Wednesday in Lincoln

I am well rested and up at 6:00 am. The snow has stopped and skies are clear, but the wind is now busy re-arranging the previous day's snowfall into even deeper drifts, and the wind chill is well below zero. I take my shower and go downstairs for a breakfast of cereal and bagels. I come back to my room and write to this blog. At 9:00 am I venture out. After a bit of digging, I extricate myself out of the Days Inn parking lot and onto the main street. I see that D street has been plowed so I turn left past the AHSGR museum and see it's still covered with a foot of snow. I turn back onto 9th street and head for the University of Nebraska. Its closed. So is the book store, and the next bookstore, and the next. I'm freezing and looking for a Starbucks to warm up. The fellow ahead of me is carrying a cup of coffee, so I ask him where that coffee shop is, and Starbucks. I hit the first one and spend some time there, then over to Starbucks. Jim calls at 12:00 and says lets meet at Mill Coffee at 1:00. I have an hour to kill so I swing back by one of the bookstores to see if they are open now. To my luck, it is, and the proprietor has a good selection. Three used books and $20 later I'm on my way to Mills.

Jim shows up shortly after 1:00. We talk about family history. He knows all about the Lodi connection. Like me, he's more interested in the history than the genealogy. I get some ideas about where to go next. South Dakota has a good archive. Sutton, due to the railroad, was the starting point in the U.S. Fanned out from there to Texas, California, South Dakota - Sutton was running out of free land. There are city histories in Odessa and Kherson (Ukraine). My next stop is Ukraine! Follow it with Germany, France. I'm ready!

My First Field Trip

I have finally gotten the motivation to reach out to others who share my fascination with this subject and headed down a parallel path of discovery. The obvious starting point is Lincoln, Nebraska, headquarters of AHSGR and home to their museum and library. It is December in America's Midwest and the weather can deteriorate quickly. A storm is coming in, which prompts me to make the 500 mile journey from Denver to Lincoln on a Monday in order to get to Lincoln before the storm hits. I call the museum first to find out their protocol in case of severe storms. The lady on the phone tells me that they do sometimes close the museum, often in parallel with school closures. I take my chances nonetheless.

I detour off of Interstate 80 south to Hastings, then east along State Highway 6, to the town of Sutton, Nebraska (population 1,700). It is late afternoon when I arrive and already beginning to get dark. I find the cemetery on the northern outskirts and check the board which is conveniently placed behind glass panes under a small canopy. The inhabitants of the cemetery list multiple names of Ochsners, a few Kleins and a few Ulmers, all of which bear some relationship. The name I am looking for, that Jacob Ridinger, is not listed.

I proceed back into town and stop off at the local library. By chance I see a book chronicling the 125 year history of the town. The librarian, despite a frenzy of small children participating in a holiday coloring contest of some sort, finds a few minutes to spend with me and shows me a few collections of books which pertain to my subject of interest. I ask her about other cemeteries in the area, especially in Grafton, Fillmore county. She says there are other old cemeteries around.

I proceed to purchase the 125 year history of Sutton, which has plenty of old photographs of my relatives, and head back on highway 6 towards Lincoln. I soon pass through the town of Grafton, population around 400, in Filmore county. The images I have now are of the landscape, not much different from the rolling fields of Tatarstan in Russia and, from the aerial pictures of Rohrbach and Worms, not such a distant place anymore. I picture what this area may have looked like when Jacob first came here, an untamed and uncultivated region very much like his previous home in Ukraine. Such a shame, though, that he would have to leave his established home in Ukraine to begin again in this new land.

The next days in Lincoln are not productive, but I take this in stride as one of the frustrating times that us researchers must often endure. The storm arrives as predicted and I am snowbound in my room at the Days Inn, with the museum, and practically everything else in Lincoln, shut down. I do manage to call Jim Griess, the AHSGR coordinator for the village of Rohrbach. We have a lengthy conversation of how we are related, how I pronounce my last name, have I been to Rohrbach, and about the regions in France and southwest Germany where our ancestors originated. He says Jacob is buried in a smaller cemetery a few mile north of the one I was in, and he has a photo of the headstone. He has a 4-wheel drive truck and lives about 10 miles outside of Lincoln. We will try to meet at the museum tomorrow.

Acknowledgements

My father, who took everything this world could throw at him and still came out smiling. To the memories of his brothers. One made it through the Soviet worker camps to see his children again in their ancestral homeland. The other, unfortunately, executed in a Soviet prison. My father's children live on in the comfort of the United States. His brother's children, my cousins, returned to their ancestral homeland in Germany after the breakup of the Soviet Union. All are doing quite well. I've heard there may still be a few relatives somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Maybe fate will lend a hand and this blog would somehow find its way around the world and summon them.

Familyologist, you'll never know how truly grateful I am for the inspiration you gave me so I may at last share this with the rest of the world. See "Followers" for more information.

Sakharov, Steinbeck and more Circular Movements

During my assignment in Nizhnekamsk, Russia I spend the bus rides to and from work reading. Currently I'm reading a biography of Sakharov. Now dead, he was the nobel-winning physicist, father of the Russian H-bomb, then turned dissident and world-renowned human rights activist. For that, he was dis-credited by the Soviet government, stripped of his scientific affiliations, and exiled for 6 years to the city of Gorky (now Nizhni-Novgorod). I found it interesting that one of his favorite books as a youth was Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", the book I had just finished reading. The book no doubt had some socialist undercurrents and explored that option as an answer to the brutality inflicted upon the California migrants during the Great Depression by the capitalist landowners.

On page 58 of the Sakharov book there is mention of a Texan that Sakharov travelled with after the war on a month-long train journey from Moscow to Turkmenistan by the name of Leon Bell. Bell emmigrated from Ukraine to Texas, didn't like the life in Texas, immigrated back to the Soviet Union. He would have been in his early twenties in 1941. I would like to check this out some more. This is a different twist on my migration story. How extensive was the migration from Ukraine to U.S., then BACK to the Soviet Union?

Why?

Where to start..........I think of the images of my father as a child and young adult in the rural area of Southern Ukraine during the most troubled times of that country's modern history. Images of his father - my grandfather - being led away from his home by soldiers loyal to Stalin. To return, then to be led away again, this time never to return and leaving my father an orphan. The Ukraine famines. First one in 1929, then again in 1933. Not due to crop failures, but an extermination effort by Father Stalin. Then finally the image of my father as a young adult, being awakened in the middle of the night by German soldiers retreating from the Red Army, giving the ethnic German villagers only hours to pack their belongings and join the retreat westward.

Ukraine means "Borderland". What a perfect fit. No natural barriers to invasion. The land is rich and fertile, and has always been coveted by invaders from other lands. The people could never feel safe, rather to be tamed, ruled and exterminated at the whims of the conquerers. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, as the communist society of the new Soviet Union was being formed and perfected, the Ukrainians did not fit the true communist mode. The kulaks, the landowners, were far too independent and capitalistic to integrate into the communist society. They had to be tamed.

Germans in France, late 18th Century

The American Revolution provided inspiration for the French Revolution. Let's back up just a bit and examine this connection. The American Revolution was successful THANKS to the French; they helped the colonists defeat the British. The French didn't do it out of love for the Americans, but because they couldn't afford for the British to have the prize of the American continent for themselves. As a result of this venture in aid of the Americans, France's economy was bankrupt. Now the French Revolution starts, much of the ideology based on America's constitution and Bill of Rights. Ben Franklin himself was ambassador to France, and was consulted often as to how the new democracy of France should be structured. Unfortunately the French path to democracy was more circuitous than the American version. The French people were not necessarily French and did not live in a new continent by their own choice. The people on the west side of the Rhine River were in French territory but spoke German. Germany as a country did not exist until much later. During this time there were only a number of individual kingdoms and principalities that happened to share varying versions of the Germanic language.

Revolutions - (the circular pattern emerges and the light shines)

If it weren't for three major revolutions I wouldn't be sitting here writing this. I would exist in a different mind, a different continent perhaps, wouldn't be named what I am, would have no knowledge of these events. My parents would not have met. My children would be someone else's. There would be another human being taking my place on this planet.

The American Revolution begat the French Revolution. Germans in France move to Ukraine. Life is good, the new American West right there in Ukraine. World War I comes along, Germany sends Lenin back to the Soviet Union on a sealed train to make trouble for the czar. Germany and Russia sign a treaty. Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrow the czar - third revolution. Lenin/Stalin collectivize the farms in Ukraine, life in Ukraine takes a turn. WWII happens along because WWI never really settled things. This is now the big one. Some Ukrainian Germans make it back to the west. The others are scattered over Siberia and Central Asia. Western Germany is in ruins after the big one. Although they speak the language, Germany is not their homeland.

My Geneology in Alsace

Two cities in Alsace bear names of my ancestors. These are Worms and Rohrbach. Worms is still on the modern map in France. Rohrbach I haven't been able to locate. I'm sure its there. Has the name been changed?

The family name was originally Reidinger, now modernized to Ridinger. In German, it's pronounced "reedinger" with a bit of the rrrrrrr roll of the German tongue. I pronounce it Ride-inger. That's how I heard it pronounced when first arriving in northern Texas from Bavaria as a six year old in 1960. It seemed to have stuck with my family, although I briefly experimented with the Germanic version, hoping strangers would have an easier time with the pronunciation. It was to no avail. Why Americans continue to butcher this seemingly simple, pronounce-just-like-its-spelled name is beyond me, but the versions I have heard are comical enough to provide ice breaker material at cocktail parties.

Alsace- Lorraine

Interesting area this Alsace. Switched countries a few times, finally ending up with France. I was on the fourth floor of my favorite used book store in Berkeley, California looking for some history specific only to this region and asked the old professor-looking fellow next to me if he'd seen anything. "If you want books about Alsace cooking, you'll find hundreds, but good luck with Alsace history", was his remark. The French Revolution is a new subject for me but I've gotten through a few books. There are a few mentions of what life was like in the countryside, and I think I found a few quotes referencing Alsace, but so far that's the extent of it. I have a feeling the Napoleon years that came after the Revolution had some role in the migrations out of there.

Development of Southern Ukraine

Borderland. That fitting phrase. Ukraine was in the center of intersecting cultures. The Vikings settled from the north, to conquer. The Venetians and Greeks from the South, to trade. The Mongols from the East, to conquer. The Europeans from the West, to farm.

The Ottoman Empire provided some political stability, but it was Russia that truly wanted the prize as a gateway to the Black Sea. Peter the Great made inroads but could not hold the territories. Finally Catherine the Great, after several successful wars against the Ottomans, formed the newly aquired lands into a Russian state called Novorussiia (New Russia). The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the coastal lands between the Bug and Dnieper rivers. Soon after, the cities of Kherson, Mariiupil and Mykolaiv were established. Conditions were set for Russia to establish new trade routes out of her southern border. The only thing still missing was an efficient port with favorable land routes and a deep harbor. That was accomplished in 1794 with the founding of Odessa. A Dutch engineer (Franz de Voland) recommended the site and Catherine II provided her approval on May 27, 1794. Work on the harbor and the city began immediately and the city began to grow.

The steppe regions north of the Black Sea coast are the areas of most interest to me. Unsettled, rich and fertile, now with access to a deep harbor for export of agricultural products, Russia's rulers had the foresight to know that the lands needed to be settled quickly or someday be lost again.

The other side of the family - another digression

I am still keeping in mind that there are two sides of the family. My mother's maiden name is Riss. Her mother's maiden name was Gaul - as in the Gaul region of France. Yes, there is French heritage on that side as well, which I intend to pursue in due time, even though my immediate interest is in the Ukraine/Russian migration of the Ridingers.

What has intrigued on the Riss side is the deep Bavarian tradition and the possible tendency towards Nazi sympathy during those war years. I have heard my mother's stories about the resentment and sense of betrayal after World War I, both towards the French people in exacting unfair retribution from the Germans and towards the German government in caving in to world pressure - sentiments shared by the German masses and my theory for saying to you that the unsatisfactory arrangements which followed WWI led to the rise of the Nazi movement and the atrocities committed during WWII.

So when I see pictures of my great uncle Albert in his German uniform or my uncle Otto in his side-car military motorcycle, I wonder about their sentiments towards the German military cause. There was some prejudice among my older relatives, subsided now with the younger generations, but no doubt some lingering innuendos from even my generational peers that the German way, and perhaps the Bavarian traditions, work better than the ways of other cultures. Can repression in the Nazi tradition ever return? Absolutely, and not necessarily in Germany! The United States is still teeming with neo-Nazi or other "purist" movements, who believe that the human race is in need of some improvement, and the methodology to that end can be only a cleansing, and not a re-habilitation, process. Holocausts still happen. Look at Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. It is an ever-present danger!

A digression on life, death and circularity

A brief digression, but one I believe is pertinent to our study of geneology and historical events. To grasp my concept, we must understand our destinies as human beings not as the result of a single life, or even of one generation, Rather, lets think of the human race as one organism, growing as the billions of individual cells divide, multiply and migrate in seemingly random directions. Yet, as the studies of probability will tell us, even random events can eventually be found to have order.

I made a weekend trip from California back to my home in Colorado on May 22. I flew there from the Bay Area to attend my youngest daughter’s high school graduation, then to celebrate my oldest daughter’s 21st birthday. The graduation ceremony included the usual oratory about new beginnings and new challenges, including a touching rendition of Doctor Suess’ Oh the Places You’ll Go (You have brains in your head and feet in your shoes…..). Ironically, once the weekend was over, the rendition could just as well be called “Oh, the places you may end up”.

I was on the bus returning to the airport after my long weekend. I decided to begin reading the book Night by Elie Weisel, the famous author and holocaust survivor, describing his experience in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. I was reading this book because I had given the other book I was reading, another rendition of concentration camp experiences entitled Ravensbruck, written by a French woman who survived the concentration camp of the same name. One of my acquaintances, a neighbor two doors down on our street, was at my home attending a reception my wife and I were having for our recent graduate. He is a prominent geologist who has crossed into some of the same distant places I have been and shares some of the same experiences. He is also an author who has published two books and is preparing to begin a third. Lastly, he is French by birth and still carries a very pleasing French accent, along with that typically continental flair which we Americans identify with a degree of social sophistication. During the course of the reception for my daughter, we were discussing his work as an author and I mention my interest in the history of the Alsace region. He tells me that the theme of his next book is to be an accounting of his aunt’s experiences in a nazi concentration camp - a bit out of character for him, since his early works had dealt with lost tribes of Polynesia. Nonetheless, the topic has shifted to concentration camps of World War II, at which I mention the book I’m currently reading. “Ravensbruck is where they sent her”, he offers. “The author of the book I’m reading is French”, I reply. Ravensbruck is where French people were sent, and died. In mid-sentence, I walk into the den and take Ravensbruck from my briefcase and hand it to him. He and his wife are on their way to Denmark in a week’s time for him to present and defend his post-doctoral geology thesis. Since the wife wants badly to read Ravensbruck on the airplane ride over, I insist they take my copy instead of taking a chance of not getting their hands on a copy before they leave. I knew there were more copies available at my Berkeley bookstores and it was a very small sacrifice. I can finish reading it later.

The reading of Night was not the only reason my mind was thinking of death that morning at the airport. The evening before we celebrated my oldest daughter’s 21st birthday with dinner at a local restaurant. Later she went with her boyfriend, son of our neighbors next door (the ones between us and the French geologist/author), and some of their relatives in from Kansas for his sister’s graduation (same age as my younger daughter), to a downtown Denver drinking establishment. I spent the evening with my youngest daughter helping her to select a dormitory for her upcoming freshman year. Five minutes after settling into bed, at ten minutes past midnight, the phone rings. My wife answers. It’s my twenty-one year old. “There has been a shooting. The husband shot the wife, then shot himself. Mom, can you come and pick us up.” At five in the morning, after being at the hospital, speaking with doctors, police and next door neighbors, my daughter knocks on the front door. I’m due to leave for the airport in 15 minutes and she wants to say goodbye. “All dead”, was my daughter’s answer when mom asks her for an update. The woman next door, mother of my daughter’s boyfriend and the other high school graduate that weekend, had lost her sister. The couple was not getting along, financial problems, personal issues, what have you. There was a fight at the couple's house (not next door), probably after some drinking (the husband had a reputation). The grandmother, who was visiting for the weekend to see her granddaughter graduate from school and staying at the sister's home, took the children (ages eight and ten) upstairs. It was a large house, a historic schoolhouse renovated as their residence. The grandmother heard screams and knocking on the inside of the bathroom door downstairs. She called the police. The police found the bathroom door locked. The next moments found the bodies of both parents riddled with bullets. The investigation continues, but it appears that the husband shot the wife seven times before being killed by the police. (He may have shot himself, we don't know yet).

The dead couple’s children are now orphans. We knew these kids, we knew their parents. The kids still played on the playground set we gave them when our children had outgrown it. Ironically, this is not the first crisis for our neighbors. A year earlier my daughter’s boyfriend’s father had nearly died in a motorcycle accident and was effectively disabled now. His wife is now not only his caretaker, the sole head of the household, but having watched her younger daughter graduate from high school two days earlier, had now inherited care and custody of a niece and nephew.

Life, death. Optimism, fatalism. Alsace, Ravensbruck. Ukraine, Siberia. What interesting contrasts. Is this the circularity of our lives and our ancestry?

I spent other parts of my weekend, before the tragedy on Sunday night, scanning old photographs of my family for a photo gallery I wanted to present to my mom and dad for their upcoming 90th and 80th birthdays, respectively. I showed dad the photos I had discovered on the AHSRG web site. “Yes, that could be my grandfather” and “the photo of the unidentified soviet soldier was my Uncle Wilhelm – he is the only Ridinger and only villager to enlist in the Red Army”, was the response to my two prepared questions. “He was captured by the Germans and spent time as a German POW. What a twist. A German, now a Soviet soldier, in a German POW camp.

My mother could not make it to my daughter’s graduation. She was bedridden with a chronic back ache. My dad was at the reception on Saturday. I sent food home since mom couldn’t get up to prepare their meals. My wife and I went to their house Sunday afternoon to take more food over and check on them. While both have held their aging well without complaining, each time I visit I am immediately taken back by their increased frailty and deteriorating health. My wife and I help them prepare lunch, discussing re-arrangement of the kitchen for “safer” access, elimination of the ever-dangerous step stool needed for access of upper cabinet space. More visitors arrive, an elderly couple, acquaintance of my parents. The visiting woman at first seems seemingly alert and full of entertaining off-the-wall remarks. But she drifts from past to present, sometimes unable to hear or comprehend our questions. The conversation swerves like an alcoholic after a night of binge drinking. She suffers from dementia.

My mother, father, the older couple, photos of dead relatives, Nazi concentration camps, orphaned children. I come for a weekend of celebration for new beginnings, graduations, new-found freedom on 21st birthdays. I am on the airplane flight back to California reminded of death’s intervention and mastery over the lives of all. Circularity.

After I’ve written this piece during the airplane ride back, the flight has not yet landed, so I decide to read some more of Night, now into the descriptions of the endless processions, roll-calls and moving about. People always standing in lines never knowing what is up ahead. When the plane lands the passengers disembark on the tarmac instead of the traditional swing-out accordion ramp leading directly inside. Immediately the passengers are led into a canvas “tunnel” which meanders from the plane to the terminal. The irony was not lost. Single file, look ahead, where is this leading? One hundred yards, still no end in sight. Two hundred yards, more turns. Where is this leading? Finally, the terminal. Happy ending. The Jews at Auschwitz weren’t so lucky.

Breakthrough in Karlsruhe

My cousin, who lives near Karlsruhe, turned me on to geneological research done by Dr. Karl Stumpp. Together we scanned the names of Germans who migrated from there to Ukraine or Russia. One of the names is a Georg Reidinger born in the Alcase region, presumably in Rohrbach, who moved to Rohrbach, Odessa oblast. Other Reidingers also came from Alsace, moving to places such as Landau, Munchen, Liebenthal. The settlers named the new villages after German villages they knew. I now have a place to start.

Another Breakthrough

Searching for Rohrbach, Ukraine, I was led to a website posted by American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. It shows the prominent influence of the Ridinger family. One photo shows the three Ridinger brothers. The gentleman on the left is my Grandfather Johann. Jacob Ridinger was the first to emmigrate to America, to Sutton, Nebraska. The family was closely linked to the Ochsners.

My Grandfather the Mayor of Rohrbach ?

Johann Ridinger, born 1894, could be my grandfather and is reported by AHSGR to have been the Mayor. My father told me his name and said he was a public official. There were many Johann's. This one couldn't be my grandfather; he was only 25 when my dad was born. But I'm sure he was somehow related. After that, is there a public record? Who was his father? I believe I can trace Johann's lineage (provided he is the right one) to myself. Oh my, though, where are the records? Government's overthrown, village names are changed, records destroyed, cemeteries razed.....

Lodi, California

I happen to be living in the Bay Area right now when I come across some old correspondence from a distant cousin in Texas. He referred to the daughter of some Ridinger who moved from Nebraska to Lodi, California. With help from the Familyologist, I checked the California death records and found Emma Ochsner, born 10 April, 1905, died 8 Nov 2000. She is the daughter of Jacob Ridinger, who immigrated in 1910 (Ellis Island). Could it be Jacob was Johann the mayor's brother, my dad's uncle? I am finding many references to Germans who settled in the Lodi/Stockton area through the AHSGR. Seems a number of the Rohrbach and Worms families ended up there.

Rohrbach and Worms Now

I believe circa 1929 the names of these villages was changed to Russian names. Rohrbach became Novosvetlovka. Worms became Vynohradne. When looking from Google Earth, the latter is located close to the highway, but for the life of me I can't see a road going to Novosvetlovka! The place is obviously still very rural, but one can somewhat see the same land divisions that showed in the earlier aerial photos I saw which were taken during World War II.

German Settlement - The Early Years

The first German families began to arrive in the fall of 1809 following land grants under the reign of Czar Alexander I. They built houses and planted vineyards and orchards. Apple, pear, plum, cherry and apricot trees. Wells were dug which provided plentiful water. The villagers were generally poor and indebted, but money allowances were provided by the local administration. Aside from occassional outbreaks of German measles and similar children's diseases, the village was generally spared of catostrophic events such as floods, epidemics and earthquakes. Illiteracy, graft and alcoholism was reported since schools, churches and law enforcement was a bit slower to follow the settlements. A minister was received in 1812, but died after two years. Not until 1820 did a significant improvement begin to occur when a firm commissioner was appointed to enforce the law, followed in 1824 by a respected minister and in 1826 by a schoolmaster.

Alsace Struggles, Ukraine Dreams

Why did Germans want to leave Alsace?:

July 25-30, 1789 Peasant revolt in Alsace
Reign of Terror: 1793-1794.
October 17, 1793 - Austrian army is driven out.
Dec. 16, 1797 - Austria recognizes French sovereinty.
1809 - Napolean drafts Germans to fight against the Austrians.
1812 - Napolean drafts Germans to fight against the Russians.

Why did Germans want to enter Ukraine?

Free land
Money allowance for Re-settlement
No forced military conscription
Freedom of speech, religion

Photos - Germany

(L-R) Manfred, William, Ernst
Ridinger, circa 1958.
Aspiring author in the center.










William and Maria Ridinger
Haunstetten, Germany
circa 1959
Author's parents.