BRETHREN-L Archives

From: Nclunaire <>
Subject: Re: [BRE] My lead to Jacob Greib's origins
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:14:13 -0400
References: <mailman.346.1285719054.24805.brethren@rootsweb.com>
In-Reply-To: <mailman.346.1285719054.24805.brethren@rootsweb.com>

I have recieved permission from Steffen Buehler (German researcher who has done a lot of Cripe/Greib genealogy because his wife is a Greib) to post to this list the information that he sent to me about his discovery of the 1733 immigrant Jacob Greib's origins. Here it is (from a Sept 1st email to me) :


Let me tell you about my hunt for Jacob:

In summer 1983, my father-in-law Philipp answered to a query in a genealogical magazine. Though he couldn't help very much, he became interested in his own family tree, so around 1986 we both went again through all available documents we could get. The result was a ancestry chart of Philipp's line up to the time of the 30-years-war. Günter Greib, a distant cousin of Philipp, provided us with some data about the Koblenz and the Rhine lines which all spread from Amöneburg. But still we wondered where Jacob Greib came from.

Then a longer break took place. Philipp had a serious stroke in 1990 and died in 1994. I finished my time at the university, moved to Munich and started working. It must have been around 1999 when I somehow found the Cripe discussion forum in the Internet and was reminded of the hunt for Jacob again. So I did what I could do from here in Germany: I collected all Greibs I could get by search engines and the phone book. I wrote to every email address I found and often got nice answers - but everyone I found was related to the Amöneburg branch.

In 2000, I wrote a letter to Günter Greib to find out if there was anything new that he may had found out in the meantime. He answered that
all his efforts were more or less in vain. But then he mentioned that there was one Greib he talked to just that summer, and this person told him he remembered that his grandfather was born somewhere in Alsace or Lorraine.

That was a complete new aspect. I went to the French phonebook, entered "Greib" and was flooded with new names. Now I visited some French genealogy websites and found some experts who could help me a little further. But still no Jacob ...

In 2001, I finally did something that I had planned right from the start: I wrote a letter to each Greib in Germany whom I couldn't assign
up to that time. And then, one evening, someone answered by phone. He was a Greib who derived from Amöneburg again, but he told me he met a French genealogist named Albert Girardin long ago who told him: "Did you know that your early roots are Huguenots? There's a long history of Greibs in Lorraine which I have researched!"

That sounded very, very promising. Unfortunately, he didn't know at all where Albert could be reached - he only remembered an address of a German-Alsace society where he must have been a member. I found out the phone number of that society, but Albert was unknown. Anyway, they told me there's an associated society where I could have more luck. Indeed, these people knew Albert, but had to tell me that he had died some years ago. But they gave me the address and phone number of his widow, Annemarie, who was working in the field of genealogy as well.

So I called this woman and after some minutes it turned out that she knew very much about the Lorraine Greibs. In fact, without going to her and her husband's files, she told me quite a lot about the history of that region and, while talking, even was able to read some excerpts from a book where it was mentioned that five Greib families came from Bern and settled in a small region in Lorraine. She promised to send more by mail.

And she did! All the ancestrial documents of that area have been compiled by a man called Gerhard Hein who filled tons of paper just by typewriter around 1970. Together with Albert Girardin and others he wrote chronicles of almost every village. Just imagine: all these genealogical treasures had been available for decades, but no one found them! Mrs. Girardin sent me three copies of the respective pages where Jacob, his parents and grandparents are mentioned.

Almost parallel, I contacted one of the mentioned Alsace experts, Fred Wampler, again, and he told me to look into the records of Diedendorf where he had found a Jacob Greib who was born in 1711. That's exactly what I found in the documents Mrs. Girardin sent me.

Furthermore, she told me there's another very active genealogist in Nancy, France, who was interested in my work as well. His name is Pierre Balliet who is a descendant from Jacob's father and has researched a lot concerning his family chart. Together with his and Mrs. Girardin's data I was able to gather all these data together:

The very first Greib mentioned is Adam Greib who was mayor of Helleringen in 1672. He married N. Maron, daughter of Jean Maron (former mayor of this village) and Judith Liénard (from Switzerland). By the way, Mr. Girardin made a short remark that all the Lutheran refugees from Switzerland only married Lutherans again, so after two generations everyone was related to everyone...

Adam had two sons: Gaspar Greib who married Marguerite Regnise. They had one son called Jean-Jacques who was born and died in 1681. Adam's second son, Adam, married Sarah Hofmann on January 18th, 1682. They had two children: Marie, born April 21st, 1684, and Jacob. His birth date is not recorded, but his death certificate from August 26th, 1765 states that he was 86 years and 8 months old when he died, which gives January 1679, a little too early concerning the wedding date...

Jacob, a cooper and church council, married Veronica Lantz, daughter of Melchior Lantz from Switzerland, on February 13th, 1709. They moved from Helleringen to Diedendorf and had two children: Jacob (the one), born August 14th, 1711, and Catharina, born January 9th, 1714. Catharina married Stephan Utter on January 25th, 1735, and this line goes down to Pierre Balliet.

Veronica died in 1715, and Jacob married Magdalena N. They had a daughter Judith born on February 18th, 1717. Magdalena died in 1718, and Jacob married Katharina Karcher. Three more children followed: Johannes (27.08.1724-19.05.1780), a cooper in Rauweiler, Magdalena (*26.09.1728, married Nicolaus Balliet on 21-04-1750), and Elisabeth (*24-02-1731, married Lorenz Balliet on 21-11-1769). Both Balliets are ancestors of Pierre as well.

Katharina died in 1754, and Jacob married Katharina Martzloff who died in 1760 without leaving any children. Jacob died five years later (see above) in Schalbach.

Even the roots of Adam were investigated a little by Mr. Girardin: according to Robert Greib, another very active Alsace genealogist, it seems to be a fact that all the five Greib families came from Lotzwil near Langenthal in the canton of Bern. Here I found another contact via Google: a Jean-Daniel Greub has researched his ancestry and put the results on his website http://www.ordiecole.com/gen/html/lotzwil.html.

Here he also claims Lotzwil to be the origin of the Greub/Greib family. I wrote an email to Jean-Daniel, asking if he knew something about an emigration of Greubs around 1670. He replied that he knew nothing, but he got all his informations from a woman in Lotzwil working in the local government who provided him with documents some years ago. But this person told me in a letter that these data are now kept in Bern (Staatsarchiv, Falkenplatz 4, 3012 Bern, Switzerland).

According to Mr. Balliet, you can get the CD [CD-ROM of church records transcribe by G. HEIN, mentioned above] from

Johann Heinrich Barth
Schillerstrasse 12
46047 Oberhausen
Germany

Phone: +49 208 863 496
Fax : +49 208 863 431
Email:

The CD's title is "Familienbücher Krummes Elsass" ISBN 3-00-006742-6. As you can imagine, it contains far more data than only Diedendorf - sixty villages are recorded here! So it's quite a lot to browse. .... [note: "Krummes Elsass" is the local name for the area of Alsace where Diedendorf, Rauweiler, and Goerlingen are located, just a very few miles east/north/northeast of the Lorraine villages of Hellering-les-Fenetrange, Lixheim, and Schalbach. These village names are ones which Buehler identifies as home to the Greibs in Jacob's lineage in this message and/or in his 2004 posting on ancestry.com that Iris Wilde linked me to a posting here a few weeks ago].

Most of the data [about the Alsace-Lorraine Greibs] come from Pierre Balliet. He further told me that a good contact would be

Monsieur RUDIO
Centre de généalogie d'Alsace Bossue
Espace culturel du temple
Rue des Eglises - BP 74
F-67262 SARRE UNION CEDEX
France

Steffen adds the caution that this is only in "high probability" the immigrant Jacob GREIB's family records, and that

"A real proof must be done by a professional. I had contact to one: his name is Roger Minert (a Cripe descendant as well) who found Veronica "Freni" Lanz's mother, Freni Bertschi. This would be Jacob Greib's (1711) maternal grandmother. Still, he has not found Adam Greib. Anyway, he is sure that Jacob Greib from Diedendorf is the same person who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1733. If you want to contact him, his address is >. He also has a website: http://www.rogerpminert.com.";

Armed with this info from Steffen, I went exploring and came across the Conseil General du Bas-Rhin website.

Nancy Cripe

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• Re: [BRE] My lead to Jacob Greib's origins by Nclunaire <>