2009 | Rathkamp Family

Mr. Rath, Meet Ms. Kamp…the origins of the Rathkamp Surname

My blogging software has a feature that shows me search strings people use to find my website. Some of the search terms are pretty entertaining. Like last week when somebody somehow found me by searching “pic of an old German family having a fight”. Other times, I can see Google doing its job by pointing to my site as people are searching for specific information related to some of my more “obscure” distant ancestors.

One common search string has to do with the origins of my last name, Rathkamp. I too have always wondered about the meaning of my surname, but didn’t actually find out until about a year ago. I always had hopes that maybe Rathkamp meant “noble Viking warrior” or “wise Saxon tribal chief”. It turns out the origin of the Rathkamp name is a little less dramatic. So for the 373 Rathkamps living in the U.S., I’m here to enlighten you.

I’m not fluent in German, but I’ll do my best to describe some different naming conventions and will try to correlate these to names to my own family tree. Some German surnames were derived from jobs or professions such as Schneider (tailor), Bauer (farmer), or Zimmerman (carpenter). Others were derived from a physical trait of the original bearer such as Tonne (big belly), Rothaar (red hair). Other names were patronymic, meaning they were passed from a father to a son such as Leitzke or Niesl. In both of these cases the “ke” and “l” at the end of each forms the diminutive of Leitz or Nies (a derivitive of Dionysus). There are also examples such as Wadenstorfer or Neuberg which both probably refer to a home town.

In the cases of Waege and Rathkamp, each of these refer to physical characteristics of the land my ancestors either owned or lived on. Waege or Wege refers to a “way” or a “walk” or “path”.

Rathkamp is formed by two different words: rath and kamp. Neither word is very easy to find in a German to English translator, so I’m guessing they’re both old German. Kamp is derived from the Latin word Campus. Traditionally, it referred to the strip of land around the walls of a city or castle. Over time I think it morphed into meaning any type of field. The closest comparison I can make in English for Rath is to “root or pull out”, in this case specifically trees or bushes.

So the moment you’ve been waiting for… Rathkamp refers to a field that originally was populated by trees or bushes.

So much for Vikings or Saxon kings.

Did They Come Alone?

[singlepic id=17 w=320 h=240 float=left]It’s hard to imagine the conditions our ancestors faced in Europe and even harder to imagine what finally happened in their lives to ultimately get them to commit to leaving their homes and families. I’m sure there had to be the promise of opportunity, but this was a much heavier decision than “Applebees, Red Lobster or Olive Garden”. When they finally did make the commitment, did the whole family come? Individuals? Extended families? How did they decide who stayed? Was it a lack of funds that forced some to stay?

I’ve known for a couple years that my 2nd great grandparents, Fritz & Dora Rathkamp arrived in the US in 1868. Tonight I finally found the passenger list. They arrived in New York on the ship New York on August 17, 1868. They, along with their daughter Johanna, were three of 637 passengers. The Statue of Liberty wouldn’t be commissioned for another 18 years.

Two years ago, I would have looked at the passenger list and only recognized them. Today though I recognize some other names as well as some other towns near their village of Oeftinghausen in Germany. The villages of Wesenstedt and Schwaforden are also represented. Other surnames include Wetenkamp, Hulsemann, Meyer, Halbemeyer, Finke and Windhorst. Wetenkamp is a name I’ve seen repeatedly. In fact, Christian Wetenkamp eventually married Johanna Rathkamp. That’s a story for another post (hint: juicy story).

There are a couple things that interest me about this list. First, the oldest traveler in their group is 35. Second, it seems everybody on this list ended up farming in Minnesota except for Fritz Rathkamp. He remained in Milwaukee his entire life. My theory is that there was a lot of opportunity for a carpenter in the rapidly growing town of Milwaukee. Was this the plan all along? I see the attraction from both perspectives. Fritz was trained as a carpenter in Germany, but his occupation was listed as “Heurling” or hired farm hand. The last thing he probably wanted to do was work on another farm. For the others, the thought of going to Minnesota and homesteading 160 acres was probably also attractive.

View Ancestral Home in a larger map

Fun With Google Maps, Part 1

When people visit downtown Milwaukee, a lot of them comment on how many old buildings they see. Actually, what they see is a fraction of what once was. Milwaukee has managed to replace its history with parking structures, sports venues, and bland concrete buildings. I still love my home town, but the remaining buildings only give you a slight feel for what it must have been like in the late 1800’s.

I’ve often tried to imagine what it was really like. There are some photo collections on the websites of the Milwaukee Public Library and the UWM Library. There are literally thousands of pictures to look at, but for this post I was only interested in pictures from the 2nd ward, specifically within a 2 or 3 block radius from where my 2nd great grandparents Fritz & Dora Rathkamp lived. The thing that really caught me off guard were the pictures of the Exposition Building which was built in 1881 and destroyed by fire in 1905. I had no idea this building was part of Milwaukee’s past.

Shown below is an embedded Google Map. If you click on the blue balloons, you will see pictures of buildings that are long gone positioned over the corresponding locations. The map is interactive, so go ahead and click on some of the balloons, zoom in and out, and move the map around. If you click the link below the map, you will be taken to the actual Google Maps page where you can drag the “little man” onto a street to enter into Google’s street view. Have fun!

View Milwaukee’s 2nd Ward, Late 1800’s in a larger map

He Left the Horse Out in the Yard

[singlepic id=16 w=320 h=240 float=right]Hearing about the current shortage of the H1N1 flu vaccine, I’m reminded of the fact that this is not by any stretch the first nor the most severe flu epidemic in our country’s history. My great grandfather, Fredrich Walz was one of the many victims of the Spanish Influenza in 1918. In an earlier post, I mentioned how the Walz family came to America in 1905 from Russia. They settled in Freeman, SD where Fredrich was a horse breeder.

As I was preparing for this post I went to the website of the Freeman Courier where the headline ironically reads, “Fighting the Flu”. My grandmother, Emma (Walz) Niesl was only 5 years old when her father died. I have a filmed interview of her conducted by my aunt Sandie (Niesl) Patten. In this interview, my grandmother talks about her memories of her father’s untimely death. Tragically, her mother Sophia (Bischke) Walz also passed away at an early age. My grandmother lost both parents by the age of 13, but was taken in by family members in Milwaukee.

The Ida Brockhaus Time Machine

I have a lot of family history pictures that originally belonged to my great aunt Grace (Waege) Larson. Just the other day I realized that out of all these pictures, the pictures I have of my Great Grandmother Ida (Brockhaus) Waege are the only pictures I own that do a really nice job of spanning an ancestor’s entire lifetime.

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Brockhaus Family Pictures

[singlepic id=7 w=320 h=240 float=left]These are two of my favorites from my collection of family pictures. The first picture was taken on the porch of the Brockhaus family farm nearl Campbellsport, Wisconsin in about 1913. Seated from left to right in the back row are my Great Great Grandparents William and Pauline Brockhaus, their son-in-law Oscar Schwinge and their daughter Hilda. In front are my great aunt Grace Waege, my Great Grandmother Ida, my grandmother Alice (Waege) Rathkamp and Emil Brockhaus. I’m pretty sure my Great Grandfather, Bill Waege took this picture. I’m not sure exactly why this is a favorite of mine, but I could spend hours looking at it.

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The next picture includes Pauline and her son Emil Brockhaus. I still haven’t identified the little girl or the woman, but I assume they are Emil’s daughter and wife. The body language in this picture needs no translation. I have very little information on Emil, but I do know he died in 1946 and is buried next to his parents in the Hustisford Cemetery. In the 1920 census, Emil shows up twice. First as a farm hand in Oak Grove, Wisconsin and next living with his parents in Hustisford, Wisconsin. Both entries list him being divorced. Go figure.

The Swede in the Weeds…Such a Hassell

If I am the trunk of my genealogical tree, Olive Hassell is the closest branch with the most mystery surrounding it. Olive is my paternal great grandmother, married to William J. Rathkamp. I know almost nothing specific about her other than her date of death. I know she was born in Sweden (my only non-German ancestor) in or about 1886. I know that when her family came to the United States, they lived in Michigan. I’m fairly certain, based on the 1900 US Census and the 1905 Wisconsin census, that her father was Charles Hassell and that they lived in Iron[singlepic id=6 w=320 h=240 float=left] Mountain. After all, how many “Olive Hassells” could there be in Michigan? There is nothing else I know of tying Olive to Charles. Charles’ first wife (Olive’s mother?) died in about 1890.

I’m pretty sure she married William Rathkamp sometime between 1906, the year his first wife Sophie Hartmann died, and 1909, the year my grandfather was born. That’s about it.

The lack of information seems to bring on a lot of questions. Who were her parents? When specifically did they arrive in America? I haven’t found any arrival information. Were she and William married in Wisconsin or Michigan? I searched the marriage index for Milwaukee County at the Golda Meier Library at UWM and found nothing. How and where did they meet? Did she move to Milwaukee alone or possibly with a sibling? What were the circumstances surrounding her early death at age 40?

One last note…

Many genealogists talk about the missing 1890 census. The lack of an 1890 census hasn’t really been that big of a deal for me, except in the case of Olive. With that census, I probably could confirm or deny her relationship to Charles and I would probably also know the identity of her mother. Bummer.

If anybody has any ideas or information, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

Neighbors

It’s amazing what you find when [singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=right] really look closely at a census sheet. The genealogy software I use is Family Tree Maker which is owned and developed by Ancestry.com. One of the nice things about this software is the “shaking leaf” it shows on a family member when it thinks it has information you’d be interested in. My grandfather, George Niesl had one of these shaking leafs tonight and even though I was pretty confident there was nothing new that I’d find, I clicked on the link anyway. FTM then took me to its search window where there was a link to view the 1920 census. Again, I was pretty sure I already had this record, but I clicked on it again.

It took 2 seconds to notice that my great grand aunt, Johanna (Rathkamp) Wetenkamp and her daughter Dorothy lived next door to my grandfather and his family on 20th and Vliet in Milwaukee. How many times had I looked at this record before?

Note also my grandfather is listed as “daughter”. Guess George wasn’t a masculine enough name.

The interactive map below shows what 20th and Vliet looks like today.

View Larger Map

Pirates, Badgers, and The Dachs Family Singers

Last week I received an email from Annemarie Schrimpf. It turns out Annemarie and I are third cousins 1x removed. Her GG Grandfather, Johann Dachs, is my GGG Grandfather. Annemarie still lives in the area of Bavaria that was the ancestral home of my 2nd Great Grandfather, Alois Dachs. Alois came to Milwaukee in about 1880, where he became a saloon keeper.

Annemarie told me she got a kick out of my DNA Test story, and relayed the following story (keep in mind “Dachs” is German for “Badger”):

You must know the hole story about Dominik Dachs

(You can see, that all times we were looking for the emigrated members of our family).

In the seventies, there was given “Dominik Dachs und seine Katzenpiraten” in the Austrian TV. (By the way, it was a comedy for childreen.)

My mother read that, but she read “Kaspiranten” (like “Musikanten”) and so she thought, that would be an music-group. She spoke by herself: It is possible, that Dominik is a descendant of the members of our family who went to Austria und because all Dachses are talented in music, it may be, he has an own band.

In this time we had an old antenna and to see Austrian TV was impossible. Mama went to her neighbors and asked her friend: “Mari, may I look Austrian TV by You? There is possibly a relative of us is on TV and I want look, if he has some similarity to us”.

Mari sad: “Yes, off course”, and she went to cowshed (stable) to to milk her cows.

So my mother and the neighbors son – Hermann (30) – were sitting in the living room an looking TV.

Later my mother told me the ending: “What do you think, what happened? What do you think what we saw? A badger! A really badger!!! And I said to Hermann: No! This one has no similarity to anyone of our family!!!”

The First Walz

My maternal grandmother, Emma (Walz) Niesl was born in Freeman, SD in 1913 to Fred Walz and Sophie Bischke. The Walzes and Bischkes were German, but we had always been told as kids that they had lived in Russia or Ukraine. This seemed to make our family history just a little exotic, almost as if they were gypsies.

The Walzes and Bischkes were the very last of my ancestors to immigrate to the United States, in roughly 1905. There are a ton of stories that have been passed down from my grandmother over the years, some of them very funny, some sad. But also fascinating is the bigger picture of the “Germans from Russia“. Because my mom’s brother George always provided the genealogy on that side of the family, I never spent much time learning about these people. But theirs is a truly fascinating story which starts in Germany.

My 4th Great Grandfather, Johannes Walz was born in Neidlingen, Germany (Wuerttemburg) in 1788. We think of the very high standard of living Germans enjoy today without realizing things were not so cozy back then. Taxes were extremely high, religious persecution was in vogue, young men were drafted to fight wars, and unless you were the first born male, the family business or farm was not in your future. Prospects for a bright future were…not so bright.[singlepic id=3 w=320 h=240 float=right]

So when Catherine II, Czarina of Russia, and herself a German, issued a proclamation begging Germans to move to and cultivate the unsettled lands she had just won from Turkey, many jumped at the opportunity. Her request was made even sweeter by offering them the ability to govern themselves, no taxes, free land, religious freedom, and the right to leave Russia at any time. In 1809, Johannes Walz and his family were among the first to settle in a colony called Neudorf, what now is Karmanova in Moldova, about 85 miles north of Odesa.

According to the information I’ve read, the first several years called for a lot of resilience and adjustments. The citizens of Neudorf, while enjoying their new freedoms, also suffered from disease, a 4 year locust plague, a hail storm that devastated crops, a livestock disease that killed 1400 head of cattle, on and on. Still they forged ahead. They were making homes for themselves.

In 1871, Czar Alexander II revoked the privileges originally offered by his grandmother Catherine and his father, Czar Alexander. This meant the citizens of Neudorf as well as the 3,000 other German colonies were now reduced to peasant status. They were drafted into the Russian army in 1874. It’s this backdrop that eventually brought my ancestors to the rough plains of South Dakota in about 1905.