I know I’m behind again with my posting (and I will catch up soon), but this morning as I’m working with my German ancestors, my heart is just aching as I find families like the one above. Elisabetha had 18 children. Only ONE survived more than one year. How did these women do it? This couple married in 1799.
Maria Ernestina Sofia below had 14 children. Two survived childhood. In those days, there is great loss in almost every single family. I imagine these dear women, heavy with child, year after year, and then, as soon as they arrive, the babies leave them. How did they hold their hearts together?? I can’t imagine.
I am systematically cleaning up the records in FamilySearch for every single person and every single family in the records I digitized last year in Grossgartach. Every day I work with records like these and remember these mothers who soldiered on with broken hearts. I hope to embrace them one day and see their families reunited.
The artwork below is called “Carried by the Covenant” by Joseph Brickey. This woman represents, to me, these mothers who loved and lost. She watches over me every day as I do my German research in old documents gathered and collected while we were in Germany. I work with these records every day, honoring and remembering these good people from my ancestral village of Grossgartach.
Here is my work place, where the magic of gathering families happens.
Here’s where these records came from:
