From the Rhine to New South Wales – The Gersbach Story

In December 2020,  FamilySearch  published the church records for the Catholic Diocese of Limburg, Hessen-Nassau, Germany covering the years 1601 to 1919.  Excitingly, it includes many baptismal, marriage and burial records for Eltville and Oestrich-Winkel where our ancestors lived.  You can read about the collection  HERE.    As I looked through the Gersbach entries, most were for Winkel not Eltville.  Our family bible shows that Anton Gersbach and Margaretha Söngen's marriage took place on 18 February 1855 in Eltville.  I've located the church  record  and it's in 1855 but the location is Winkel.  My focus was always on Eltville...after all Anton and Margaretha called their property Aldavilla and the family story was that it was after their home town.  But then again...Eltville and Winkel are only 8 kilometres apart. So here's the beautiful St Aegidius (St Giles) in Winkel As one of my 2021 "lockdown" proj...

Our earliest photo of "Pargie" aged 24 Sydney, 1885 I grew up hearing my father’s stories about Anton and Margaretha Gersbach, my second great-grandparents, and their son Francis (Frank), my great-grandfather. We all knew Frank as “Pargie.” He died seven years before I was born, yet he was spoken of with such love that I’ve always felt close to him. One of my childhood treasures was his Bible—beautifully illustrated, with faded photographs of Anton and Margaretha, who had left Germany for a new life in Australia. It hinted at a large, close family, and years later it inspired me to start researching our Gersbach roots. The trail begins on the Rhine River, in the towns of Eltville and Oestrich-Winkel, just 8 km apart and near Frankfurt. In the 1850s, many from this region migrated to Australia as vinedressers, shepherds or farm labourers. Among them were four Gersbach men - two sets of brothers: Johann (John)  and  Anton  Johann Valentine (Valentine)  and...

The  Society of Australian Genealogists’ “Hang Outs”  are giving me the perfect opportunity to turn my research into a systematic record — and then into blog posts! Yesterday’s session let me tie together the stories I’ve shared over the past two weeks with my favourite topic:  genetic genealogy . If you’ve done a DNA test and would like help understanding your results, feel free to contact me via the email above. You can read about  Jane Feeney , my second great-grandmother, [HERE]. You can read about  Anton and Margaretha Gersbach , my second great-grandparents, [HERE]. Next, I’ll be showing how DNA is helping me map my genetic makeup through my paternal grandmother,  Essie Woodlands  — and why genetic evidence is so important for  proving  our family trees. Louise Coakley is an Australian genetic genealogist, member of SAG and publisher of  Genie1 .  DNA does indeed have amazing power and I hope the information in this post de...

Starting this first post for the Gersbach family blog has been a long time coming! Today I “virtually” joined a meeting of the Society of Australian Genealogists, where the theme was  emigration . It inspired me to share the remarkable migration story of my many-times-great-grandparents — and the broader German emigration scheme that brought them here.  This story builds on my earlier post about Jane Feeney, my great-great-grandmother, who arrived in Sydney in April 1849 on board the  Digby  as one of over 4,000 young women brought from Ireland under the  Earl Grey Famine Orphan Scheme . You can read that post  HERE .  Jane’s daughter, Margaret, married Francis (“Frank”) Gersbach. Frank was the son of   Anton Gersbach   and   Margaretha Songen , who arrived in Sydney in September 1855 before settling on the Macleay River in northern NSW near Kempsey. Anton and Margaretha were both from the picturesque wine towns of  Eltville ...