Germany Connector's Challenge December 2022: Nobel Laureates

Question

Hi Connectors,

here we are again with the German Challenge. This month I focus on Nobel Laureates, since the Nobel Prize is always awarded on Dec 10.

So this month's choices are:

Wilhelm Wien, a physicist (Connected! Thanks Manu!)

Emil Fischer, a chemist (Connected! Thanks Paige, Flo, Manu and I tap on my shoulder too)

Albrecht Kossel, he got the Nobel Prize for medicine (Connected! Thanks Manu!)

and Günter Grass, who got it for literature. (Connected! Thanks Flo, Manu and I tap on my shoulder too)

As always, there are more possibilities to choose from, but I wanted to bring a bit of diversity into the field.

Have fun!

Comments

Would love to start working on Grass' first wife. Can you please put me on the trusted list, Jelena?

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I would, if I knew your mail domain.

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Wrote you  on Discord

Answer 1

I started a little work on the family of Albrecht Kossel and found his father-in-law, Adolf Holtzmann, was also notable. He was a German professor and philologist. His name is associated with a Proto-Germanic sound law known as Holtzmann's Law.

Hopefully, I will be able to figure out what that means. His Wikipedia page is small, but hopefully, useful.

Comments

I will have a closer look at the Kossel-branch of the tree. Church records are at www.archion.de and I´ll try to find some more data and potential connections.

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Connected :-)

This went fasther than I thought it would. Albrecht Kossel should be connected via his mother https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Jeppe-70

Connection should show up probably tomorrow.

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Beautiful! That is not even the same mother I saw for him on some Ancestry Trees. That is why I don't hardly look at them at all.

Answer 2

Emil Fischer's mother Julie Poensgen was an aunt to Carl Poensgen (Wikipedia, * 1838 in Schleiden). We have connected Anna Maria Poensgen (* 1826 in Schleiden). Now we "only" need to find the connection ...

There is also his son, who emigrated to the US and his children, which married in the US: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/MR1Y-LD8

Comments

I added the son Hermann Otto Laurenz Fischer who immigrated to the US (by way of Canada), and his wife Ruth Seckels (b. 1893 in St Goarshausen), and their daughter Agnes who married Louis John Peterson, an American.  I poked around and haven't found a connection for the husband, but his ancestry goes back 150-200 years in the US so I'm sure I will eventually stumble on something.

It's an interesting family.  Emil's son appears to have been an accomplished biochemist, and his granddaughter Agnes was a reference librarian and curator of the Central and Western European Collections of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

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Here is a gigantic family tree of Poensgens:

https://blog.archiv.ekir.de/2015/10/26/die-poensgen-familie-86-cm-vom-pfarrer-zum-industriellen/

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I found Julie Poensgen on the "gigantic family tree of Poensgens" and added her as Emil Fischer's mother, but I couldn't find Anna Maria Poensgen or her father Anton.  Family Search doesn't have the familes of these two women connected either, even though they are from the  same town.

I was able to connect Emil Fischer through his granddaughter's American husband's family.

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Great job Paige!

I added some more Poensgens from Florian´s source and established a second connection through https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Poensgen-2

In German we say "Doppelt hält besser." (something like "two is better than one") :-)

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Thank you, you two. And Jelena for actually creating Poensgen-2

Answer 3

Wilhelm Wien is connected now via his mother Luise Therese Mehler https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Mehler-36

Comments

Great Manu!

Answer 4

Guess we're stuck with Günter Grass ... Danzig .... again ...

Maybe somebody finds something in one of the sub trees of the people connected to him at geni.com:
https://www.geni.com/family-tree/index/6000000014744040091

Comments

Alternative: his first wife Anna Margareta Schwarz (* 1932) is the daughter of Boris Schwarz-Fischer (1899-1987), a Steel company owner from Lenzburg, Aargau, Switzerland. The family seems to be very old and we also have some other profiles from Lenzburg. His ancestors are Georg Schwarz-Fraissinet and Wilhelm Schwarz-Bertschinger

A daughter of Wilhelm is connected as described in this article to Oberforstrat von Wedekind from Darmstadt. We have the connected Darmstadt profile https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Von_Wedekind-1

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There are also these two notable siblings, that might be related to the family:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_Schwarz_(Journalist) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Schwarz
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I guess this person on Wikipedia would be our Oberforstrat.
He is also grandpa of our Von_Wedekind-1 (via FamilySearch)

Actually Von_Greyerz-13 would also be somewhere in the middle of this connect (again created by Jelena!)

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And in the meanwhile I am in the middle of exploiting the available sources (especially Hessian biography). But today it has to wait until I wrote the biography for Werner von Siemens for the EPOW.

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And meanwhile Manu has created https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Schwarz-1930 , so we can continue from there

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Connection is done and should appear tomorrow. Thanks for starting, Manu, and coming from the other side, Jelena.

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Glad to hear this - congrats to all involved on making the connections!

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Thanks. 40 degrees, like usual

Answer 5

I found Günter Grass on Gedbas. While it lists only those ancestors whom we also have in WT, some profiles contain additional information, albeit unsourced. What is your experience of asking Gedbas contributors for sources? Would you send an e-mail to the address listed at the page?

Comments

Sure, why not. In one case this year I asked a person about a source/photo from FamilySearch and the guy even joined WikiTree

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Thanks for the thumbs up! I've sent a msg to the e-mail address on the Gedbas profile.

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I did indeed get a reply but the guy couldn't or wouldn't provide any source. Still, his birth year of 1857 for Grass' maternal grandfather Vinzenz Wilhelm Knoff is more probable than WT's previous "about 1870".

Answer 6

Hello, I'm:

• 22 Degrees from Wilhelm Wien/5 branches (1-6-2-5-9)
• 23 Degrees from Albrecht Kossel/(directly through marriage)/7 branches (3-3-1-3-3-8-3)
• 29 Degrees from Emil Fischer/5 branches (3-5-7-3-12)
• 37 Degrees from Günter Grass/6 branches (1-4-5-6-10-12)