Ancestral Homeland

The male line in my family can be traced back with some certainty to the 18th century, when a few Maritz men appeared in the employ of the Dutch East India company somewhere in what is today South Africa. For years, the best version of the events that got them there was that which was told by my great uncle, that the first Maritz men to set foot in Africa were a pair of brothers, German mercenaries who joined up to guard the Cape Colony. This is a story; the only thing about my genealogy that is certain is the existence of a gene which never lets things such as facts get in the way of a good story.

BUT, from that distinguished line comes my father, who now flogs computer equipment to owners of large data centers. It so happens that one of the worlds' largest is owned by the Mormon church in Salt Lake City, which they use to track the genealogy of all of their members, so all the ancestors can be baptized in absentia. On a recent sales visit, my father was allowed to peer into this treasure trove, and found that his, and my, people can indeed be traced back as far as Europe -- as far back as a Quinten Kehren Marisse, born in 1568 in the village of Zutzendorf, in what is today the French province of Alsace. At the time, this territory would have indeed been German speaking and controlled by German princes. The Maritz storytelling gene does the effect of coming unerringly near the truth.

Quinten's birthplace is only about a hundred miles south of where I'm now working in Luxembourg, and so this weekend my father and I took a road trip down from Germany to check out this, our ancestral homeland. We met in Heidelberg, where he had some meetings, and drove for a few hours down the Rhine into France.

Like most of Europe, the country looks and feels just like Pennsylvania. Rolling hills, broad plains, and the occasional grove of forest. The German side of the Rhine is now more or less a complete belt of industrial farms and prosperous towns. The Rhineland is a major industrial center for Germany, and the towns are all quite modern and prosperous. Speyer, where we stopped to have a look at the cathedral, has a science museum with not just one but several large aircraft propped up by pillars high in the air, accessible by stairways to children young and grown. I convinced my father not to stop.

On the French side of the border, the landscape is the same but the civilization is quite different -- it's all still small scale farmland, dotted with ancient small villages every few miles, clearly built up over the centuries as dwellings for the workers toiling the rich fields. The very fact that the land could support so many villages speaks to its richness. The Germans were able to somehow transform that fecundity in to major cities and airplanes frozen in flight; the French just let it be.

After about an hour of winding over country roads and through villages large and small, we crested a final rise and saw spread before us Zutzendorf, a village exactly as all the others. A few hundred houses stood tall around a few streets of modest proportions, and as we strolled about, the odd tractor would trundle past. Red roofs covered that dark wood and white-washed stone siding material that most people associate with quaint German mountain villages. A few weeks ago I drove with Ellen through some German mountain villages. They all appeared to have long since moved on to a more bland building style. It was Sunday, but there didn't appear to be anything that would have been open had it not been. A mayor's office, a tractor warehouse, and that's about it.

We looked about for signs of Marisse's, but found none. The story was that Quinten's son or grandson immigrated to Africa, and upon doing so adopted the more Dutch sounding name of Maritz. However, in Zutzendorf, despite being no Marisse's, there were plenty of Moritz's listed on house name plates and in the local cemetery. Is it possible the name changed before the family left?

Anything would have been possible in those heady days of 17th Century Europe and the 30 Years War, a sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics which set the stage for the following four centuries of warfare. As my father pointed out, Zutzendorf, which would have converted to Protestantism along with the rest of Alsace in the 1520's, came to be governed by a Catholic France in 1648. It's possible that a French sounding name like Marisse may have been inconvenient in a society ruled by a French foreign occupier. Its even more likely that the war had something to do with Marisse/Moritz/Martiz family's decision to leave Alsace and head on to Protestant Germany proper, and from there onto fiercely protestant Africa.