Pete's Log: Maria Mechtildis Hurtz
Entry #2391, (Genealogy)(posted when I was 45 years old.)
My 4x great grandmother (if my sources are reliable), Maria Mechtildis Hurtz, was baptized in Keyenberg in 1791. At the time Keyenberg was located in the Duchy of Jülich in the Holy Roman Empire. It probably had a population of about 400.
She married Adrianus Henst in 1809 in Overpelt. At the time of her birth, Overpelt was still part of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, also in the Holy Roman Empire.
By the time of her marriage, however, Overpelt and Keyenberg had both been annexed by France. Overpelt as part of the department of Meuse-Inférieure and Keyenberg as part of the Roer department. The Holy Roman Empire had also ceased to exist after 1000 years of history.
When she died in Overpelt in 1862, Overpelt was part of the new Kingdom of Belgium, while Keyenberg had become Prussian. The two towns are 50 miles apart, but when you look at a modern map and see one in Belgium and one in Germany, it's harder to imagine what her life might have been.
The dialects across Germany and the low countries probably formed much more of a spectrum then, so how similar were their native tongues? What was it like to move from one member state of the Holy Roman Empire to another? And then to go through the upheaval of becoming French, then Dutch, then Belgian?
All I know about Maria Mechtildis is the dates and places of her baptism, marriage, and death. But I'm so curious.
What I know about her, I found in my two Limburg genealogy sources. But unlike most everyone born in or around Overpelt, her birth in (what became) Germany means I found a potential baptism record for her on FamilySearch. The name, place of birth, and names of her parents all matched. But the year was listed as 1788 instead of 1791.
I had so far found my Limburg secondary sources to mostly match other data, so finding this discrepancy threw me for a bit of a loop and I quit looking at it for a bit.
The thought finally occurred to me to look at all baptisms in Keyenberg in 1791 (there are 110 records available) and that's how I found Maria Mechtilda Hurz, baptised April 9, 1791, the same date my Limburg sources have and the same parents. Just missing a t in the last name. Non-standardized spellings of names is pretty common for that time and place, but that missing t stopped me finding her the first time around.
If I had to guess, maybe the Maria Mechtildis baptized in 1788 died young and her parents re-used the name. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen it. But it could be any number of reasons.
Keyenberg is located near the edge of the Garzweiler open-pit mine, a mine which has consumed numerous towns in the area. Keyenberg was planned to be demolished for the mine as well and inhabitants were already being resettled. Last year it was announced the mine wouldn't expand after all and Keyenberg and several other towns appear saved for now.
I was aware that open-pit coal mines in Germany were destroying towns and that there were protests against them. It's an interesting feeling to have discovered this (distant) connection now.