It may be naive to claim that American society is without class distinctions, but it indisputably lacks some of the barriers found in other countries. That’s because we are largely free of one of the most prevalent distinctions elsewhere in the world: family standing. Most of us don’t know whether our ancestors were impoverished peasants or displaced nobility — or even where they came from.
But Americans are engaged in an unprecedented effort to fill in some of the blanks about their background. Genealogy has become one of the most rapidly growing hobbies in the country. Burgeoning online access to census forms and databases of birth, death and baptismal records and even DNA testing has set off a stampede to discover our origins. It’s an interest reflected in the popularity of commercial genealogy websites and TV shows such as Henry Louis Gates’ “Finding Your Roots.”
I have been willingly swept along with that tide. Since childhood, I had puzzled over the uniqueness of the Steiden name — in fact, my father’s extended family were the only other Steidens I knew of.
But long before the genealogy bug bit me, the generation with the answers was gone. As for my father and uncle, they didn’t even know for sure whether the name was as German as it sounded. All my dad could say for certain was that in three years stationed in that country as a soldier in the mid-1950s, he never encountered anyone else with his name.
Several years ago, I began Googling for clues. I found that a distant relative had posted his findings about a Steiden link on a message board. It pointed me in the direction of an obscure corner of eastern Germany, and provided some dates indicating when my great-great-great-great-grandparents had left there. Also, a psychiatrist bearing the Steiden name showed up in (of course) Vienna. Taking a chance, I gave him a call. He told me he believed his father had come from somewhere in the Czech Republic — just across the border from Germany. But our conversation was brief and awkward, and my attempts to make out-of-the-blue calls to the few other Austrian Steidens were not as kindly received.
A breakthrough
I seemed to be at a dead end when, a few years ago, the availability of online information exploded. My sleuthing intensified, and I found now-digitized baptismal records from a small German town called Mittweida, showing that my ancestors had baptized their first two children at the local church before emigrating in the early 1850s. Another hint of Steiden origins, dating back to the 1650s, turned up in marriage records in a nearby town, and establishing a Facebook account has led to more connections — including, late last year, a link to a Czech named Roman Steiden.
Doing some historical research, I developed a theory: My ancestors had probably fled Mittelsachsen, the eastern province that includes Mittweida, in the wake of the failed German revolution of 1848. One of the key events of the uprising was a May 1849 revolt in the nearby regional capital, Dresden.
I harbored no Ancestry.com-fueled delusions that, Edward Steiden, my grandfather five generations removed, had been anyone of importance in that clash. He died a penniless and apparently illiterate factory worker sometime before 1870 on the outskirts of Philadelphia. His sons made their way to Louisville, Ky., where they worked in what were surely the grim conditions of the city’s German-immigrant-dominated meat-packing industry until they could start small butcher shops of their own. None of their descendants got past high school until my dad — weary of his factory job — put himself through college.
But even if my forebearer had been a faceless laborer whose only motivation in emigrating had been to escape even deeper misery, I wanted to know something about the place he and his predecessors had come from, and what had become of the other Steidens who once lived there. So when my wife and I decided to take a 25th anniversary trip, Germany became our destination.
A trip to Germany
A travel agent reacted quizzically when I laid out an itinerary heavy on an obscure eastern region instead of the usual first-time favorites like Munich and the Black Forest. But somehow I felt that seeing Mittweida and its environs would mean more to me than a tour of the Neuschwanstein Castle or lifting a stein at the Hofbrauhaus.
After an initial stay in touristy Bavaria, Mittweida felt like another country. But the staff at our surprisingly well-appointed lodging, the Center Hotel Deutches Haus, went out of its way to make their only American guests comfortable. A venture into the local taverns turned up no one who had ever heard of the Steiden name, but they were happy to share the local pils with the distant descendant of a fellow Mittweidaer. And a drive through the green and rolling May countryside to visit the local castle, Burg Kribstein, turned into an unexpected adventure when we encountered a medieval festival where I was drafted from the audience to perform in a skit, drawing roars of good-natured laughter when the crowd realized my German was so limited I could barely sound out the script.
The highlight, though, was a visit to the town museum, where the curator was happy to escort us to the old stadtkirche and muster the caretaker, who let us into the sanctuary where the ancient baptismal font still stood. She also shared with us enough information to leave me fairly certain the mid-19th century had been a difficult period in Mittweida’s history — no place to be a subsistence-wage worker with a growing family to feed.
Still, there was something unsatisfying about our visit. All traces of the Steidens had apparently long since disappeared from Mittelsachsen, and despite the friendliness of its people, there were no connections to be made.
That would be the mission of the next leg of our journey.
Shortly before we left Atlanta, Roman Steiden had replied to a longstanding Facebook message asking if we could get together while my wife and I were in his vicinity, and perhaps learn what he could tell us about the family. Reaching him at his phone number proved to be a challenge, and our conversation, reliant on his unpracticed English, seemed as awkward as some of the others I had tried to have with presumably distant relatives. Still, after some fumbling, he invited us to his family’s home in the Czech border town of Osek.
Family reunion
We made the one-hour drive from Mittweida and found ourselves in a village where nondescript high-rise apartment blocks stood as a monument to the Communist era that had ended two decades before. Another remnant of that era — nonsequential addresses — sent us on a lengthy search along Svoboda Street until a passing neighbor pointed us to a three-story house where the mailbox bore the name I was looking for.
We didn’t know quite what to expect. Aside from the fact we shared a name, I knew little about Roman — only that he was in his 40s, had a girlfriend named Marketa and worked as a trucking company dispatcher. Would we truly be welcomed, or would we be seen as pushy strangers intruding on the family’s privacy? Would cultural and language barriers prove insurmountable?
The moment we crossed the doorstep of the stuccoed, middle-class dwelling, our apprehensions were gone. Roman embraced us and introduced us to his sons, Jans and Kamel, and to Marketa and his mother Janna, who were in the kitchen preparing what would be a reunion feast. Minutes later, Roman’s father, Albin, who lives with Janna on the floor above, bounded down the stairs calling out my name as if I were his favorite nephew. For the following hour, he showered me with photos and stories of the family’s history, relying on Jans to translate — though he rarely paused long enough for the young man to catch up.
A delicious meal of carp, schnitzel and streudel followed, showcasing the talents of retired restaurant chef Janna, then a tour of the house, home to three generations. Albin, a builder, showed off his barbecue in the garden and the schnapps tray he had crafted from a mason’s trowel, complete with a bicycle bell whose jingle indicated it was time for a round of the fiery local liquor. We weren’t just welcome — we were honored guests, and we were entreated to make a return trip as soon as possible and stay longer.
Ironically, Albin’s enthusiastically offered family history didn’t solve the mystery of where the Steidens of Mittelsachsen had gone. His father had died in World War II, when he was just a boy, and his knowledge went back no further than what little he recalled his grandfather telling him. It was quite possible that the family had migrated from there into the then-Sudetenland, a Czech region long home to many German-speakers, around the same time my ancestors left for America. But he didn’t know, and I had no way of finding out.
But our visit answered one question, at least as much as it could: the Steidens of Osek and Atlanta are a family. Even before we crossed back into Germany, I missed my distant cousins, And now that I’ve met them, we won’t be strangers.
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