Max Alfred Pueschel

I'm starting my family digging extravaganza with my great grandfather, Max Alfred.  He seems to have come from a family in Spremberg which I keep accidentally switching the r and the e so it ends up Spermberg and then I start hysterically giggling.

His family lore is fairly interesting since my opa didn't get along with him, but by most all accounts (Opa's and his mother) he seemed to do no wrong.  What I have found so far is he went to a super posh school in his day called Kreuzschule. The Kreuzschule was started in the 1300 and is the oldest school in Dresden and one of the oldest in Germany. It specialized in Latin as it was started by monks and later became a prominent Protestant school in the reformation.  This is great info as my opa describes him speaking Latin and studied Greek philosophy (know one dead language you might as well be proficient in another dead language). This is insight for me as my opa was named after the Greek hero, Achilles because his father loved all things Greek.  Daniel and I want to do something similarly wacky with our children, but not just Greek heroes, Scandinavian heroes as well. He also sang well and played the piano according to my Opa.  The school is also know for its choir, so who knows he may be in the choir.  I have to wait to get onto Ancestry because I don't have money right now, but I've already found what may be him on Dresden City records and hope to go through their  schools books and find something (course the Kreuzschule was bombed in 1945 so nothing may be left in records).

Another interesting thing I found was that he worked for the Royal Saxony Railroad, Opa said he was the secretary of finance for the company. Later he told my dad that his job was as important as the secretary of transportation in the US.  While yes I do agree he probably was a CFO for a kingdoms transport company (Saxony was its own kingdom until WWI), the kingdom had more than one railroad company.  Most interesting of all is that his wife's parents didn't want them to get married, she came from a super loaded family that had aristocracy connections. 

Remember the weeds!

Here is where it gets fuzzy.  Grammsie's dad is the one from England that I have been tracking down, I was able to find his dad's grave. I still don't know why a young man would leave his family, that ran a successful business that you would inherit, go to West Germany,learn German, marry and start a family, learn textiles (completely different skill set than farming and shopkeeping), and catch the attention of the king with your wicked textile skills and move to East Germany. Once there marry a lady twice as young as you and start a whole new family.  Yeah I'd really like to meet this guy because he was wildly successful even before he left home. Anyways Sampson (Mr. Wildly Successful) taught miners wives in the Ore Mountains how to make lace and other textiles so they could make piece meal money. He was later able to have property next to the kings in Potsdam (see loaded, and had his daughter hang out and help the crown prince with his English homework). The interesting thing is the Royal Saxony Railroad was making routes to the Ore Mountains as well during the turn of the century when Max was working for them.

His father-in-law had already past away (1892) by the time he was married (1899).  I'm sure that some serious name dropping went on in order for him to get this job. He studied Greek for crying out loud, his son describes him as an avid outdoors man, I'm not ragging on his math skills, but really he gets a desk job doing finance!?!  I hope to find out more and see how much my narrative is complete hogwash or if Max really did trade in on his father-in-law's name.

Mostly my information is from my opa's memoirs, but Wikipedia is the best to look up names of places and companies and it's amzaing the story you can piece together.

New Year, New Attempts

I’ve decided on two new resolutions and I think I will keep an old one. Since I started out so good with walking daily and then it went to crap, I think I will redo that resolution. I hope to get Daniel into the acupuncturist so that he can get his energy up and we will help each other with this one. Okay really I’m assigning him a resolution since his most favorite is to quit smoking.

One of my resolutions I stole from a friend, but it is so simple yet so worthy that I can’t let it slide…I’m going to floss every night.  Now I know myself better than to totally have a perfect record of this, so I am shooting for perfection while hoping to do it three times a week.  I’ve started, but end up doing it two weeks in a row and then nothing for two months.  I know not too exciting, but important as I’m getting old and my teeth are falling out (not really, but I’ve had some troubles).

My next resolution I think will be kind of fun reporting as I’m going to be able to keep up with the blog this way. I want to do more family history.  Even though I’m a total Anglophile and love that side my father’s family, I think I’m going to dig around with my father’s German heritage.  I’m at complete loss at how to go about this, but meh it’s part of the adventure.  My sister-in-law should be able to supply words such as birth, death, and occupation, since she is German, so that should help.  The biggest problem is I have family that goes back before census’(I should know the Latin plural for this and don’t; boo High School Latin that didn’t stick) and of course they lived in an area that was Prussian, Russian, or whatever conquering force at the time was.  Of that means burning and pillaging, so who knows what is left around. I have very little German history to go on, so this could end up being a huge shot in the dark.  Plus I’m really annoyed with all the genealogist I work with because all they ever know how to do is look up the American census and find everything they want and have no idea how to really dig, so I am stumbling for sure just to find a good starting place.  Ultimately, I hope to have another little expedition to see where some of these people lived. Maybe more grave standing in weeds will take place! I hope that I find some scandalist-scandal that will make for some good posts.  Which just shows that I really am a gossiper, I even want to know dead peoples problems and troubles.  Maybe I will find pictures!!!!

I have a backup plan if I really get stuck.   I seriously want to catch up on my scrapbook as I am now four years behind.  I no longer really take many pictures because I know it will only make the pile higher.  This means I will have to put down my knitting which rankles a bit, but I should at least set an example of marking my life while I curse my ancestors for being paranoid atheist who refused to leave some mark that they existed.