FUN FACTOID

31 My 2020, Sunday

We receive the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. My husband recommended that I read an article based on a conversation with writer, Annie Proulx. She's interested in everygthing and finds herself going down one rabbit hole after another, finding out more about a minor detail, then branching off from that detail to another. Now that we've been at home during the pandemic for more than two months, I have the time to do the same, so here goes.

Proulx is fascinated by fens and bogs. She told about an historic encounter in 7 A.D. between the bog people of northern Germany and the Roman Army. The Romans set out to conquer the area described by Proulx as "northern Germany between a forested hill and the great bog". One member of the Roman Army was Arminius who had originally come from the Cherusci tribe that lived near the Vaser River, and Arminius decided to help his tribe defeat the Romans. Under his leadership, the bog people devised a diversion that led the Romans into the bog and defeat. The story mentions Kalkreiser Hill.

Well, this description rang a bell. When we traveled to northern Germany many years ago to research my husband's ancestors, we found his ancestral village located on the northern side of a wooded ridge and facing the lowland part of northern Germany, formerly the great bog, but now drained by an extensive canal system. The language spoken here is called platt Deutsch, or low German, not because it is low in the sense of inferior, but because it is spoken in the low land. About a century ago following a landslide, dinosauer tracks were uncovered here, footprints the size of a big dishpan pressed into the prehistoric mud.

One of my husband's earliest known ancestors was Borries bey der Hunte who was born in 1660. The Hunte is a small river that flows north from the ridge, through the low land, and on into the North Sea. The Weser River (Weser being the German spelling of Veser) parallels the Hunte, a bit further east, and the Weser was the river my husband's ancestors followed to reach the port of Bremerhaven from which they sailed to America in 1843.

I did a little research with Google maps, and learned that the Kalkriese Hill mentioned in Proulx story is about 25 miles from my husband's ancestral village. The Hunte River flows toward Kalkreise for awhile, but then has been channelized as part of the drainage project in the lowland. So I began to wonder if my husband's family is descended from these bog people, the Cherusci. We will never be able to document a connection, but being able to go back as far as Borries bey der Hunte or Borries [who lived] by the Hunte River, takes us to the time before fixed surnames and instead, people who were identified by where they lived or to whom they were related. Is my husband descended from the bog people? An interesting though probably unimportant factoid that I have time to ponder while sheltering in place.