Germany: More School and Heidelberg

Monday was another school day. KL and I let the students have at while we bummed around downtown Esslingen. I could do this every day, thanks.

The next day the students and teachers took a trip to Heidelberg. We bustled down to the train station and hopped aboard an ICE train for a three-hour ride which I still enjoyed, thank you.

Heidelberg is an old, old city that was largely untouched by World War II. It’s a medium-sized town at the bottom of a valley on the banks of the Neckar River (which also flows through Esslingen). It’s the quintessential German city, with narrow, cobblestone streets, unexpected churches, little markets, and a world-class university. Looming over the whole place is The Ruin.  The Ruin is a ruined castle that was built and inhabited only a short time before a war blasted it into semi-rubble. It’s been partly restored, but largely left as a ruin and something about it looks incredibly romantic and poetic, which is why it hasn’t been fully rebuilt. It’s a stunning site. Heidelberg is probably my favorite place in Germany, and if I won the lottery, I would give serious consideration to living there.

The students were given time to explore. Me, I had my own agenda.

See, Darwin has been doing genealogy for decades and, like most genealogists, he has a few stopping points—ancestors he can’t get past. One ancestor is Graf (Count) Johann (Johannes/John) Damon (Dammon/Daymon/Daman). Darwin can’t find his parents, a necessary step for going farther back on his tree. 

However, family legend says he studied at the University of Heidelberg in the early 1800s, when the Napoleanic Wars pulled him out of school. Eventually he made his way to the United States. I was going to find out more about him.

My main goal was to find out if it would be worth searching more for him in Heidelberg. See, I only had about an hour, and I was fairly sure that if the records existed, they would be scanned from hand-written pages and saved as photos or PDFs. Early 19th century hand-written German is a bitch to read. You have to know, for example, if what looks an f is actually an f, an s, or even ss. Capital letters are florid and difficult to distinguish from one another. V and W look much the same. So I was fairly sure that finding Daman in any existing records would be a difficult and careful hunt, which I couldn’t do in just an hour. I wanted to learn if it would be worth it for Darwin and me to return later. 

I located the university library with my iPhone and discovered it was only a short walk from the meeting point for the students. Yay! I hiked through Heidelberg’s horrifyingly delightful streets to the massive stone library, which is conveniently located across the street from an equally massive church built of pink sandstone. I had settled on the library as a more likely place to store old records than, say, the registrar’s office.

Inside, I found an information desk, where a Very Helpful Lady sat me down and asked me what I needed. I told her. She settled her glasses on her nose and started clicking keys. I was a little worried that my request would be greeted with a semi-huffy, “I can only help you a little,” but not at all. I had just handed a librarian a research puzzle, you see, and most of them live for this kind of thing, including the Very Helpful Lady.

A second monitor that faced me mirrored what she was doing, which was very useful. She called up a number of records sites, and it turned out I had been right—the early 1800s records were PDFs of old books. Printed or typed records didn’t start until the 1830s, long after Daman would have been a student. They definitely had the records, and the VHL perused a few of them to see if Daman’s name cropped up. In the meantime, she fired questions at me (but very nicely). Did he earn his doctorate? (No, he didn’t even graduate.) Do you know what he studied? (No.) Do you know what religion he was? (Protestant.) 

I also called poor Darwin, who was dead asleep at 4 AM back home, to get more clarification on some points. (Hey, this was the only chance to do this search with on-site help. Sacrifices must be made.) He scared up a little more information and answers to the questions, but not a whole lot. Most of it was, as I said, family legend, and wasn’t official knowledge.

Rather than become frustrated by the skimpy information, the VHL became more interested. Could we find him? She suggested that, since he was born a count, that we check the city records at Kassel, where he was born. Records of nobility were more carefully preserved. We should also check at churches for birth, baptism, and marriage records, since we know his religion. And she showed me a bunch of places where such records were already digitized and available on-line. (Although Darwin is adept at searching web archives, American search engines often ignore European archive sites, and without a URL, he didn’t know where to look.)

In the end, I came away with a whole bunch of leads, including the tantalizing idea that his original (pre-Amercan) name may have been Jacques, since there was a Jacque Daman from Belgium who served under Napoleon, was injured at Waterloo, and attended university at Heidelberg. Darwin doesn’t think he’s the right person, but it’s worth following up on. And we have the other archives to search now.

I thanked the VHL effusively for her time, and she seemed pleased. So it was a good day for all!