QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Prussian plains, noble districts and dead ends

Many pieces of the anecdotal history were missing or indistinct when Colin Tesch began a five-year quest in 1978, and some of his discoveries may be familiar to others who have undertaken similar explorations. “Round about the time I started on what turned out to be a much bigger and more absorbing task than I ever dreamed possible, ancestor-hunting had, for some time, been something of a social craze but from that viewpoint I’m not guilty. “Off and on over 20 or more years I had wanted to know more – my father Edward Ludwig died a couple of years ago aged close to 87, one of his brothers was still going at 85 and there were several youngsters between there and 75 or so. “Memories, never very clear, were fading and nobody was ever quite sure of beginnings; there were divergent views about two brothers and a cousin who had arrived from Germany but I had never heard any mention of a date beyond uncertain reference to the 1860s. “Everybody knew that the Logan River, Waterford and Bethania played a part in the early life of the Tesches – I knew that my branch had gone to Maleny – one or more had gone to Bundaberg – the name cropped up at Kingaroy, etc, etc – but it was all vague and disconnected. “I set out to trace my branch, which led me to think in terms of ‘the Maleny Tesches’, but also hoped to find others said to have come out about the same time.” Disparities in names and dates Four distinct branches of the family tree arrived on four ships over 12 years, beginning with 10 Tesches spanning three generations on the one vessel – La Rochelle – in 1863. Challenges began with identifying and confirming the presence of adult father and son both named Gottfried Ludwig aboard La Rochelle – no mean feat in the paper trails of those days! “More stumbling-blocks were introduced first by the second Gottfried Ludwig,” Colin wrote, “who turned out to be the same man as a ‘Friederick’ Ludwig. He had puzzled me and it also took quite a while trying (not very successfully) to sort out such things as which Carl was which, when some records showed ‘Carl’ only or Carl Frederick or just plain Charles. The fact that ‘C’ also stood for Christian did not help.” The intermingling and repetition of Christian names made birth, death and marriage records an onerous task – for handwritten ‘copperplate’ scribes at the time as much as later researchers, and Colin mused that perhaps some registry clerks could be forgiven for not recording every one of three or more Christian names every single time!

Generations and marriages also sowed confusion, particularly with shorter lifespans and greater mortality being commonplace, and Gottfried Ludwig (II) turned out to be a case in point. At 31, the eldest son of his identically-named father, he was clearly identified as a ‘Waterford’, one of whose sons became ‘the’ Maleny Tesch. “He was married twice and by his first marriage (to a Koff) had a daughter and a son … By his second marriage (to a Kempf) he had five sons and two daughters. He also had twin daughters who died as small children. “I found that death records could be inaccurate in respect of the names of surviving children, which are provided by “the informant” at the time of the parent’s death. I did not pursue a lot of death certificates and the dates shown are in many cases uncertain and could be one, two or even three years one way or the other … Again, and in other cases, naturalisation records show a stated age at the date of taking the oath but this does not always agree with a date arrived at some other way.” Why did they leave? “The oldies,” wrote Colin, “recall that their oldies talked of dissatisfaction with things in the homeland; the comments mainly relating to the accent placed on two years’ compulsory military service and seemingly the Prussian way of life in general. “Following the separation of Queensland … the interest of those seeking fresh fields was stimulated by … Heussler who went from Queensland to Berlin in 1860 as Agent-General and Immigration Officer. His stories of “noble districts” which were awaiting development, and offers of assisted passages to those who could not afford to pay set the wheels in motion and, with the accent on farmer and artisan stock, thousands of German people tore up their roots and set sail.” In the pre-internet era of the early 1980s, when only the Encyclopaedia Britannica Atlas could reliably depict the lands behind a Berlin Wall which would stand for another decade, towns and villages could still be unidentifiable, given the number of times the victors of history have chosen to apply their own nomenclature to the landscape. “As a closing thought,” Colin concluded his research, a year before his death, “anyone contemplating battling with the Russians (or someone) for permission to delve into records which may have survived the devastation of war … might not be too keen to start at all … following advice from relations in [then] West Germany that anybody ‘snooping’ around searching records in the East could well be looked on with some suspicion. I am satisfied that there is nothing to be gained by delving further into the past.”

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