My buddy, Dar, has roots both in Colonial America and also in the area I am going to describe below. Over the weekend we found a Patriot for Dar. I can find her tree by using darkaso on Ancestry. It is her McIver side of her family that goes back to a man named James Rhyndress who was living in Dutchess County NY during the Revolution. It is likely that he fought with my own ancestors who were living in next door county: Orange.
It is Dar's Seltsam side that show ancestors who go back to the area that I am going to show below. Katharina Gottert Straki ancestors lived for at least two and maybe three generations in Hatzfeld, Hungary.
In looking for a map which would show the location I found a PDF that has great information:
https://www.zichydorfonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hatzfeld-FB-History.pdf
A quick synopsis of the information on this site says that archaeological findings point to a settlement on this site as early as the bronze age. In 1332-1337 it was documented as Chumbul and as was true for all of the Banat it belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary. The community was completely destroyed during the Turkish conquest. It was then vacant land leased to various cattle herders to pasture their herds.
In 1766 the town of Hatzfeld was colonized with families from various regions of the German Reich: Alsace, Lorraine, Sarrland, Luxembourg, Baden, the Palatinate and from Franconia along the Rhine and Main Rivers. There were 402 houses, a church, rectory, school and tavern in Hatzfeld which was the largest settlement in the Banat lowlands.
https://www.zichydorfonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hatzfeld-FB-History.pdf
The rest of the article is of great interest, but I will not copy more at this time.
So where was the Banat? and where was Hatzfeld? On the below map it is the community labeled Jimbola that is in the very middle and just above Timisoara.
And where is the Banat?
There is a great site with maps and history at:
https://folkdancefootnotes.org/culture/ethnicity-history-geography/banat-region-romania-serbia-hungary/
And the below map is taken from that site:
Basically what Dar told me is that her folklore in her family is that they were in a German community living in the Banat before the move to American shores, so her family history in that area would have begun in 1776. Just about the time of the American revolution.
My own research has shown that the Thirty Years War began in 1618 and led to 96 years of sporadic fighting that left the Palatinate of Germany decimated. This was a deciding factor in the founding of our country and I have ancestors who fit into this category of having left the Palatinate to settle here. This settlement of our shores would have continued until the Revolutionary war when immigration pretty much stopped....perhaps this is why these people moved east instead of west? This would be interesting to research.
Dar's people lived in the Banat until a move to Michigan to work in a chemical plant. I need to get Dar to fill in this time period for me....from her tree it would seem that it would have been late 1800s or early 1900s as the generation that made the move were born in Hungary in 1858-1867 and died in Michigan in 1914 and 1942. The name of the town in Michigan where this couple lived until death was Wyandotte. I found an article that announces the fact that Wyandotte Chemical Corporation was acquired in 1969 by BASF.
An early figure was Captain John Baptiste Ford, who used the salt to create soda ash, which in turn was used to create plate glass. In 1893, he created Michigan Alkali Company, which created baking soda, soda ash, and lye. The company, later renamed Wyandotte Chemicals Co., went on to create a variety of soaps and cleaners, eventually becoming part of BASF and expanding into the BASF industrial complex.This almost had to have been what bought Dar's ancestors to our shores....
