Meet the Walters

Unlike some of my other ancestors that I’ve heard (and told) the same stories about over and over, there never seemed to be many family tales about my German heritage via my mother’s mother. I never really knew anything too specific, even though it’s a quarter of my ancestry and the most recent.

But today at my mom’s house we found an old suitcase in the back of a closet. In it there was a real treasure trove — about a dozen old official documents, all carefully mounted under glass and wrapped in newspaper, some from as far back as the mid-1800s. Birth certificates, confirmation certificates, marriage certificates, all in German but loosely translated on the back.

Then — what’s this one? An emigration approval form for my great-great grandfather, Johann Walter, to bring his family — including his wife Lisette and four-year-old Anna, my great-grandmother-to-be — to America in 1884. What a moment that must have been, holding that paper in his hands. Through all the locations listed on the documents and a little web searching we pieced together where they came from. Maybe even a little speculation about why they left.

Turns out my center of German gravity is what would later be East Germany, mostly in the northeastern region of Mecklenburg about 1.5 hours north of Berlin. Seems Mecklenburg was an isolated Baltic backwater at the time, with not particularly fertile land and fresh from generations of serfdom and a subsequent failed progressive reform movement. Unless you were a lord you were a peasant, or at least your parents had likely been, and you were probably worse off than ever once granted limited freedoms (including freedom from support from your former lords). Germany had only been a formal country since Johann was a young man, and social mobility was virtually nil. Not sure how he met a nice girl from Chemnitz, much further south, that’s a mystery we didn’t solve.

The only choice for many was to leave, and so they did. The emigration rate from the Mecklenburg region in the late 1800s was one of the highest in the world.

Johann Walter was near the tail end of that wave. The one story my mother remembers hearing about him is that he was a coachman, a stagecoach driver for one of the local fat cats, and he was a favorite for his willingness to drive fast. Which makes you think, ‘ooo, sounds like a charming rogue, had some spunk in tough times’. Maybe. Or maybe he was basically a frustrated limo driver, in a time and place where that occupation was more or less the glass ceiling for non-nobility. At age 34 he took his chance at a new life.

I wonder if this discovery explains part of my attraction to that part of the world? Some residual inner connection, little karmic tentacles? I’ve been working on my long-term East photo project since 1998, compulsively going to the region since 1991, and was a fan of Kundera and Koudelka for a few years before that. People have always asked if I have family ties somewhere over there and I’ve said no. Weirdly, the former East Germany is one of the few places I haven’t worked in. Though I have felt the most tingle of resonance with the landscape and people in Czech Republic, just over the border.

Another strange coincidence is that my daughter and I, just for fun, were recently shopping online for European castles. You know, for a summer place, a fixer-upper. Anyway, many of the listings were in what was East Germany (surprisingly affordable by the way). I realize now it’s possible we might have looked at Johann’s former workplace.