What if the only early history we have of the Volzke family is Nell's story of the Volzkes coming to America. Not only can we not fault the storyteller, we must be grateful to my grandmother for faithfully recording what she was told. Writing with the sorrow only a family historian can feel: the Volzke coming to America story is missing important operative facts, and some of this Volzke story may be nothing more than a story made up by immigrants to entertain their young children in the days before our electronic obsessions. This wouldn't be the first time a newcomer to America created a new story more in alignment with their new life.
Finding a conservator or even a pack rat among us should not be that difficult. Between immigrant brothers Friedrich and Albert, 15 children were born, all of
whom must have known the name of the village in Pomerania their parents and grandparents claimed as home. This third generation of 15 cousins may even have known the names of the elder Friedrich's first wife and the names of the two half-brothers who did not emigrate. My grandfather Gottlieb, one of the 15 cousins, must
have known. Why then was he satisfied to preserve their origin only as
"Pommern".
Why do so few clues remain to
fill in the story surrounding the origins of our Volzke ancestors? Why were the Volzkes so willing, perhaps even anxious, to separate themselves from their history in the old country? Had their former lives been arduous, disappointing, even threatening? Maybe successes - or difficulties - in their new life in America buried the past deeper in the past, a now insignificant fragment of what once was. Maybe the survival challenges of their today diminished the survival challenges of their yesterday. Did the earliest generations of Volzkes in America deny their origins to avoid anti-German
sentiment of the two world wars? Maybe, just maybe, leaving the past in the past was the result of a successful assimilation with other Americans.
Did the senior Volzkes destroy their German documents? Or was that a more recent event occurring only after the death of our German-speaking antecedents. Did an English-only speaking grandchild destroy the German documents as illegible and therefore merely tedious and burdensome, and their German language letters, and German Bibles annotated with family history leading back to the old country? Does any piece of paper from the early days exist today in an old dusty shoe box in the back of a dark closet?
When was the interest in our family history lost? Was our history
suppressed, was it merely forgotten? Can history lost in the space of three generations be recovered?
The goal of the Volzke Project is to uncover what can be uncovered, to
reveal what can be revealed, with the evidence available to me as I write. I will share with you my working theories for the arrival in America of the brothers Friedrich and Albert, the Volzke village of origin, and the answer to the questions "Who is Ernestine Klabunder" and "Who is Wilhelmine Ott". Whereas the Volzkes did not record their journey, I will record my journey to find my Volzke origins, and preserve a few family stories along the way.
In the years to come more documents may be found on both sides of the ocean and, in digitized form, they may be more accessible to future researchers. We may find far-flung cousins as Europeans become more comfortable with DNA as a research tool. They may recall their grandparents' stories of two half-brothers who crossed the ocean in the early 1880s and settled in South Dakota.
I hope you will find this blog when you are ready to research your Volzke heritage and will use the tools then available to either prove or disprove my theories. Maybe YOU are the archivist of the old dusty shoe box in the back of a dark closet.
I'm a Volzke. Are you a Volzke?
