I read E. L. Doctorow's The March within a year of its publication in 2006 just as I was confirming the suspicion I had held for a year or two that I did indeed have a Civil War ancestor. It began in 2001 a month or two after 9-11 when I accompanied my wife to a meeting with nurses in Atlanta, Georgia where she was scheduled to speak. We…
I read E. L. Doctorow's The March within a year of its publication in 2006 just as I was confirming the suspicion I had held for a year or two that I did indeed have a Civil War ancestor. It began in 2001 a month or two after 9-11 when I accompanied my wife to a meeting with nurses in Atlanta, Georgia where she was scheduled to speak. We spent a Sunday afternoon there at Stone Mountain with two Samoan nurses my wife had worked with in Samoa in 1991 and again for a number of months from 1993 to 1996 and beyond. I found myself in the position of having to interpret this monument to these Samoans we had known for about a decade. A year later my wife had a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland and I went along. It was my first trip to Europe. I flew into Amsterdam, spent two nights there, then flew to Geneva where I met up with my wife for the weekend. On Monday morning I got on a train to Munich and enjoyed the last day and a half of Oktoberfest in the first week of November before boarding a train for three nights in Berlin. I took day trips to Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam and to Spandau and I saw the Brandenburg Gate while the new U.S. Embassy there was officially opened. I had known since early childhood that my father's family were Germans who moved to Wisconsin sometime in the 19th century and that my grandfather had been a minister there and preached in both German and English. He died in 1932 more than twenty years before I was born. His wife, my grandmother, died in 1956 and saw me only once while I was still an infant in 1953. On my trip to Berlin I had no clue where to even begin a search for my German roots. As it happens, living in Manila, it began with a dial-up connection to the internet, using Google to Search my own surname. I found a cemetery transcription of a small church graveyard in Tilden, Wisconsin, not far from Chippewa Falls and about an hour's drive from the Twin Cities. I found a Census Record from 1910 for Chippewa Falls. I also found a Plat Map for a Scott Township in Sheboygan County bordering Lake Michigan and a roster for Company F of the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry with a soldier named Wilhelm Lubach, who enlisted on October 18th, 1864 and died of disease on July 27th, 1865. But what really made me curious was an emigration record from a German genealogy site called the Neumark List. It was Germans mostly from what had been West Germany searching for relatives and ancestors who had lived before 1945 east of the Oder in what had since become Poland. I joined the list and tried to recollect what I could from two years of high school German and another year and a half at the college level. Reunification of Germany was a complex process as most of the five million Germans living east of the Oder who survived WWII were transplanted to what we used to call East Germany. I followed the List for more than a year before I determined that the Kreis Koenigsberg where my ancestors lived when they registered to emigrate in 1855-56 was not the city where Immanuel Kant was born and lived out his entire life. That city has been known as Kaliningrad since the end of WWII. It's a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania and Russia's only ice free Baltic port. Kreis Koenigsberg is a county about seventy miles from Berlin. Koenigsberg was a town that was that county's county seat, now known as Chojna. Zehden is a small town in that county on the Oder at the point where the Finow Canal connects to the Oder. You can get in a boat and go all the way to the Kurfurstendamm in downtown Berlin without getting out of the boat. The Port of Berlin is actually the city of Stettin on the Oder about twenty miles from the Baltic. The Poles call it Szczecin. Reading E L Doctorow's The March is quite disorienting until you are three or four chapters in. I learned today that it has been made into a stage play that was performed in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2012, but I think it's still considered an off Broadway production. Half a dozen Doctorow novels have been made into films that received critical acclaim but achieved disappointing results at the box office. The March was written knowing that it would eventually become a movie. It's quite cinematic and photographers documenting Sherman's march to the sea and beyond are among the main characters. The only question is when.
Thanks so much for sharing this story. I am going to make sure that my wife, who is from Germany, also reads it. I would love to see "The March" turned into a Hollywood film.
I read E. L. Doctorow's The March within a year of its publication in 2006 just as I was confirming the suspicion I had held for a year or two that I did indeed have a Civil War ancestor. It began in 2001 a month or two after 9-11 when I accompanied my wife to a meeting with nurses in Atlanta, Georgia where she was scheduled to speak. We spent a Sunday afternoon there at Stone Mountain with two Samoan nurses my wife had worked with in Samoa in 1991 and again for a number of months from 1993 to 1996 and beyond. I found myself in the position of having to interpret this monument to these Samoans we had known for about a decade. A year later my wife had a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland and I went along. It was my first trip to Europe. I flew into Amsterdam, spent two nights there, then flew to Geneva where I met up with my wife for the weekend. On Monday morning I got on a train to Munich and enjoyed the last day and a half of Oktoberfest in the first week of November before boarding a train for three nights in Berlin. I took day trips to Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam and to Spandau and I saw the Brandenburg Gate while the new U.S. Embassy there was officially opened. I had known since early childhood that my father's family were Germans who moved to Wisconsin sometime in the 19th century and that my grandfather had been a minister there and preached in both German and English. He died in 1932 more than twenty years before I was born. His wife, my grandmother, died in 1956 and saw me only once while I was still an infant in 1953. On my trip to Berlin I had no clue where to even begin a search for my German roots. As it happens, living in Manila, it began with a dial-up connection to the internet, using Google to Search my own surname. I found a cemetery transcription of a small church graveyard in Tilden, Wisconsin, not far from Chippewa Falls and about an hour's drive from the Twin Cities. I found a Census Record from 1910 for Chippewa Falls. I also found a Plat Map for a Scott Township in Sheboygan County bordering Lake Michigan and a roster for Company F of the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry with a soldier named Wilhelm Lubach, who enlisted on October 18th, 1864 and died of disease on July 27th, 1865. But what really made me curious was an emigration record from a German genealogy site called the Neumark List. It was Germans mostly from what had been West Germany searching for relatives and ancestors who had lived before 1945 east of the Oder in what had since become Poland. I joined the list and tried to recollect what I could from two years of high school German and another year and a half at the college level. Reunification of Germany was a complex process as most of the five million Germans living east of the Oder who survived WWII were transplanted to what we used to call East Germany. I followed the List for more than a year before I determined that the Kreis Koenigsberg where my ancestors lived when they registered to emigrate in 1855-56 was not the city where Immanuel Kant was born and lived out his entire life. That city has been known as Kaliningrad since the end of WWII. It's a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania and Russia's only ice free Baltic port. Kreis Koenigsberg is a county about seventy miles from Berlin. Koenigsberg was a town that was that county's county seat, now known as Chojna. Zehden is a small town in that county on the Oder at the point where the Finow Canal connects to the Oder. You can get in a boat and go all the way to the Kurfurstendamm in downtown Berlin without getting out of the boat. The Port of Berlin is actually the city of Stettin on the Oder about twenty miles from the Baltic. The Poles call it Szczecin. Reading E L Doctorow's The March is quite disorienting until you are three or four chapters in. I learned today that it has been made into a stage play that was performed in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2012, but I think it's still considered an off Broadway production. Half a dozen Doctorow novels have been made into films that received critical acclaim but achieved disappointing results at the box office. The March was written knowing that it would eventually become a movie. It's quite cinematic and photographers documenting Sherman's march to the sea and beyond are among the main characters. The only question is when.
Hi Craig,
Thanks so much for sharing this story. I am going to make sure that my wife, who is from Germany, also reads it. I would love to see "The March" turned into a Hollywood film.