Purpose. The spreadsheet linked below is part of my ongoing effort to enumerate the Donauschwaben (or Danube Swabians) living in St. Louis in the twentieth century—and, equally important, to show the relationships between them. Each person listed on the spreadsheet is immediately related to at least one other person on the sheet, either as a spouse, a child, a parent, or a sibling.
The spreadsheet therefore represents the ways in which Donauschwaben living in St. Louis became knitted together. Often these relationships were already in place upon arrival. But the community also knitted itself after arrival, through marriages solemnized in St. Louis, frequently between people from different Donauschwaben villages. These immediate familial relationships gave coherence to a community that started with the first migrations in the early twentieth century, that grew with the arrival of expelled Donauschwaben following World War II, and that ended with the deaths of St. Louis’s last Donauschwaben in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Contents. To be clear, the spread sheet, which is still in progress, enumerates members of an expatriate community, not their forebears in Hungary or their descendants in St. Louis. While it contains elements of genealogy, it is not traditional genealogy, which emphasizes “vertical” relationships—that is, ancestry and lines of descent within a given family. Instead, the spreadsheet emphasizes the “horizontal” relationships, especially marital and sibling relationships, that bound families together into an interrelated community.
The spreadsheet lists only Swabians who:
(a) were born in Hungary,
(b) lived in St. Louis, and
(c) were immediately related (as spouse, parent, child, or sibling) to another Hungarian-born Swabian living in St. Louis.
There are two exceptions:
(a) Children born to Donauschwaben in St. Louis who themselves married either Donauschwaben or children of Donauschwaben are listed, since these second-generation marriages were important to community cohesion.
(b) Spouses of Donauschwaben who were not themselves Donauschwaben are listed; their names are preceded by an asterisk (*).
Sources. The sources of data in the spreadsheet are too numerous to annotate. They include ships’ manifests, obituaries, cemetery records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, census records, Familienbücher—the list goes on. Anyone wishing to know the evidentiary basis of any particular data point should email me.
Method. Generally, the method of the research reflects the purpose: to expose relationships between and among Donauschwaben living in St. Louis. In other words, data have been assembled by “tracing out” the immediate familial relations of a given member of the community. This research leads to the discovery of additional community members, who are in turn “traced out.” The names of community members who have not yet been “traced out” are highlighted in yellow.
The method, of course, is inherently biased towards identifying community members who are immediately connected to other Donauschwaben. It will not lead to the identification of St. Louis Donauschwaben who have no such connection.
Organization. Community members are listed alphabetically. Within each entry, parents, children, and siblings are also listed alphabetically. Spouses, however, are listed in chronological order.
Future developments. The downloadable spreadsheet linked below will be updated as corrections are made and new data are added. I hope that the accrual of data will eventually enable us to investigate key questions about the development of St. Louis’s Donauschwaben community. When did it start? When was it the largest? What forces held it together? What accounts for its demise?
Immigrant Identities in St. Louis, 1903-1935 