The gathering of information in preparation to my writing The Story of Schnake is a tale to make genealogists envious. While most genealogists spend hours researching old documents, most of what I have learned has practically jumped into my lap.
I graduated from college in 1955 and became a teacher. In 1956 the army was about to draft me, so I decided to enlist to get a choice of service. I enlisted in the US Army Security Agency (ASA) and married Doris Schnake in that same year. ASA decided to send me to Army Language School in Monterey, California, for a year of intensive training in the Hungarian language. Then I was assigned as a radio intercept operator/translator to Bad Aibling, Bavaria, near Munich in southern Germany. (An aside -- a year of schooling on the Monterey Peninsula and 18 months (all indoor duty) in the Bavarian Alps -- is that an army career or a paid vacation?)
Doris joined me in Germany and we lived off base in a German home. I had a year of German language in college (1953) and began to build on that. When I could converse fairly well, we decided to try to seek Doris's ancestral history. I didn't even know how to spell "genealogy" (I spelled it "-ology") and we knew nothing about genealogical research.
We had heard that Doris's ancestors were from Kreis (County) Minden in northern Germany, and that the town was Baerkirchen. So I took a leave and we set out for the north. Arriving in Minden, we learned that there was no Baerkirchen, but there was a Bergkirchen - the pronunciation is almost the same. Bergkirchen was the Lutheran parish center for a part of Kreis Minden.
So we went to Bergkirchen. We met the pastor and were ushered into his office. In five minutes, he found my wife's great grandfather's record in a book that he took off his shelf.
In those days there were few Americans seeking their German heritage and we were a novelty. The pastor took a day off to guide us in the area. He took us to the village of Unterlübbe to the former home of Doris's ancestors. We met the family living there now and saw the interior of the house, which was a house and barn combined as was the style in much of Germany. On the "barn" side was a large entry way, and in the wood over the entry the pastor found the names of Doris's great-great grandfather and grandmother and the date the house was built - 1848.
Meanwhile, the pastor had asked his secretary to excerpt all relevant records from the church archives, We stayed at the parsonage while we were there, and when we left he presented us with official church documents bearing the church seal, tracing Doris's family back to the mid 1600s and including quite a number of other Schnakes as well. By sheer dumb luck we came away with records that many genealogists would kill to get, and it cost us nothing. Good thing - on army pay we didn't have two quarters to rub together.
We returned and I wrote up this research for the family. That's where it stayed for quite a few years. Then in 1964 we moved to Kirkwood, near St. Louis, and I started a new teaching job. A neighbor was an old German man who just happened to be from that same area. He gave me a beautiful old book, MINDEN-RAVENSBERG: EIN HEIMATBUCH (Minden-Ravensberg: a homeland book) published in 1929 which contained articles and some beautiful pictures of the area, including woodcuts of Bergkirchen and pictures of peasant costumes of the area. He said no one in his family was interested in their history, and he knew that Doris and I would treasure the book.
In the 1980s computers came along, and in the 1990s the Internet opened up. Online, I contacted a lady who had spent many years of her life learning to read old German documents and researching Schnake history. She had a carefully researched database of over 5,000 names of Schnakes and related families from two adjacent Germn church parishes, with meticulous and careful source references. She sent it to me on a disk; all I had to do was to load it into my genealogy program. There is no way I could do that much research in the rest of my life.
The last stroke of fortune occurred when a Schnake cousin visited Germany and returned with a booklet written by local scholars, focusing on my wife's ancestral village as an exampleof villages in the entirearea. It had a listing of every house in the village with all occupants that they could find back to 1572, with the peasant class, the amount of land farmed, and much other information. It told of how the Schnakes were serfs who paid land rent to the Monastery of St. Martini in Minden, and there was a continuous record there up to the 19th century. In it, the authors stated that the records of the Cathedral in Minden had been almost totally destroyed in the 30 years war, but that the records of St. Martini had not been touched. Even after the protestants took over, they decided to maintain the "monastery" on paper as a record keeping device for the land rents owed by the peasants, which then went to the St. Martini church. These records stretched from 1572 to the early 19th century. What a wild stroke of luck! The booklet showed that the Schnakes farmed 16 Morgen of land, about 9.5 acres, and had a record of her ancestor "Engelke Snak" at house no. 19 paying land rent to St. Martini in barley and rye.
Setting up the Schnake home page on the Internet brought all sorts of information from other sources. Kind people sent me listings of Schnake marriage dowries, historical tidbits, and even pictures from the area. From ship records sent to me by kind souls, I discovered that her great grandfather came to this country in 1867 on the maiden voyage of the steamship Weser together with a sister and an aunt, and I was able to find and download pictures of this ship. I incorporated many of these into the booklet "The Story of Schnake".
Their ship voyage was form Bremen to Southampton to New York. I duplicated that same voyage when I returned to the US, in the army equivalent of "steerage" with hundreds of other soldiers in cramped quarters in the lowest level of the ship. Our conditions were much better than theirs, but it gave me a feeling for what it must have been like.
Yes, I did do SOME direct research, sending for filmstrips of German parish records and checking a few details at the local Mormon Family History Center. But that was one percent of the information I accumulated.
Genealogists, you are authorized to be envious. This kind of luck is like winning the lottery two or three times straight.
Important links:
I wrote a beautiful song for the 50th wedding anniversary of my in-laws 20 years
ago. It is now available on CD and I havae set up several Internet sites to sell
it. Go to any of the following:
Golden Love site at
http://goldenlove.att.net
Golden Love site on SchnakeNet
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~schnake/goldenlove.htm
Golden Love site on Pace Network
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~pace/goldenlove.htm
Golden Love on FortuneCity
http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/cern/1343/ or
http://www.nav.to/compu-tutor1
Rick Schnake has an interesting hobby/part time business. He collects
and sells authentic historic signatures on original documents. He has US
Presidents and many other historical figures represented. Why not check
it out?
Rick's main site at "http://www.historyinink.com"
Mirror site on Schnakenet
at
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~schnake/HistoryInInk.htm
Mirror site on Pace Network
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~pace/HistoryInInk.htm
Golden Love main site http://goldenwedding.net