Dear Dad,
My search for our family’s roots is not turning up as much as I hoped it would. I’ve learned a lot about the places where our ancestors are from, but not a lot about who they were specifically. Here’s everything I know about your great grandfather (the one who gave us his name) and the land he came from:
He was born in Alsace more than a hundred years after it had become part of the French empire in the mid 17th century, and he left for America in 1848 before Alsace was turned back to Germany during the end of the 19th century.
See, though the people of Alsace were technically French at the time he was born, they continued to speak the local dialect of German that they had spoken for centuries. So, your great, great grandfather was an Alsatian German-speaking Frenchman.
I know you said that your grandparents claimed they spoke French, but don’t forget about the stigma attached to Germany during the World Wars, and even before that, just before our ancestors left Europe to come to America, the French Revolution brought a great deal of stigma to the German language as well. At the end of the 18th century, French revolutionaries declared that French was the language of liberty and freedom. So they started asking why the people of Alsace spoke German if they were truly “French.” The new French government made life difficult for the Alsatian people, closing German schools and firing teachers who didn’t speak the official language. They said that to be a part of France, everyone had to learn French. But more than 90% of the people of Alsace didn’t speak a word of the language. So, the French took away the Alsatians’ traditional clothes, ridiculed their traditions, and even shipped them to other places.
After the craziness of the early days of the revolution died down, Alsatians were less persecuted, and the region was able to make a serious effort to integrate itself into France. Schools taught French, though people spoke Alsatian at home. Soon, Alsace had one of the highest literary rates of any region in France. Still, the people were constantly torn between two languages, so they never used either 100% of the time.
Alsatians didn’t consider themselves German despite all the problems they had in the early days of the revolution. The revolution had created certain freedoms (like lower taxes) that they wouldn’t have had under a German government. It was better than any other choice they had, plus it seemed inevitable.
When the industrial revolution came to Europe, Alsace was one of the continent’s main industrial centers. Alsatian farmers weren’t able to work as easily as they once did, as machines took many of their jobs. That was around the time when our ancestors came to America, probably to find work and land, during one of the largest population migrations of the century. Few of those who left Alsace at that time did so with a passport; in fact, most of them smuggled themselves on boats to escape debts brought about by industrial age unemployment. As there is no record of your great grandfather having obtained a passport in Alsace during that time, I guess he was among those who snuck out of the region undeclared.
As you know, he settled in Naperville, Illinois where he helped build the town’s first Catholic church, though I have been unable to find out why he chose Illinois as his base. Some of your cousins have said that he came to the Midwest on a rush for California Gold, but that could also have been your other great grandfather, the one who came from Bavaria to open a brewery in Naperville.
So, even if that doesn’t tell us a lot, it at least makes me the living authority on our family ancestry. I’ll tell you more when I learn it.