# Kleinbettlingen, Esslingen, Baden-Württemberg In the rolling countryside of Württemberg, south of Stuttgart and near the villages of Bempflingen and Grötzingen, lay the small community of Kleinbettlingen. For the Raisch and Hahn families, and for the Rudolph children who carried their story across the Atlantic, this was home ground through much of the nineteenth century. ## The Hahn and Raisch Households The earliest of these lives belonged to **Johann Georg Hahn**, born on 29 August 1792. On 9 February 1824 he married **Maria Katharina Gaißer**, and among their children was **Christiana Mary Hahn**, whose marriage would bind the Hahn line to the Raisch family. On 15 February 1848, **Christian Friederich Raisch** married **Christiana Mary Hahn**. Over the following years their household grew to include daughters **Anna Maria**, **Elizabeth Marie Margaretha "Amelia"**, **Catherine**, and **Charlotte Fredricka Raisch**. Christian and Christiana were the anchor of this family — steady enough that, in time, they would take in their orphaned grandchildren and raise them as their own. **Anna Maria Raisch** was born on 28 October 1855. In 1877 she married **Jacob Rudolph**, whose people came from nearby Bempflingen. Together they had two children, **Marie "Mary" Anna Rudolph** and **Christian Rudolph**. But Anna Maria's life was brief. She died on 21 January 1880, at only twenty-four, and was buried a week later on 28 January. Her two small children were left without a mother. ## After Anna Maria's Death Jacob Rudolph felt unfit to raise the children alone. In 1881 he emigrated to the United States, leaving Marie and Christian with their grandparents, **Christian and Christiana Raisch**. In that household in Württemberg the two children spent their early years, cared for by the same grandmother whose own marriage had begun there in 1848. The Raisch daughters scattered as they came of age. On 8 October 1885, **Charlotte Fredricka Raisch** married **Joseph Pfaff** — the "Mrs. Pfoff" whom the children would later know in Philadelphia. Other sisters also crossed the ocean: an aunt named Engelman, and **Elizabeth "Raisch" Scholz**, who settled far out west. When Marie and Christian left Germany at last in 1893, at fifteen and fourteen, it was to these aunts in America that they were sent. ## What Remained For this family, Kleinbettlingen was the place of beginnings and of grief. It held Anna Maria Raisch's short life and her grave, the marriages that joined Hahn and Raisch and Gaißer across three generations, and the grandparents' home where two motherless children were sheltered until they were old enough to make their own way in a new country. Those who left carried the village with them only in memory — but for a young Mary Rudolph, who could later recall little of her own mother, it remained the fixed point from which the whole family's story unfolded.