St Mary’s Church in Osnabrück

We agreed to meet up with Carol Saint-Clair again on Friday afternoon in order to conclude our tour of historic Osnabrück by visiting two of the city’s great churches: the Lutheran St Mary’s Church (St Marienkirche) on Mrktplatz and the Catholic St Peter’s Cathedral (Dom) a block or so away.  First stop was St Mary’s Church.

The buttressed east side of St Marienkirche.

Gargoyle on the church’s east side.

The present St Mary’s is probably the second or third church to be built on the Mrktplatz. A simple one-nave church stood on the place in the early 11th century. By 1300 the church had grown to a Gothic three-nave structure with aisles. Arches were added in the 15th century. As Osnabrück grew over the centuries to be a prominent member of the Hanseatic League its prominent citizens began to look upon St Mary’s as their own church as opposed to the Cathedral a block away and its Rome-appointed Bishop. The Protestant Reformation came to Osnabrück in 1543 and St Mary’s became a Lutheran church. Today it is part of the Evangelical Lutheran State Church of Hanover.

View of altar and triumphal cross from the church’s west side.

This room is in back, behind the organ and under the west tower.

The baptismal font dates from 1560.

Stained glass window by 2oth century artist Johannes Schreiter was installed in 1992.

The winged altar was built in 1515 in Antwerp.

The triumphal cross over the altar dates from the 13th century.

Last supper table and sculpture by Heinz Heiber (installed in 1995).

Same view but with my camera held vertically.

Close-up of table and sculpture.

Views from altar looking west.

The Flentrop organ was built in Zaandam, Netherlands and installed in 1967. It was also extensively restored in 1998.

Tombstone inscription for Justus Moeser, a prominent 18th century jurist who lived in Osnabrück.

St Mary and Child (Marie mit Kind), sculpture from the 16th century.

We then walked from Mrktplatz to Domplatz and visited St Peter’s Cathedral. That will be the subject of my next posting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Searching for my Theler Ancestors: Hunteburg

After visiting Dielingen on our Friday morning (May 25, 2012) tour through Theler land  we said goodbye to Westphalia and crossed the border to  Lower Saxony. We drove through the farm community of Meyerhofen and soon arrived in Hunteburg to see the third and last church where our ancestors worshiped.

Present-day Hunteburg has a population of about 4,000 and includes Meyerhofen and a couple of other smaller communities. Hunteburg itself is now a part of the municipality of Bohmte (a town about eight kilometers to the south) in the district of Osnabrück.

Christian Theler moved away from Hedemer Buchholz to Meyerhofen during the time when France took control of northwest Germany. Most of the people of Westphalia during the 18th and 19th centuries were Protestant. Before Napoleon Hunteburg belonged to the bishopric of Osnabrück where rules of religion differed from Westphalia. In the southern and western parts of Germany most of the people were Catholic but Osnabrück was about half Catholic and half Protestant. The rulers of the bishopric alternated between the Bishop of Osnabrück and his Protestant counterpart. And some towns were allowed to have a Protestant church while others had only a Catholic. The Protestants of Hunteburg were told that they could worship at the Catholic Church but they never did. Instead some frequented the Protestant church in Venne to the south while others including our Thelers preferred to attend service in Dielingen.

Napoleon met his Waterloo in 1814 and the next year the Congress of Vienna formed to  divvy up those parts of Europe that used to belong to France. Westphalia was given to Prussia but Hunteburg and Osnabrück became part of the Kingdom of Hanover and the rules that people lived with for years began to change. It took a while for the old rules of land ownership and inheritance to change but the rules of the bishopric regarding places of worship changed right away and the Protestants of Hunteburg were allowed to have their own  church. St Matthew’s was built in 1815 and the congregation held their first service within a year even though it  took two full years to complete the construction. And so our Thelers stopped going to Dielingen and had their children baptized in Hunteburg.

The church was designed in a simple hall format and it looks a lot like the existing Catholic church.

Display in front of the church.

It looks like there will be a wedding soon.

1815 cornerstone.

The Theler family members who made their way to Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1830s and 1840s have traced their ancestry back to this Christan Theler and I had hoped to be able to uncover some evidence during my trip to Germany to connect my family to the Ohio branch. What led me to Hunteburg originally was my great grandfather Johann Friedrich Theler’s statement on his marriage certificate that he was baptized in Hunteburg in 1822 and the researcher for the Theler Family Report of 1971 wrote that Christian and his family were the only Thelers who worshiped at Hunteburg during that time.  Christian had a child baptized in Hunteburg in 1821 and another 18 months later in 1823. There is no record to be found of any Theler baptized in 1822. So it is possible that there was another child born to Christian and his wife Ann Marie that year but it is highly unlikely. Perhaps my Friedrich had the wrong year for his birth. But there are no records for anyone named Theler in Hunteburg between the years 1825 and 1865.

A few months before our trip last year I discovered a Christian Tegeler, wife Ann Marie and three children including a boy named Friedrich who boarded a ship in Bremen and landed in Baltimore in 1838. I have been studying this family since our trip to see if they could possibly be mine but the information I have been able to dig up seems to point to another Christian Theler who lived in Levern, a village that is now part of the town of Stemwede (along with Dielingen) and is just a few miles north of Hedemer Buchholz. The huge LDS database on Familysearch.org contains just about every baptism and marriage record for churches in Westphalia including Alswede and Dielingen and I have uncovered hundreds of records for Theler and its surname variations. There are very few records, however, for Osnabrück and Hunteburg and other areas that once were in the Kingdom of Hanover. Maybe some day they will appear.

And so I will continue my search.  I didn’t find much in regards to my personal genealogy during our three days in Osnabrück but I’m still glad we went there and visited some churches and met some people and took some photos. And I learned a lot about German history!

My next two postings will contain photos of Osnabrück’s two great churches, one Lutheran and one Catholic

The Sunshine Award

One of my blog followers, mvschulze, has nominated me for the Sunshine Award.

MV describes his blog as “Stream of Thought observations, images, and more” and he can be found on http://mvschulze.wordpress.com. His observations are spot-on and so are his photos!

There are a number of rules that must be followed if you accept this award and then you have to answer a few questions.

Here are the rules:

Rule 1.  Post the Sunshine Award logo on your blog
Rule 2.  Nominate 10 fellow bloggers
Rule 3.  Announce their nomination in their blog’s comment section
Rule 4.  Mention links back to their blog, including a link to the person who nominated you.
Rule 5.  Answer the questions.  This is designed to help people get to know you better.

Here are my ten nominations:

1. http://strassenfotojournal.com  Strassenfotojournal –  Street Photography By Cornelia Lohs. Cornelia walks the streets on three continents taking her candid black and white photos.

2. http://ivonprefontaine.com  Ivon Prefontaine’s blog is called Teacher as Transformer: Education, Leadership, Life, and Transformation. Ivon’s postings often contain pretty pictures and even prettier poems.  He often reblogs gems from other bloggers.

3. http://2summers.net  2Summers: An American suburbanite in quirky Johannesburg. Heather Mason likes to walk around Joburg and take pictures with her cell phone. Then she writes about her experiences and shows us her Instagram treasures.

4. http://rebeccaplotnick.wordpress.com   Rebecca Plotnick’s blog is called RL Photography: Fine Art Photography. Rebecca has been blogging a lot about Paris lately. Her photos are fantastic!

5. http://ithinkthereforeiamsterdam.wordpress.com  Callum and Laura’s blog is called ithinkthereforeiamsterdam: Bikes, boats and bitterballen. Amsterdam is a great place to visit (we spent four days there last year) but if you can’t get there then the next best thing is to follow Callum and Laura.

6. http://vialucispress.wordpress.com  Via Lucis: Photography of religious architecture. Detailed historical narratives by Dennis Aubrey combined with superb church photography by Dennis and PJ McKey make this my favorite blog. The churches Aubrey and PJ visit are mostly Romanesque and mostly in France.

7. http://livingonthenorthernplains.wordpress.com  Danielle Mead Skjelver’s blog is called Historian Loose on the Northern Plains: Periodic Musings on Research, Writing, & the Persistence of Life Outside Those Activities. Danielle is a professor of history who lives in North Dakota. She is presently writing a novel about Martin Luther and also manages a website devoted to her family history.

8. http://sillymonkeyphoto.com/  Travel Photography by Dmitrii Lezine. Dmitrii is an expert in HDR photography. He also writes Windows 8 apps and produces a mystery photo every Friday.

9. http://czechtheflip.com  Czech the Flip: Musings of a Filipino mom about life in the Czech Republic. The title of Grace’s blog says it all. She takes great pictures, too!

10. http://sartenada.wordpress.com  Sartenada’s Photo Blog. Matti is from Finland and blogs in English, Spanish and French and takes terrific photos. He was the first person ever to comment on my blog.
Here are the the questions:

Favorite Color: Orange (and black) The colors of my favorite baseball team — the San Francisco Giants.

Favorite Animal: human (also least favorite).

Favorite Number: four — that’s how many grandkids I have!.

Non Alcoholic Drink: fresh orange juice.

Alcoholic Drink:  Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

Facebook or Twitter: Facebook (don’t Twitter).

Passions: family, family history, history, photography, planning trips, traveling, blogging about our travels.

Giving or Receiving: I have received much more than I have ever given or will ever give.

Favorite City:  San Francisco –  where I grew up.

Favorite TV show: I was Lost for seven years and still follow Michael Emerson on Person of Interest.

Please check out my ten nominations plus mvschulze’s blog when you have the time. And thanks, MV, for nominating me!

Searching for my Theler Ancestors: Dielingen

Our third stop on our Friday morning tour (May 25, 2012) was to the village of Dielingen which sits on North Rhine-Westphalia’s border with Lower Saxony about 12.5 miles northwest of Hedem. In the 1970s Dielingen joined twelve other villages to form the town of Stemwede. St Mary’s (St Marienkirche), the church in Dielingen is the parish church for the four westernmost villages in Stemwede (Dielingen, Drohne, Haldem and Arrenkamp) and is part of the Lübbecke Evangelical-Lutheran circle. Also, most of the people in Stemshorn, a village directly north of Dielingen but across the border in Lower Saxony, prefer to worship in Dielingen even though they were once in different countries and today are in different states.

St Mary’s Church (St Marienkirche) in Dielingen

The original church where St Mary’s now stands was probably built in the 9th century, soon  after Charlemagne defeated the Saxons and converted them to Christianity. The first two or three churches were probably made of wood and burned down before the present church was built in the early 13th century. The church is first mentioned in a document dated 1231 from the Bishop of Minden declaring the church to belong to the monastery in Levern (another village now part of the town of Stemwede).

The church’s tower dates back to the 14th century. The spire was added in the early 18th century.

St Mary’s was first built as a two-bay hall church in the Romanesque style but it is now more of a Gothic structure. The tower is Romanesque and there is a rounded arch in the church’s northwest corner. All of the other arches are pointed. The church has been remodeled many times over the centuries. North and south transepts were added in the middle of the 15th century, forming a “T” in the church floor-plan. The spire was added in the 18th century. Two of the interior treasures — the organ and the pulpit — are baroque and date back to the seventeenth century. The tabernacle and choir stalls are even older. The last major restoration was in the 20th century (1958 to 1963).

The northwest Romanesque portal. All other arches are pointed.

The main altar.

The pulpit and organ are behind the main altar.

Another view of the pulpit.

View of south transept.

The Last Supper.

“Behold, your king comes to you” (from the gospel of St Matthew).

Easter 1663 memorial.

I guess this is St Michael.

I made this photo dark to show off the colors.

View of north transept.

The arched ceiling over the nave’s two bays.

Steinnecker coat of arms. Otto was a nobleman on the side of the Swedes during the Thirty Years War. He probably paid for some of the baroque additions to the church in the 17th century.

East side of the church. On the left is the south transept. The window in the center is behind the right side of the main altar. On the right is a small sacristy.

War memorial on east side of south transept.

Our tour guide, Carol Saint-Clair.

An order of devout Dielingen parishioners called the Society of St Matthew was formed shortly after the end of the Thirty Years War to bury those who died of the plague. This order still exists today and they still take part in funeral ceremonies. In 2004 a book was published on the history of the village and its church in honor of the 350th anniversary of this society.

Christian Theler left the family farm in Hedemer Buchholz in the early 1800s when Napoleon was flexing his muscles all over Europe. He found work in Meyerhofen in the Bishopric of Osnabrück and in 1813 he married Anne Marie Dinkelmann probably in her home church of Stemshorn but the marriage record was recorded in Dielingen. Their first child was baptized in Dielingen but when the Kingdom of Hanover took over Osnabrück in 1815 and allowed a Protestant church to be built in Hunteburg, the Theler family began to worship there.

The Congress of Vienna that gave Osnabrück to Hanover in 1815 also gave Westphalia to Prussia and young males who didn’t wish to serve in the Prussian army began to walk westward from border villages like Dielingen until they found themselves in the Kingdom of Hanover where no one really cared who they were or where they came from. So they made their way northward to Bremen to find a ship that would take them to the New World.
The exodus soon accelerated with the introduction of flax spinning and weaving machines that marked the end of the homespun linen industry in Westphalia. Then a series of crop failures further hastened the abandonment of the farms. About half of the people who left Westphalia received permission to leave. The others just walked away. Many of their neighbors in Osnabrück-Hanover joined them.

Next posting: St Matthew’s Church of Hunteburg.

Searching for my Theler Ancestors: German Genealogy, with a Twist

The twist has to do with inheritance. Our Thelers did not own their land. But they had a right to rent their land and then hand down that right to the youngest son. But what happens when you have just daughters or your youngest son dies without a son of his own?

I soon learned from my German Genealogy 101 that my Theler name was not a surname that gets passed down from all of the males in the line as you find in most of our western cultures.  Theler is the farm name of # 12 Hedemer Buchholz. And if a daughter inherits the farm  then her husband must relinquish his own name and take on that of the farm.

I corresponded with our tour guide Carol Saint-Clair for several months before our trip to Europe last May. In one of her email messages Carol recommended that I pick up a copy of a book called “Ann Angel’s Freedom,” an historical novel co-authored by Katharina Gerlach and Anke Waldmann. The book is based on all of the research Anke did on her own family’s farm east of Osnabrück and takes place at the end of the 18th century and the first few years of the 19th century.

I learned a lot about the rules of inheritance from this book as well as other government restrictions that along with local beliefs and traditions complicated the lives of those who lived in farming communities in this part of Germany. There’s even a little murder mystery woven into the theme. The story takes place in and near a village called Schledehausen which is west of Hedem and south of Hunteburg and just east of the city of Osnabrück. The book is available on Amazon and there is even a Kindle version. Click here  to read more reviews or even purchase your own copy.

The 1971 LDS Report on the Theler family focuses on a person named Christian Ludewig Theler and his family and we spent the bulk of Friday morning, May 25, 2012 touring the key sites in Christian’s life. After visiting Alswede where Christian was baptized and Hedemer Buchholz where Christian was born we traveled on to four other places that contributed to the other major significant events in Christian’s life and the lives of his family. One of these places, Dielingen, is in Westphalia and the church there is in the same circle as Alswede.  Dielingen is on the extreme northeast corner of Westphalia and is surrounded on three sides by Lower Saxony where we found the other three places: Stemshorn, Meyerhofen and Hunteburg.

Christian was the second of three sons. Since his younger brother Franz was going to inherit the farm, Christian had two options: (1) stay on the farm and work as a farmhand for his brother and most likely never marry or (2) move away to find a job on another farm. He chose the latter and one day during the period (1806-1815) when the Kingdom of Westphalia belonged to France he moved to Meyerhofen where he met Anna Marie Dinckelmann from Stemshorn. The two were married in 1813 and they worshiped in Dielingen where their first children were baptized. In 1815 a Protestant church was built in Hunteburg which is a tad closer to Meyerhofen than Dielingen and so the Theler children born between 1815 and 1825 were baptized there.

Hunteburg changed hands often during the early 1800s. Prior to 1803 Hunteburg was part of the bishopric of Osnabrück. In 1803 it became part of the principality of Osnabrück. In 1806 Prussia took over only to be followed by the French kingdom of Westphalia in 1807. It was part of the French Empire in 1811 but after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1814 the Congress of Vienna decreed that it become part of the new kingdom of Hanover. That same Congress gave all of Westphalia to Prussia. So Hunteburg and Dielingen were in two different countries prior to 1806 and after 1815 but in the same country between those years. And now those same borders are in place to separate the modern states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.

Governmental regulations regarding religion and inheritance began to change under Prussian rule in Westphalia and Hanoverian rule in Osnabrück and the local economies began to nosedive. Germany had its own potato famine in the mid 1800s and the linen industry could not compete with cotton from the American South. Also, many young Westphalian farmers were not too keen on serving three years in the Prussian army. These and similar forces brought forth a large exodus of German farmers and their families. Some went to other places in Europe or to South Africa and some crossed the Atlantic to New York and Baltimore where they either stayed in the big cities on the coast or pushed inward to join other German communities in St. Louis, Milwaukee and Cincinnati. Christian’s son Carl made his way to Cincinnati in the 1830s.

Oh, about the twist: Christian’s mother was a Theler. His father’s name was Johann Christoph Levermann who changed his name to Theler when he married Christian’s mother. We are so used to tracing our family history (and our DNA) through the male surname but I am definitely not doing that here. I have traced the farm name back 300 years, not the surname. To follow the DNA I would have to break off the Thelers at Christian and then follow the Levermann line. This was not a rare occurrence when a daughter inherited a farm and it happened twice to our Thelers in the 1700s. Christian Theler’s own mother Louise Marlene Theler was the daughter of Gerhard Henrich Moorfeldt and Catharina Agnese Theler. So we have to go back two generations of the female line in order to find another male, Christian’s great grandfather, the one and only Christopher Tailers Von dem Buchholtze! Wait a minute. I don’t think he was a Theler either! I detect a pattern here! Maybe if I follow the Leverman and/or Moorfeldt lines I will eventually get back to my Thelers! I’ll save that work for a rainy day.

Next posting: we visit St Marienkirche, the Evangelical-Lutheran church in Dielingen.

Searching for my Theler Ancestors: Hedem and Hedemer Buchholz

Hedem is a sleepy village of about 500 people on the south side of the Mittellandkanal immediately to the west of Alswede. Hedemer Buchholtz is an even smaller farming  community on the north side of the canal and is usually considered a part of Hedem.  My Thelers lived on # 12 Hedemer Buchholz for more than 300 years.

Map of Hedem and Hedemer Buchholz

In the 1970s this area of North Rhine-Westphalia was redistricted and both Hedem and Hedemer Buchholtz are now part of the town of Preussisch Oldendorf.

Hedemer Buchholz farmhouse.

It is commonly believed that the first settlers of this part of the Northern German Plain came by in the 3rd or 4th century and there have been some archeological discoveries of ancient tools and structures around Hedem. The name Hedem is a Frankish word (“em” or “eim” means “home”) and probably has been around since the 800s when Charlemagne conquered the Saxons of Lower Saxony and Westphalia, converted them to Christianity and built churches to ensure that they stay Christian.

“Buchholz” means Beech Forest in German. Immediately to the west of Hedem is a village named Lashorst and north of the canal west of Hedemer Buchholz is Lashorst Buchholz. So I guess at one time the area north of the canal was all beech trees. The canal, by the way, was built about a hundred years ago, long after our Thelers first came to the area. Some of my ancestors appended the name of von Buchholtz to their Theler name. Maybe they were among the first people to come along and cut down the trees for farmland. East of Hedem there is a forested area called Hollwinkel where a noble family lived in a castle which was beseiged  by  the Swedish army during the Thirty Years War. Immediately east of Hedemer Buchholz is a nature preserve called Ellerburger Meadows that is also heavily forested. Otherwise the only trees you see on the farmlands are those that provide shade to the farmhouses.

The Thirty Years War devastated Westphalia and about a third of all Germans perished, if not from battles and sieges then from the plague that usually folllowed in the wake of an army’s advance or retreat. But the war was over in 1648 and the church in Alswede was rebuilt in 1653 and a family by the name of Tegeder appeared in the church records in 1654. They were followed by Telers in 1664, Teiler in 1658 and Teyeler in 1681. By 1695 the family was called Teyelers Vom Buchholtz. The most common spelling in the 1700s was Tehler and Theler with  a sprinkling of Tegeler. Tailers showed up in 1732 and by 1747 they were calling themselves Tailers Von Dem Buchholtze.  The Alswede priest was probably the only literate person in the community and so the spelling of one’s surname depended on the particular priest who recorded a marriage, baptism or death.

There only are a couple of roads in Hedemer Buchholtz. We drove down one of them that was close to the canal and stopped at a small country store among a few farm houses and started up a conversation with the store owner and a few neighbors. None of the locals knew any English. We were lucky to have Carol around to lead the conversation! They told us that the old Theler Hof at # 12 had burned down about fifteen years ago and that the last male Theler was killed during World War II. There was a woman named Theler who lived in a cottage house down the road a bit but she died a few years ago. As was the custom, a young couple took care of her in her old age and when she died her house became theirs.

Residents of Hedemer Buchholz.

Hedemer Buchholz country store.

Down the road from the country store.

A woman named Theler once lived in this cottage.

View from the front of the Theler cottage.

The Theler house at # 12 Hedemer Buchholz was on the horizon above the fence post roughly half way between the house on the left and the clump of trees on the right.

The old school in the Village Square of Lashorst west of Hedem.

I started my ancestor quest in 2002 when we visited Ireland and met several distant cousins  on my mother’s side of the family. I struck out in my attempt to find my father’s Irish relatives, however, and had hoped to find some distant relatives on my father’s side of the family here in Germany and so was disappointed when I heard this news. We also heard that the people of Westphalia had a hard time (more on this in my next posting) during the mid 1800s and a large portion of the population moved elsewhere, including the US. About 17% of all present-day Americans are of German descent and there are probably more Thelers living in America nowadays than in Germany! I watched a baseball game the other day between Boston and Tampa Bay and the pitcher for the Red Sox was a fellow named Buchholz. He may be a distant cousin!

In my next posting I will be discussing some of the peculiarities I have come across regarding German genealogy in my search for my great great grandfather and his family.

Searching for my Theler Ancestors: Alswede

Our tour guide Carol Saint-Clair met us at the Remarque Hotel in Osnabrück at 9 am on Friday, May 25, 2012 and drove us north and east to Theler territory — several hamlets straddling the borders of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsesn) and North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westphalen).  Our first stop was Alswede, a village of about 1,000 people which is located about 25 miles (40 Km) northeast of Osnabrück.

Buildings across the street from St Andrew’s Church, Alswede

Intersection near St Andrew’s Church, Alswede

St Andrew’s Church

Alswede is split in half these days. The north side belongs to the town of Espelkamp and the portion south of the Mittellandkanal is now part of the town of Lubbecke. All of these places are in the district of Minden-Lubbecke.  Minden, the district’s capital,  is a town on the Weser River about 13 miles (20 km) to the east of Alswede.

My Thelers belonged to the Evangelical-Lutheran religion and worshiped at St Andrew’s Church (St Andreaskirche) in Alswede for more than 300 years and I have looked at church records for more than  200 of those years, from the 1650s to the 1880s. For a portion of this period Alswede was part of the Kingdom of Hannover. The city of Hannover is about 50 miles (80 km) east of Alswede. Napoleon conquered this area in the early 1800s and for a brief time Alswede was part of the French state of Westphalia. In 1815 Westphalia became part of Prussia. The present German state of North Rhine-Westphalia was created after World War II.

More views of St Andrew’s

There were several churches built over the centuries on the land where St Andrew’s now sits. The first building, a small chapel, was built in the 12th century. Then in the 13th century the counts of Tecklenburg built their own private chapel. The church was also part of a Cistercian monastery for a time. The Reformation came to this part of Germany in the 1500s and today about 70% of the population of Alswede is Evangelical-Lutheran. The present church was built in 1563 and is of the common Gothic Hall design found all over Westphalia.  A third aisle was added in 1893. The tower was completed in 1868 but the first two stories of the tower are the oldest part of the church, dating back to the 14th century. There was a major remodeling of the church in the 1990s and  a new tiled roof was installed a couple of years ago.

Inside St Andrew’s

We toured the church’s interior and discovered many ancient gravestones hanging on the back wall near the main entrance. Most of the old stone inscriptions were in German but we found one in Latin accompanied by a document that translates the inscription into German. The gravestone memorializes an esteemed pastor (Johann Schlichthaber) and his wife (Magdalena Crausen) who were married in 1658.

Gravestone inscription in Latin.

Inscription translated to German.

Several years ago I received a copy of an LDS report on the Thelers who worshiped here from one of the Cincinnati Thelers who is most likely a distant cousin. This report was commissioned by a Mormon branch of the family and published in 1971. Since then the Mormons have microfilmed most of the records in this part of Germany and most of these can be found on their familysearch.org website. Unfortunately, there are some gaps in these records and I have not been able to identify all of my direct ancestors. The LDS report of 1971 contains records that go back to 1723 for the following surname variations: Theler, Tegeler, Tehler, Taegeler, Tegler, Tailer, and Teiler. I have been able to go back as far as 1654  with records I have found on the Internet and have discovered these additional surname variations: Thegeler(s), Teieler(s), Telers, and Teyeler(s).  I even found a record from 1747 for a Tailers Von Dem Buchholtze and a few from 1695 -99 for Teyelers Vom Bucholtz.

St Andrew’s is located on Hedemer Strasse and after visiting the church we drove about a mile west to the small farming community of Hedem and then turned north, crossed the Mittellandkanal and found the even smaller farming community of Hedemer Buchholtz. These two places will be the topic of my next posting.