# German Spätzle Country  **Swabian Kin in Württemberg** Rudolph• Stiebler • Raisch • Hahn The Rudolph and Raisch families both belonged to the same corner of the German southwest — the villages of the Esslingen, Reutlingen, and Böblingen districts of Württemberg, where forested hills, orchard slopes, and vineyard terraces framed a settled world of Lutheran farming communities. For generations neither family strayed far from the parishes of their birth. Then, within a single lifetime, the two lines were joined by marriage and scattered across an ocean. This chapter follows them through their Swabian homeland, through the union of Jacob Rudolph and Anna Maria Raisch, and outward to Philadelphia and beyond. ## A Landscape of Villages The places the two families knew were all of a piece: small Württemberg settlements south of Stuttgart, clustered around a parish church, measured in a few hundred souls, and bound together by a handful of recurring surnames. The Raisch line reached deepest into the wooded uplands. In Waldenbuch, at the edge of the Schönbuch forest, the family held its ground for more than a century and a half, alongside the **Kayßer** and **Weinhardt** lines whose records span from the early 1700s into the 1870s. Nearby Glashütte carried the same forest character, and it was between these two villages that the earliest known Raisch generations lived and died. To the south and east lay the villages tied to the **Rudolph** line and to the marriage that joined the families. Grötzingen, in the Esslingen district, was the Rudolph seat, a village of half-timbered farmhouses in the Swabian Alb foreland where the family's baptisms, weddings, and burials fill the parish register from 1711 to 1918 — more than two centuries in one place. Bempflingen, in the Reutlingen district on the broad valley of the Neckar, was a farming and orchard village where the **Hahn** and **Gaißer** lines lived and where the youngest Rudolph children were born. And Kleinbettlingen, in the Esslingen district, was the small village where the **Hahn** family buried its dead through the later 1700s, where the **Raisch** presence carried into the 1800s, and where — in a single church — Jacob Rudolph and Anna Maria Raisch would marry, and where Anna Maria would be born, wed, and buried within a span of twenty-four years. These villages shared everything that mattered: the same Lutheran faith, the church bell ordering the working day, the same rhythm of sowing and harvest and the autumn grape gathering, the same economy of small plots combined with a trade. They also shared the same pressures. Partible inheritance divided holdings among heirs until many were too small to feed a family; population growth outstripped the land; and hard years — the "year without a summer" in 1816, the failed harvests of the 1840s — struck communities with little cushion. By mid-century Swabia had become one of the great sources of German emigration, and the families in this chapter would in time follow that well-worn path westward. ## The Raisch Line The Raisch family can be traced back to **Johann Michael Raisch**, born in December 1733 in Waldenbuch, where he lived his whole life until his death on 3 April 1791. His descendant **Johann Georg Raisch**, born on 21 November 1764 in Glashütte, lived in Waldenbuch and elsewhere before returning to Glashütte, where he died on 9 October 1836 at the age of seventy-one. The next generation, **Christian Friedrich Raisch**, born on 23 December 1791 in Glashütte, moved between Degerloch near Stuttgart and Waldenbuch before returning again to his birthplace, where he died on 28 February 1862. His son, **Christian Friederich Raisch**, was born on 14 May 1818 in Waldenbuch and made his home there. Raised in the customs of Württemberg village life — its Protestant faith, its respect for craft and land — he married **Christiana Mary Hahn** on 15 February 1848 in Kleinbettlingen, in a year when waves of revolution swept the German states. Christiana had been born on 12 December 1825 in Bempflingen, the daughter of **Johann Georg Hahn** and **Maria Katharina Gaißer**, into a world of vineyards and close-knit farming villages. Together Christian and Christiana raised four daughters. The eldest, **Anna Maria**, was born on 28 October 1855 in Kleinbettlingen. The others carried the family into the wider world: Elizabeth Marie Margaretha, known as "Amelia," born in July 1858 in Reutlingen, married Emil Scholz and traveled the greatest distance of all, settling in Washington State — in Stevens County and in the communities of Elk, Chattaroy, and Milan in Spokane County — where she died in Milan on 9 January 1933; Catherine, born on 6 July 1863, married John Engelmann and made her home in Philadelphia, dying there on 21 May 1939; and Charlotte Fredricka, born on 6 July 1869, married Joseph Pfaff and likewise lived out her years in Philadelphia, dying on 16 July 1943. Christian lived beyond 1883, though the date and place of his death are not recorded. His wife Christiana outlived him by decades and made a remarkable late journey. In 1897, at the age of seventy-one, she crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, arriving on 24 June — almost certainly to join family who had gone before her into the city's large German community. By 1900 the census recorded her there, and she died in Philadelphia on 21 March 1909 at the age of eighty-three, buried three days later in the city that had become her last home. Her life had stretched from a Württemberg village in the age of kingdoms to a great American city on the edge of the modern era. ## The Rudolph Line The Rudolph family was anchored even more firmly in a single place. **Johann Jacob Rudolph**, born in Grötzingen on 14 April 1711, spent his whole life there until his death on 28 November 1771. His son **Johann Jakob Rudolph**, born 3 February 1737, likewise lived and died in the village, dying on 26 September 1801. The next generation, **Christian Rudolph**, born 9 February 1784, ended his days in Grötzingen on 7 July 1848, and his descendant **Carl Christian Heinrich Rudolph**, born 8 April 1812, died in the village of his birth on 9 February 1872. For more than a century and a half the Rudolph name scarcely stirred from this one corner of Württemberg. It was **Jacob Rudolph**, son of Carl Rudolph and **Hedwig Stiebler**, who broke that long continuity. Born on 5 October 1853 in Grötzingen, Jacob married **Anna Maria Raisch** in 1877 in Kleinbettlingen — the union that joins the two families of this chapter and carries their story forward into the Daubel line. ## The Marriage and Its Sorrow The marriage of Jacob Rudolph and Anna Maria Raisch was rooted entirely in the Swabian world both knew, joining two families of the Esslingen countryside. For a few years the young couple shared the ordinary hopes of village life. Two children were born to them: a daughter, **Marie "Mary" Anna**, born on 9 August 1878 in Bempflingen, and a son, Christian, born about 1879. That future was cut short. Anna Maria died on 21 January 1880 in Kleinbettlingen, not yet twenty-five, and was buried a week later on 28 January in the same ground in which she had been christened and wed. Her granddaughter Rosie Daubel later preserved the shape of the family memory: a mother lost when her daughter was only three, a father who remarried, and a second wife who "didn't want his children." Widowed young and unable to raise the two alone, Jacob sent them to live with their maternal grandparents, Christian and Christiana Raisch — an echo of a pattern that would repeat itself. In 1881 Jacob emigrated to the United States, part of the great wave of German departure, and settled in Philadelphia, where the language, churches, and work were familiar. In 1883, in Philadelphia, he married again, to Anna Hofbauer, and with her raised a second family that included Carrie Anna, Albert, Michael John, Jacob John Jr., and other children. The census records of 1900 and 1910 find him established among the city's German-American families. By 1915 he had crossed the Delaware to Collingswood in Camden County, New Jersey, where the censuses of 1920 and 1930 record him, and where he died on 17 April 1933 at the age of seventy-nine, buried in Camden. Though an ocean and a new life separated him from his first children, he did not entirely lose track of them: a surviving letter from his American daughter Carrie to Mary's son Herman Daubel — his grandson — testifies to a thread of contact that reached across a generation and a continent. ## The Children Carried West The two children Anna Maria left behind grew up in the care of their Raisch grandparents. When Mary was fifteen and her brother fourteen, the family judged them old enough to make their own way, and in 1893 the pair were put aboard a ship bound for Philadelphia, into the care of their aunts on their mother's side — a Mrs. Engelman and a Mrs. Pfoff, married sisters of Anna Maria. In Philadelphia Mary went into domestic service, taught herself to read, write, and speak English — becoming quite fluent and a notably good speller — and for a time kept house for a doctor. All the while carrying the burden of supporting her brother, who suffered from an incurable illness that left him unable to work. That illness ended in tragedy. Christian Rudolph, afflicted from birth with a physical disability, took his own life in a Philadelphia park on 28 May 1896, at the age of seventeen. Unwilling to remain a burden to his sister, he ended his life, leaving Mary alone in a city she had known only three years. Mary’s own path turned westward through one of her aunts. Elizabeth "Raisch" Scholz had settled in Washington State near a family named Daubel, and on a visit to her aunt and uncle Marie met **Charles Daubel**. The two married in 1902, and Marie never returned to Philadelphia. Together they raised eleven children, and she made her home in the Spokane region — in Chattaroy and Elk — for the rest of her life, dying in Spokane county on 9 January 1939. Through her marriage, the intertwined Rudolph and Raisch lines passed into the Daubel family. Jacob's American daughter Carrie Anna Rudolph, born in Philadelphia on 26 November 1883 to his second wife, was thus Marie's half-sister. Known in later life as Carrie Roehm, she kept up the family's faint transcontinental thread, writing as "Aunt Carrie" to Mary's son Herman. She made her home in Haddonfield, New Jersey, living for more than thirty years at 2 Linden Avenue, active in the First Baptist Church, the Order of the Eastern Star, the American Legion Auxiliary, and the Haddon Fortnightly Women's Club, and a charter member of the Baptist Home auxiliary in Riverton. She died on 17 January 1979 at West Jersey Hospital in Camden, survived by three nephews. From two families rooted for centuries in the villages of the Esslingen, Reutlingen, and Böblingen districts, the line narrowed to a single marriage in Kleinbettlingen, an early grave, and two orphaned children — one buried young in a Philadelphia park, the other carried on to a farmstead and eleven children in the far Northwest, where the joined Rudolph and Raisch blood entered the Daubel line.