Given any amount of data, the human brain will craft a narrative to make sense of that data. Introduce new data and the brain is forced to choose whether to accept it and craft a new narrative to accommodate the new data, or reject it and cling more tightly to the old narrative. Incorporating new data into an existing narrative is hard, and sometimes even painful. Genealogy is a mental contact sport when it comes to processing new data. It is way more fun to find data that supports our narrative than find data that upends our narrative.
Being so focused on proving that Leonard, Andrew and Francis Haussler were brothers left me unprepared for finding their actual family in Alsace, France. Be careful what you search for because you just might find it.
Armed with parents’ names Ferdinand Haussler and Barbe Lochner my search turned up a family tree on Geneanet for Ferdinand Haussler and Barbe Locherer, married 6 Feb 1816 in Hochfelden, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France. On the tree were three daughters and two sons born between the years 1831 and 1835. Umm, what? Ferdinand left young children behind in France when he came to New York City in 1841?
I swerved and screeched my way through the steep learning curve on Geneanet and Alsatian digital records in French and Latin and was able to establish the information was correct. It was Locherer, not Lochner; the marriage data was correct; those 1830’s children were correct. Where were the three brothers born in the 1820’s?
There’s Ferdinand as a saddler in 1836, his wife Barbe Locherer and the oldest son Leonard age 16 (b. 1820). There’s a daughter Francoise, 14; André (Andrew), 13; Francis Xavier, 12; Marie Louise, 8; Joseph Alexander, 6; Marie Thérèse, 5; Ferdinand (not a twin), 5; Charles Theodore, 4 and Caroline, 2. (One child died in infancy.) Okay then. A real family. Did Ferdinand Sr. really take his oldest sons to America and leave his wife and children behind in France in 1841?
Apparently, yes. Here is the 1841 Census for the same place.
Barbe Locherer, femme – Haussler en amerique. Hubby was in America. The oldest daughter Francoise was taking in ironing, as was the rest of the family (ages 6 to 19) if those ditto marks are to be taken literally. To be honest, I still haven’t found a satisfactory explanation for this. Was it a classic immigration story where some family members come to America and send money home to the family? That would be the easiest to accept. I was possible to send money overseas in the 1840’s. I haven’t been able to learn how common or affordable it was for regular people. Western Union didn’t start its money transfer system until the 1870’s. International banking was more for business and commerce. Letters could be carried and were deliverable for a price. Was American paper money useful in rural France? The logistics don’t work in my limited understanding.
Divorce was illegal in France at the time. Was this a way around that? Especially since, and this is the other part of The Narrative I had wrong, the Haussler’s were Catholic! Francis Xavier Haussler married Magdalena Dietz in a Lutheran church. It never occurred to me to question that.
Also, Ferdinand was born out of wedlock, and his wife’s family had more than one line that could be found in records in the Bas-Rhin area into the 1600’s. In genealogical terms, I hit the jackpot with all this. I have a whole big family in Alsace, France. Maybe someday I’ll understand why they were left behind.
The Lazy Genealogist 