Today I have visited Kuchenheim, just a few kilometres from Euskirchen. It is these days really a comfortable looking dormitory suburb. Its streets are named for musicians, - Bachstrasse, Beethovenstrase, Mozart, Vivaldi, Offenbach, etc… My guess is that it was very small, and as it has grown only in recent times, it has footpaths, and the houses have their own front gardens. There were a (very) few old houses. Kuchenheim was the birthplace, on 21st April, 1854, of my maternal great -grand-mother, Anna Gertrude Breuer.
I moved on to Rheinbach, about nine kilometres away. Rheinbach also has lots of streets named after musicians. This led to a distraction – thoughts about street naming. In France, streets are named after great philosophers, writers, statesmen, with the occasional General thrown in. In Ireland, Saints, of course. What do we do, I wondered? We have Kings and Queens of England in our capital city, hmmmm….., (But then also some notable early Australian figures have been honoured in Sydney and Melbourne), then we also have suburbs where streets are named for native trees or flowers, or (as in the case of Clifton Hill, where we lived in Delville Avenue) for the battlefields in France of WWI, the suburb being developed soon after), or suburbs with streets named for alcoholic beverages (Tequila etc….), or for the women (mother, wife, daughters, sisters…) in the life of the developer who opened up the suburb hmmm….. In the US, streets have compass points and numbers East 1st, West 19th, Fifth Avenue, all set out on a grid. Theoretically, you should be able to find your way to an address without a Voice, in America. (I am not convinced of that, really) I decided there is as Ph.D. in street names and what they say about places. Probably someone has already done it.
Anyway, here in Rheinbach, in 1877 Anna Gertrude Breuer married John Adam Loth. (The church there is also St Martin’s . And the church in Bad Ems where some of the children of JA and AG were baptised is also St Martin’s. He must be a favourite around here. ) Their second child, Jacob, was my grandfather. They came to Australia in the late 1880s, John Adam via Chile where he had been working as an engineer on a mining project, and Anna Gertrude, with the four remaining of her six children, (at that stage – four more “Australians” were later born to the couple), escorted to Australia by her brother Heinrich to join John Adam in North Queensland, where he had been sent to work on the mines.
Just a very few kilometres from Rheinbach there are three tiny villages – Irlenbusch, Neukirchen and Kurtenberg. The first two almost merge into each other, the third is a little way apart. This cluster takes us back yet another generation. For it was in Kurtenberg, on 16th February 1831, that my great-great-grandmother was born, Margaritta Cremer. Margaritta married Adam Loth (born in 1831 in Oberelbert, near Bad Ems) on 17th February 1855. (Adam Loth had been working around Irlenbusch and Neukirchen as a blacksmith. It was a mining area. Though today I saw farmlands, with, to be sure, lots of horses.) Their son John Adam Loth, (he who in the previous paragraph married Anna Gertrude Breuer and eventually came to Australia) had been born the year before, and entered into the church registrar as Cremer. He was then legitimized and his name changed to Loth by his parents’ marriage.
It took not very long at all to cover just about every square metre of these three tiny villages. In fact Kurtenberg consists of about 8 buildings. On the main road there is an Inn, and a sign to Kurtenberg. So you go off along the road, and then you turn into another byway which takes you into Kurtenberg. When you come to a dead end in someone’s driveway, you turn around and come out again. It is that tiny. There was one very old (white with black timbers) house, and I looked at it and wondered …1831? I did not even see a living person. Perhaps those who live in the houses now work in Rheinbach, and surely some of them still run the farms. If I had seen anyone I would have asked if the Cremer name still lives on in the district.
There are beautiful woodlands nearby too, and driving through them in the autumn, with the wonderful range of warm colours, was magic.
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