# Württemberg Roots **Blacksmiths and Farmers of Bonfeld** Daubel • Streib • Deck • Haueisen For more than a century and a half, the intertwined Daubel, Streib, Deck, and Haueisen families lived, married, and worked their trades in a cluster of small villages in the district of Heilbronn, in the kingdom of Württemberg. Blacksmiths, farmers, master butchers, and village officials, they baptized their children in the parish churches and appeared in the citizens' registers generation after generation — until the strict conscription of a newly unified Germany and the promise of a freer life drew one household of them across the Atlantic. This chapter follows those families from their Kraichgau homes to the threshold of emigration, and leaves the story of their arrival in America for the chapters that follow. ## The Villages of the Kraichgau The homeland of these families lay in the Kraichgau, the fertile belt of loess-covered hills that stretches between the Neckar valley and the Rhine plain. This was old, worked land — soft ridges and shallow valleys broken by orchards, vineyards, and open grain fields — and it rewarded the mixed farming that sustained its villages for centuries. A family here could be very nearly self-sufficient, growing its own bread grain, pressing its own fruit, keeping milk cows and poultry, and grinding its own flour. That same rhythm of self-reliance would one day cross the ocean with them. The villages themselves followed the classic Württemberg pattern: a compact core of half-timbered houses and barns clustered around a church and marketplace, with the fields radiating outward and worked by villagers who walked to them each day. Everyone knew everyone, the same surnames recurred across the generations, and marriages knit the leading farming and artisan households together again and again. Babstadt was the earliest anchor of the Daubel line, a village of perhaps a few hundred souls where the family held the standing of citizens and, in one generation, plied the trade of master butcher. To be a _Bürger_ there was to occupy a defined and respected rung — the right to own property, practice a trade, and take part in the community's common affairs. A few miles off lay Treschklingen, where the family's story briefly converged in a marriage recorded in November 1798, joining a master butcher and a village mayor's son from Babstadt to a bride whose origins reached toward Adersbach. Its "Ochsen" tavern anchored village sociability, and its recognized crafts and offices carried real weight in a place small enough that one could stand among its lanes and see the rooftops of the neighboring settlements. Nearby Daudenzell, in the Neckar-Odenwald district, gave the Streibs one of their earliest named generations. At the center of the whole story stood Bonfeld, to which both the Daubel and Streib lines gravitated and where the families' records grow densest through the nineteenth century. It was a thoroughly Protestant village, its Lutheran identity running deep, and in this era it belonged to a heartland of Pietist and revivalist religion. From 1825 until his death, Johann Georg Haueisen — kin to the Daubels through **Christiane Rosina Haueisen** — lived in Bonfeld as a well-known Protestant lay theologian and revival preacher of the Hahn community, and his grave lies in the village cemetery. Such earnestness gave villages like this a spiritual seriousness that shaped daily life and lent weight to notions of good standing — the very qualities officials would later certify when a family sought permission to leave. Life across these villages was materially modest and, for the young, precarious. Children were born often and buried often, sometimes within days of their birth; epidemics, poor sanitation, and the hazards of childbirth pressed on every household regardless of standing. Across the long span of these families' presence, the region passed from the patchwork of the old Holy Roman Empire — margraviates, bishoprics, and imperial knights — through the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and into the consolidated modern states of Baden and Württemberg. By the 1870s these villages lay under an orderly, paper-heavy bureaucracy that registered citizens, taxed emigrants, and certified reputations. Nothing about leaving would be informal. ## The Daubel Line in Babstadt and Bonfeld The Daubel line can be traced with certainty to **Johann Georg Deubel**, born in Babstadt on 25 July 1711 and dead there on that same date in 1779. In 1735 he married **Anna Margaretha Detterer**, and for a time he lived in nearby Obergimpern. His son, **Johan Georg Michäel Daubel**, born in Babstadt on 18 March 1738, rose to prominence as the village mayor and tavern landlord; he married **Maria Barbara Wilser** in 1764 and died in Babstadt in 1801, having spent his life at the center of the community's civic and social affairs. The family's standing carried into the next generation with **Johann Georg Michael Daubel**, born in the village on 24 September 1766, who made his living as a citizen and master butcher. In 1798, at Treschklingen, he married **Louise Margaret Melscheimer**; he died in Babstadt on 12 March 1821. It was his son, **Johann Christian Ludwig Daubel**, born in Babstadt on 6 February 1800, who moved the family's story to Bonfeld. On 19 July 1836 he married **Christiane Rosina Haueisen**, born in Ehrstädt on 10 June 1806 — for her, a second marriage, her first having been to a man named Haas. Johann Ludwig died in Bonfeld in 1869 and Christiane in 1886. Their household in Bonfeld would produce the generation that finally left Germany behind. ## The Streib Line The family that Ludwig would marry into carried a comparable weight of standing. The earliest Streib known by name, **Johan Christian Streib**, served as seigneurial steward in Bonfeld, an office that placed him in the administration of the local manor. The family's tradition of trust and responsibility continued with **Johann Georg Philipp Streib**, born in 1743 in Daudenzell, who became a village judge and farmer, combining the working of the land with a role in local justice; he married **Catharina Elisabetha Braun** in 1766 and died in December 1813 at the age of seventy. His descendant **Johann Christian Streib**, born in 1770, remained on the land as a citizen and farmer in Bonfeld, married **Eva Barbara Braun** in 1793, and died there in 1825. The line came to **George Michael Streib**, born in 1794 in Heilbronn, who married **Christiana Deck** in November 1829 and remained tied to Bonfeld until his death in September 1872, at the age of seventy-eight. His daughter, **Magdalene Christiane Streib**, born in Bonfeld on 10 July 1840, would join the two families together and carry the Streib name across the ocean. Her father's identity was a matter that the later emigration papers helped to settle, correcting an earlier understanding of her parentage. ## Ludwig and Magdalene The two lines were joined on 31 January 1867, when **Ludwig Daubel** married **Magdalene Christiane Streib** in the church at Bonfeld. Ludwig, son of Johann Daubel and Christiane Haueisen, had been born in Bonfeld on 9 October 1839. Like his forebears he was a craftsman — a blacksmith and mason both — following the trade essential to any farming community, where a smith shod horses, forged tools, and mended the ironwork on which agriculture depended. In 1860, at about twenty-one, he had performed his military duty with the royal artillery. Magdalene, twenty-six at her marriage and somewhat older than many brides of her day, was the daughter of George Streib and Christiana Deck. Together they raised six children, all born in Bonfeld: Heinrich (Henry) in 1867, Philipp in 1869, Johann Ludwig (Louie) in 1871, Karl (Charles) in 1873, and the twins Sophie Elisabeth and August in 1875. It was a full household, built entirely upon the small world of a single Württemberg village — until the family decided to leave it. ## The Decision to Emigrate The reason for departure, as remembered in the family, was the boys. The strict military conscription that came with the unification of Germany in 1871 weighed heavily on a household with a row of sons coming of age, and Ludwig and Magdalene wanted greater freedom and safety for their children — above all, to spare their sons the years of service that awaited them. The emigration was carried out formally and with care. In February 1881, Ludwig — described in the careful language of the bureaucracy as "the married man, Ludwig Däubel, smith from Bonfeld" — applied to the Royal Württemberg authorities for release from Württemberg citizenship for himself and his family, "for purposes of emigration to North America." The Bonfeld municipal council attested that Ludwig and his wife belonged by birth to the local parish, held Württemberg citizenship, possessed a very good reputation, and had never been penalized. It noted his fulfilled military service in the artillery and recorded that, beyond the necessary costs of travel, he held assets of roughly 3,000 marks — a substantial sum for a village smith. No hindrance stood in his way. The Royal District Government at Ludwigsburg issued his discharge that spring, and on 9 March 1881 the Mayor's Office in Bonfeld recorded that Ludwig Däubel had received his discharge certificate from the Württemberg State Union, noting that he had "no homeland certificate, also no other identification at hand." With that, the family's ties to the Württemberg state were severed, and a man set out with his papers cleared and his roots formally cut. The coming of the railroads made such a departure practical in a way it had never been before. Household goods and even farm machinery could be crated and shipped, and the Atlantic crossing that had once been the province of the desperate had become a deliberate choice for a solid, propertied family seeking a freer life. ## Charles, the Boy Who Crossed Among the six children who left Bonfeld in 1881 was **Charles Daubel**, born in the village on 14 January 1873 and a boy of eight at the time of the crossing. He would grow into a stern and hardy man, carrying on the smith's and farmer's trades of his father and grandfather in a new country, and his story — the farm at Chattaroy, the eleven children, the marriage to **Marie Anna Rudolph**, and the suspicion his German birth drew during the First World War — belongs to a later chapter. For now it is enough to note that he was one of the children for whose sake his parents had gathered up their household and left the only village they had ever known. In the winter of 1881, then, a Bonfeld blacksmith, his wife, and their six children stood at the hinge between two worlds — their discharge papers in hand, their trades and thrift packed for the journey, and generations of Daubels and Streibs behind them in the Kraichgau villages of Babstadt, Treschklingen, and Bonfeld. Ahead lay the crossing to North America, and the story of where they landed.