Genealogical Report · Haut-Rhin, Alsace
The birthplaces of Elizabeth Merck and Joseph Seckler, established from the original civil registers of the Haut-Rhin, together with seven generations of their Alsatian ancestry.
This is the report delivered to Nicole, published here as an example of what a Racines report contains, with the family's own details left as they were. The narrative of how the research was actually conducted, including the dead ends, is told in the case study.
Nicole's question was simple to state and hard to answer: where exactly in Alsace were my great-great-grandparents born? The American records said only “France,” and a death certificate issued in 1938 gave a birth date that turned out to be wrong by one year, which is why every earlier search had looked in the wrong register.
Both answers have now been found in the original acts.
Seven kilometres apart. They married twenty-five years later in Paterson, New Jersey.
Act no. 221 · Naissances de Soultz, 1863 Declaration made at the town hall of Soultz, before us Wolly Antoine, second deputy mayor, on the twenty-third of December eighteen hundred and sixty-three, at nine o'clock in the morning, of the birth of a child of the female sex, born in lawful wedlock this day at one o'clock in the morning, at the home of its father and mother, and named MARIE ÉLISABETH.
Given name and surname of the father: MERCK Jean Baptiste, factory worker, aged thirty years.
Given name and surname of the mother: LIERMANN Élisabeth, no occupation, aged twenty-nine years, spouses living at Soultz.
Act no. 31 · Naissances de Buhl, 1862 In the year eighteen hundred and sixty-two, on the nineteenth day of the month of June, at five o'clock in the evening, before us Joseph Hittenbrand, mayor and registrar of the commune of BUHL, canton of Guebwiller, appeared Joseph SECKLER, moulder, aged thirty-two years, living in this commune, who presented to us a child of the male sex, whom he declared to have been born in his house in this commune, this day at nine o'clock in the morning, of himself and of Thérèse SCHELLENBERGER, his wife, no occupation, aged twenty-seven years, to whom he declared he wished to give the given names of JOSEPH EUGÈNE […] after the act had been read and interpreted to them in German.
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Neither identification rests on a single document. Each is confirmed by independent American records made during their lifetimes.
| Source | Age stated | Consistent? |
|---|---|---|
| Elizabeth, marriage, Paterson, 25 June 1887 | 23 | Yes. 23 years 6 months |
| Elizabeth, birth of son John, 10 Nov 1898 | 34 | Yes. 34, turning 35 in December |
| Elizabeth, Soultz census, 1866 | 2 | Yes |
| Elizabeth, death certificate, Paterson, 1938 | born 23 Dec 1864 | Day and month correct. Year wrong by one |
| Joseph, marriage, Paterson, 25 June 1887 | 25 | Yes. 25 years and 6 days |
| Joseph, Soultz census, 1866 | 4 | Yes |
Her 1938 death certificate, given by her son John, records her birth as 23 December 1864. The day and the month were exactly right. He remembered his mother's birthday. Only the year was wrong, by one.
That single digit sent every search into the registers of 1864 and 1865. Her act was in 1863, four hundred pages earlier.
On the 1887 Paterson marriage record, the maiden name of Joseph's mother had initially been interpreted as “Leininger” with the help of ChatGPT, but the reading remained uncertain, and it reached me as “Liermann,” which matched nothing and blocked the whole paternal line. Read again under magnification, the clerk's hand gives a name beginning with the same S he used in “Seckler” and ending unmistakably in -berger: “Selinberger.”
It is an English-speaking clerk's phonetic spelling of SCHELLENBERGER, confirmed by the birth act of Joseph's sister Marie at Soultz in 1864, which names the mother Schellenberger Thérèse in full.
The surname LIERMANN is written Lireman in the Soultz acts of 1807 and Liermann from the 1830s onward. It is one family, spelled by successive clerks as they heard it, which is the same phenomenon that produced “Selinberger” in New Jersey eighty years later.
An aunt of Joseph's, Marie Anne SECKLER (b. c. 1821, wife of Joseph Vogel), died at Soultz on 6 August 1863. That is the first trace of the family's arrival there.
Everything in this report happened at the mouth of the Florival valley, below Guebwiller. Nicole can walk the whole thing in two days.
They were wine people who became mill people. In 1807 both great-great-great-grandfathers, Jean Merck and Jacques Lireman, are recorded as vignerons at Soultz, and they served in turn as the mayor's official witnesses at births. Their sons were day labourers. Their grandchildren, Jean Baptiste Merck and Élisabeth Liermann, are both ouvrier and ouvrière de fabrique, factory hands. They almost certainly met at the mill.
They spoke German. Every act signed by the older generation carries the same formula: après lecture et interprétation faites en allemand, after reading and interpretation made in German. Jean Merck signed his son's 1833 birth act Johannes, not Jean. These people were French by civil status and German-speaking by language, which explains every one of the name distortions on the American side.
The trade crossed the ocean. Joseph's father is recorded as a mouleur, a moulder, at Buhl in 1862. On the 1898 birth record of his son John in Paterson, Joseph's own occupation is written moulder. The same trade, from a foundry in the Florival to a foundry in New Jersey.
Silk drew them to Paterson. On the same page of the Soultz register as Elizabeth's birth, a neighbour is described as a fabricant de rubans de soie, a silk ribbon maker. In 1887 Joseph gave his occupation in Paterson as silk weaver. They left one textile valley for another.
They lost children. An infant Merck died at Soultz on 11 January 1866. Charles was born one month later, on 11 February. Élisabeth Liermann buried a daughter within weeks of giving birth to a son.
All records are held by the Archives d'Alsace, site de Colmar (Haut-Rhin) and are freely consultable online at archives68.alsace.eu.
| Record | Commune | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Birth of Marie Élisabeth MERCK, 23 Dec 1863 | Soultz | 5Mi472/26, act no. 221 |
| Birth of Joseph Eugène SECKLER, 19 June 1862 | Buhl | 5Mi/90/4, act no. 31 · image |
| Marriage MERCK × LIERMANN, 23 Jan 1861 | Soultz | Mariages 1861, act no. 9 |
| Marriage SEKLER × SCHELLENBERGER, 27 Oct 1859 | Wuenheim | Mariages 1859, act no. 9, folio 5 |
| Birth of Jean Baptiste MERCK, 8 Nov 1833 | Rimbach-Zell | 5Mi414/1, act no. 6 · image |
| Marriage MERK × EHLINGER, 23 May 1831 | Rimbach-Zell | Mariages 1831, act no. 1 |
| Birth of Jean MERCK, 9 Oct 1807 | Soultz | Naissances 1807, folio 28 |
| Birth of Marie SECKLER, 14 Aug 1864 | Soultz | 5Mi472/26, act no. 128 |
| Death of Marie Anne SECKLER, 6 Aug 1863 | Soultz | 5Mi472/28, act no. 121 |
| Birth of Émile SEKLER, 12 May 1860 | Buhl | Annual index 1860, act no. 36 |
| Decennial indexes used throughout | Soultz | 5Mi472/25 (1792 to 1872) |