Bertsch is in Ohio for his third American visit to see family members and to attend the Shelby County Fair.
Members of the Pence family are active in the baking and flower shows and, since the cousins found each other through Erin’s geneology efforts, they have shared stories about it with Bertsch. They had even visited each other via Skype while the Pences were at the fair. Bertsch wanted to see for himself what it was all about.
“Fairs in Germany, they look like this, but they are not agricultural. They are industrial production fairs,” he said.
“He knew we were big into the baking competition,” Erin said.
“I knew they had a lot of fun,” Bertsch added.
So he planned his vacation from his job as a marketing manager of a bank to coincide with this year’s exhibition.
“He arrived on baking day! It was nuts,” Erin laughed. Her family took him to the baked goods auction, Monday. But what interested Bertsch most was “the agricultural stuff with the cows, because we don’t have it in Germany,” he said.
The cousins had “found” each other in 2009, more than 12 years after Erin first went looking for her family heritage. She came by her 4-H project naturally. Sondra has been interested in family history since she was a little girl.
“I would go to Grandma’s house and look at her pictures. I’d ask, ‘Who’s this? Who’s this?’ I remembered all the stories,” she said.
So it wasn’t a surprise when Erin began to research genealogy. She discovered that Christian Bertsch II had settled in Ohio in 1853. His father, Christian Bertsch, had another son, Ludwig. Sondra and Erin are descended from Christian II. Jorg is descended from Ludwig. So they share Christian Sr. as a great-great-great-grandfather.
Before the advent of Ancestry.com and other such sites, researchers would use online message boards to post things. Once something is posted on the Internet, it never goes away. So on, as he says, a “very boring Monday evening” in 2009, Bertsch discovered messages that Sondra and Erin had posted 10 years before. Until his father died, Bertsch had never cared about tracing family roots.
“He inherit me a box of old stuff. I found photo of Christian who was mayor with a little child, my great-grandfather, Christian III, a son of Ludwig,” Bertsch said. That piqued his interest.
“Our family hadn’t been in touch for 110 years. I hoped to find something in an (online) archive. I Googled Christian and found the notice of Sandy,” he said. “I sent an email: ‘I live in Scherzheim, and if you are related to this man, we are cousins.’”
“The message board was 10 years old. It was good I still had the same email address,” Sondra said. She called Erin right away.
“We’ve been hunting family since I was 10 years old,” she messaged back to Bertsch. She was delighted to find he knew the same family stories her grandmother had shared with her.
Emails flew eastward and westward for two years before Bertsch made his first trip to the U.S.
“When I first come, they give me a toe test,” he laughed. “They wanted to see my big toe. They wanted to see if I have the Bertsch toe. I don’t know what they have seen, but I passed. They say, ‘OK, you’re a Bertsch.’”
Through Erin’s continued genealogical research, other relatives in Colorado, Cincinnati, Kentucky and Indiana were connected to German kin and each other. Bertsch lives a block away from church records that had not previously been available to Erin. That broke down a what had been a brick wall in her study. Even better, he had all the letters that their ancesters had written from Anna in the mid-19th century. Her one-time 4-H project expanded more and more.
And the “stuff” Bertsch found in his father’s box opened up friendships half a world away.
“He would be so proud and pleased,” Bertsch said.
Monday’s presentation will comprise much of their research, which revealed that many old family names in Anna are connected to the German migration to the U.S. Christian II was among hundreds of German immigrants who came in the mid-1800s from the villages of Scherzheim and Lichtenau in the Black Forest of Germany.
“In Pearl Cemetery, there are more names from my area than in Scherzheim Cemetery,” Bertsch said.
“Monday’s presentation will focus on why so many people left the regions of Baden, Germany and Alsace, France during the 1800s to start a new life in America,” said Erin in a release. “Many area families can trace their roots to these two towns, including the surnames Accuntius, Bertsch, Billing, Eisenstein, Finkenbine, Fogt, Harman, Heiland, Kah, Knasel, Leiss, Losch, Ludwig, Martz, Meyer, Pfaadt, Schiff, Schilling, Stengel, Rohr, Timeus, Wenger, Woehrle, Zimmer and Zimpfer. The Elsass, Hagelberger, and Altermatt families emigrated from the Alsace Region of France, just across the Rhine River from Lichtenau. These families settled the farmland in Dinsmore and Franklin townships in Shelby County and were founding members of St. Jacob Lutheran Church in Anna.”
The talk is sponsored by the Anna District Historical Society and the Shelby County Historical Society. Speaking to an audience won’t be new to the European cousin.
“He gives programs at the historical society over there,” Sondra said. “We said, ‘Bring your stuff.’”
Bertsch is a member of Scherzheim and Lichtenau historical societies.
“I gave a presentation there. The people were really interested. I hope they are here, too,” he said.
He and his American cousin haven’t stopped researching. Their latest project is to track down descendents of what they call the “lost 69.”
“When Christian Sr. was mayor, there were bad economic times in the 1840s. Towns had to provide for the poor,” Erin said. “The Baden government gave towns funds to ship people to America.”
Eleven families numbering 69 people left Scherzheim for the new world then.
“We never expected to find any of them,” Bertsch said. But they have, and some of them are traveling to Anna from Nebraska, South Carolina, Kentucky and Washington, D.C., for Monday’s talk.
The genealogists would like to hear from more people who have family stories, documents or photos of ancestors who hailed from Scherzheim or Lichtenau. Information is available at www.ourgermancousins.com.
