Help needed for paternal line of Vivian Maier

Question

The maternal branch of the awesome photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009) is now connected with the Champsaur immigrants cluster. First connection made yesterday, more to come.

But I'm stuck with her paternal line, Austro-Hungarian/Slovak immigrants in the late 1800s early 1900s, totally outside my comfort zone. I've put research notes on the profile of his father Carl Maier, aka Gusztav Vilmos Karoly von MAIER according to the linked Geneanet tree, totally unsourced, but which is not necessarily wrong.

I let this to people familiar with this area.

Comments

For those not familiar with the Champsaur immigration, see https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Connect_1900#2023_:_The_Champsaur_Connection

Answer 1

Here are her father's birth/baptism and her grandparents' marriage, both in the Lutheran church in Modor (also known as Modra and Modern) in Pozsony county, Hungary:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9Q97-Y39F-CJ2
4528696 620/785
Modor Luth. baptisms
1892
Number 4. born June 27, baptized July 26.
Child: Gusztáv Vilmos Károly, male, legitimate
Parents: Vilmos Maier local butcher and his wife Mária Hauser, both Lutherans.
Residence: Modor II, 173.
Godparents: Mrs. Nándor Hauser born Hedvig Büttner, in Jurjevácz, Croatia, and Alma Büttner self-employed in Jurjevácz -- as their substitute Mrs. Nándor Hauser born Erzsébet Maier.
Officiant: Károly Hollering, Lutheran minister.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9Q97-Y39F-CGT
4528696 706/785
Modor Luth. marriages
1886
5. on 14th September.
Groom: Mr. Johann Wilhelm Maier, local butcher, legitimate son of ?? Mr. Rudolf Maier Sr., local master butcher and citizen, and his wife Caroline born von Maier.
Bride: Miss Elise Maria Hauser, legitimate daughter of Mr. Ferdinand Hauser, local innkeeper and his wife Elise born von Maier.
Place of origin and residence: Modern; Oedenburg [=Sopron], Modern.
Religion: Lutheran, Lutheran.
Age: 28 years, 26 years born 24 September 1860.
Status: single, single.
Witnesses: Mr. Josef von Maier local farmer; Mr. Theodor Zlocha, mechanic in Vienna.
Announced on 30 Aug., 5 and 12 Sept.
Officiant: the same
Remark: [something about] dispensation from 2nd degree consanguinity is on file in the parish archive.

(The birth/baptism is in Hungarian, so the only difficulty I had there was deciphering the location of the godparents. The marriage record is in German, and there are several words that I cannot even approximate. Edited: thank you to L. König for the help with decipherment. I wonder if the still-missing word is something like "the late"? I haven't yet found death dates for any of these people.)

Edited again: found the ship manifest (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C9PR-T7QP?i=519, lines 6 to 9). They were on the Kronprinz Wilhelm, sailing from Bremen, 10 Oct. 1905.

Comments

I can't read the word before 'Herrn Rudolf Maier' either, but the words after that are 'des Ält[eren], bürgerl[icher]' which means 'senior, citizen' (so his full name was Rudolf Maier der Ältere = Rudolf Maier Sr.).
The occupations of the witnesses are 'Oeconom' (farmer) and 'Mechaniker' (mechanic) and the word in the column of the officiant is 'derselbe' (the same [as above]).
The last column is very hard to read, here's what I got:

Die [?]fügte Dispens vom 2ten [?] der [?]verwandtschaft liegt im Pfarrarchiv.

Some document about the kinship (maybe of bride and groom?) is in the parish archive.

Hopefully someone else can fill in the remaining gaps.

---

Thanks muchly, L. König! (I kinda guessed "Oeconom" -- I've encountered it before, but couldn't remember what it means. And "mechanic" also occurred to me, but I haven't a clue what that occupation would've meant in 1886 [besides not "automobile repairman"].)

---

It occurs to me that the name equivalences are possibly not obvious to other people: Nándor = Ferdinand, Gusztáv Vilmos Károly = Gustav Wilhelm Karl = Gustav William Charles, Erzsébet = Elise (yes, the substitute godparent was grandma).

It seems to have been fairly common practice among German-speaking Lutherans in this area to use their second or third given names, not the first. (My spouse has multiple branches of ancestors who fit the model.)

---

Thanks to both of you. Feel free to create/edit the profiles, if you don't mind.

---

Just a naive question, because I am not familiar with the US sources either. How are we sure that this Gusztáv Vilmos Károly Maier is the same as Charles/Carl Maier who married in New York in 1919?

The only source given for the marriage on the profile as it stands is a FS tree which appears to be completely wrong regarding the ascendancy of Maria Jaussaud (Carl's spouse and mother of Vivian), so why should I trust this source for Carl's parents.

Unless I miss something, every time I go to FS I'm completely lost with the interface and how to get to the primary records. Since I use it so rarely, I don't learn;

---

I haven't looked at Vivian's mother on FS, but I've been working on her father's side there, and I'm quite certain we've got the correct guy.

I'm somewhat out of my depth on the New York end, so all I can go by is the index of the 1919 marriage. The name and age of the groom are correct, assuming he went by his final given name, like the rest of his family; the names of his parents match; and the birthdate probably matches (although the index has mangled it).

There's a draft registration that matches the birthdate and his emigration with his parents. (I haven't tracked down the referenced naturalization.)

The 1910 census also matches his parents, and adds his sister and uncle. It gives the same arrival year as the manifest, which names Modra (Modern) as their place of origin. There's also a state census from 1915, confirming the parents, sister, and uncle, but I can't access the image for that.

---

Ok, seems enough to me

---

I had a vague recollection that New York City is sometimes an exception to the genealogical black hole represented by New York State, and last night, I found (and posted) that marriage certificate. I was right that the index mangled the birthdates: what it actually says is "Age: 27 on 27 June 1919" and "Age: 21 yrs on May 10 1919". And yes, it gives entirely different parents for the bride than what her profile says -- but also different from what that "Storied.com" file on FS says. (Her profile on the tree at FS doesn't make a decision: it has both the marriage-certificate-based parents and her apparently-true parents. And someone's gone and found a birth record that almost perfectly matches the marriage certificate.)

---

This marriage record raises a lot of questions. Just thinking aloud here :

• The second name "Margaret" does not appear on her birth record.
• The filiation declared for Maria in this record is completely at odds with her story told by the Champsaur registries and Maria and Vivian's biography supported by local witnesses and relatives.
• The alleged birth place, "Lyon, France" defies all attempt to check against any birth record. Lyon is a big town, miles away from Champsaur.
• Maria is forging herself a father, although she actually inherited the "Jaussaud " name from her mother. Maria is the illegitimate daughter of Emilie Jaussaud, who was barely 16 at Maria's birth. Maybe Maria wants to hide this unglorious filiation, for many understandable reasons. Maybe her husband himself is not aware of her true filiation. All bets are off.
• The alleged name for Maria's mother, "Eugénie Pellegrin" is partly true. Maria's mother first name is indeed Eugénie, and Pellegrin is the maiden name of Eugénie's mother.

Along with the dubious 1940 census quoted in the sources, this piece seems a hint at the difficulties of Maria to cope with her origins.

If we had not the biography of Vivian with some solid elements on the French side, I would wonder if those two Maria are actually the same person.

---

Disadvantaging and shaming a child for the marital status of her parents makes no sense whatsoever (I mean, really, what is the child supposed to do about it?), and yet, such behavior was accepted and common. Therefore, people tried to hide illegitimate status every way they could -- such as by inventing new parents to put on a vital record.

I get the impression that any official transaction that didn't require verification of reported data invited a certain degree of sloppiness in reporting: Austria-Hungary simplified to Austria, origins in a small town 15 miles north of Pozsony (Bratislava) reported as birthplace = Vienna, ages rounded off or fudged, etc. It was not a huge step to go from that to partially-true parentage, using true given names, and surnames from one generation further back. If the official had called them on it, they could easily have claimed confusion about what the question had been.

---

It seems that we have the same interpretation of the affair. Actually the "alternative truth" provided by the marriage record provides information "between the lines" when compared to more solid sources, and is a good illustration of the dangers of single-sourced genealogy.

---

Based on the other records from this church that I've been looking at, I think the missing word before "Herrn" in the marriage record is something to do with "noble". (Maybe adelgeb[oren]?)

And I figured out that they definitely needed a dispensation from consanguinity: the mothers of the bride and groom (i.e. Charles's grandmothers) were sisters.