Heidelberg. Not Mississippi.

Part of letter from Tommy Alewine, August, 1970

Cousins and others: this post will be brief. It's an update to an ongoing discussion that started years ago and, unfortunately, hasn't yet been decisively ended.

...And may never be.

Before I start, I want to say this: I've never felt inspired to identify myself too intimately with my ancestors. Their lives and troubles are interesting to me, and I like being able to see that line going back as I manage to find another connection. But in my long years of research, one thing has risen up above the clutter of facts, trivia, maps, census records, etc., etc., and it's this: 

You are who YOU are. You are not who your ancestors were.

Recently, a friend of mine began doing research on her own family for the first time. Being from the South, she found several Confederate soldier ancestors, of course, and remarked on being surprised about that. I told her to prepare herself for finding the branch that was slave-holding--there will probably be one, somewhere; there are two or three in my genealogy--but to remember that it doesn't inform who SHE is, now. Just accept it for the history that it is.

So you are who YOU are. That in itself should be intimidating enough and inspire you to do some self-examination!

Some of you are probably amused at the doggedness of my attempt to solve, once and for all, the riddle of the supposed "name change" of our family. I wrote a whole post about it recently, and another earlier last year, so just refer to that page to get yourself up to speed. For me it's an obsession to try to correct false things and to get facts out, instead of just legends. I can't explain any other way why it matters so much to me.

You remember the "telephone game" from school: One kid whispers something one time to another student, who whispers to another, and so on, and by the time the student at the end of the line says what he's heard, there's usually no relation to the original sentence. It's kind of fun. Makes a good lesson on how gossip spreads, too.

But I don't like seeing that on the Internet. As a teacher, I try to train my students not to repeat hearsay and rumors. Go to the source document, I tell them. There's already too much stuff available that only suits your preconceived ideas, and you can fast find yourself in an echo chamber where you're just reading things that affirm what you WANT to believe.

So after seeing all over the place a story that's been repeated for years--that our ancestor was "a professor from Heidelberg University in Germany"--it seemed obvious that the proper way to get to the bottom of this was to go to the source. You know Europe generally has great records. The Germans (and Swiss) are well known for their attention to detail. I figured it might not work but was definitely worth the effort.

So I got in touch with Heidelberg University.

I am posting here the email I received on Thursday evening.

Email received February 1, 2018

 
Read it thoroughly. Be amazed.

Some thoughts:

First, look at the bottom. Ms. Liptak expresses regret that she "could not be of more help in finding a connection between your ancestor and the Universität Heidelberg."

Really. After all the places and years she combed through. 

I was astounded.

Second, I believe this may stop the chatter about John George Alewine's having been a professor. Ms. Liptak looked at things I never would've dreamed of looking at. Who would've thought to check into lists of custodial staff? And she researched way outside the time frame I gave her. And there was nothing.

There were a couple of other things, little minor stuff that struck me as noteworthy. For one, I sent my original email partly in my extremely poor German, assuming that the request might not land with an English speaker. Wrong. You see that Ms. Liptak has excellent English. As a language teacher myself, I should've expected this. In Europe, and throughout the world, people frequently speak multiple languages. In a later note to Ms. Liptak, I apologized for this preconceived idea of mine. I knew better.

For another, she assumed I would be unhappy at having received a negative response. ("I am sorry I could not find a connection...to the Universität Heidelberg.") I, however, was quite content with her answer, because it seems definitive, and it represents truth. Truth...not a legend or wishful thinking. I'd have been glad if she'd found John George on staff there. But I would've been just as happy if she'd told me that his job was sweeping the floors in Heidelberg in 1740.

And I am also happy finding that he apparently wasn't there at all.

You may be into genealogy for a different reason than I've been doing it all this time. Perhaps you're looking for medical reasons--to find out where a genetic trait started. Perhaps you were adopted and want to locate your birth parents.

My reason is simpler and, maybe, more trivial: I just like finding out things about my ancestors' lives. I don't mind discovering an  illiterate person, or one who was disfellowshipped from a church for drunkenness (yes, it happened), or one who filed a pension application that indicated he was "destitute." I enjoy learning about how these people lived--the good and the bad parts--and what they did, where they moved, and so on. If I can find a document they wrote, that takes me into ecstasies.

I don't feel a need to identify with them exactly; I just appreciate discovering that they had problems, joys, challenges--in their own way, in their own milieu--as I do myself. Their challenges were definitely more serious than mine are today. Perhaps, in a way, that brings me some perspective.

One more document I'm waiting to receive from a university collection in the Midwest may help sort out the rest of the problem with the supposed "name change." (Again, see my previous post.)

Or it may not. Either way, it may bring a little more light to bear on events from the 1750's when John George arrived in the United States.

--And, by the way, just for fun, look at this page: http://www.namespedia.com/details/Alavoine

Ælfwine