Nicklaus, Tiedeken, Huismann, Heger, Blaha, Nahrhaft, etc. Genealogy Since all my father's ancestors are German (of one type or another), you might find it interesting to visit the German Genealogy Page.
Since some of the WWW pages referenced below are in German, you might find Alta Vista's Translation Service useful.
Notes on Tiedeken family history:
This family tree was put together primarily with the following sources:

There is another large set of Tiedekens in the USA, not included in these records. These Tiedekens are mostly concentrated in the Philadelphia and New Jersey area, where they emigrated to in the mid-1800s. There is some evidence to suggest there might be some earlier connection between their ancestors and the Tiedekens presented here. Those Tiedekens may have come from Twistringen, Germany according to some US passenger list records (for Francis Tiedeken, arriving in Baltimore on August 6, 1846). And the Friesoythe parish records do mention some Tiedekens from Twistringen, acting as godparents, etc. for the Friesoythe Tiedekens. But no actual connection has yet been proved and more research will be needed.

This other "Philadelphia Tiedeken" branch is being researched by Bob Moran [email protected]
His Tiedeken home page is at http://www.nealcomm.com/rjem/tiedeken.htm

Other links of interest :
A WWW site on East Friesian Culture can be found here (English) or the german version has a little more information
That site also contains a copy of a very old photo of Leer
A more English-oriented site on Ostfrisian culture is at FolkHart and the similar Windmill
You can learn more about the city of Friesoythe, Germany from it's web site.

Notes on the Nicklaus family history:
The US-side, descendents of Balthasar and his brother George, was mostly put together with a variety of family and cemetery records. My sister Brenda has done a lot in the way of locating obituaries, running down various courthouse records, etc. Bernita Nicklaus, daughter of Peter E. Nicklaus and granddaughter of Peter Nicklaus also supplied a lot of information.

For my connections to Germany and Uechtelhausen, all the research there was carried out by Albrecht Schuering. Thanks to him, we were able to connect our Nicklaus family to their roots and current-day relatives in Germany. The text for Balthasar provides more details on what we currently know and how we came to know it.

My immigrant ancestor Balthasar Nicklaus, as well as the above Tiedeken family, settled in Butler County, Iowa. Balthasar lived near the now-defunct town of Eleanor.

Some other Nicklaus branches
I might point out that there is another Iowa Nicklaus family who mostly come from Bremer county, Iowa (which is adjacent to Butler Co.). Due to the proximity and since Nicklaus is a relatively uncommon spelling, I was rather surprised to learn that these other nearby Nicklauses are unrelated to us. From what I have been told by them and what I have learned of my ancestry, I believe there is definitely no common Nicklaus ancestor between the two families.

Of course the most famous of the Nicklaus name is Jack. I'm pretty sure that his Nicklaus ancestors are not related to ours. According to a family researcher on that Nicklaus line, family legend has it that their ancestors were from the Alsace-Lorraine region (near the French-German border, pretty far from Uechtelhausen), but that is still unproven.

Notes on the Blaha and Nahrhaft family histories:
Most of the initial information on the distant ancestors was extracted from the state archives of Plzen of the Czech Republic. At the time this work was done, Plzen was in Czechoslovakia. The research was undertaken by a researcher employed by Ludwig Andrew Heger (son of Ludwig Karl Heger) sometime around 1984.

After getting into this a little deeper, I was happy to discover that there are two brothers in Germany, Robert and Oswald Froetschl, who have been actively researching the Nahrhaft lineages for over 25 years. These Froetschls are descended from the same Nahrhaft family as my great-great-grandmother, Agnes Nahrhaft Blaha. Their grandfather is Robert Froetschl

Matching the placenames to current locations on a modern-day map can be rather difficult at times. The families presented in this book lived in an area in the current (1998) Czech Republic, just east of the German border. Here is a map showing the area these ancestors are from. Another map shows an enlargement of the Tachov area. The area is about 50 km west of the Czech city of Plzen (also spelled as Pilsen or Plsen). This area can go by several names, and, due to various wars and shifting of power, this area has been part of several nations during the last hundred years. Due to this, most of the districts and towns have a German name and a Czech name (and maybe also an English name).

This area is included in Bohemia, which is roughly the western half of the current (2000) Czech Republic. More specifically, western Bohemia was also called Egerland (there is an Eger River as well as a border city named Eger, now called Cheb in Czech). Confusion is also added because Bohemia has layer upon layer of various districts, counties, regions, parishes, dioceses, postal regions, etc., all shifting over the years, of course.

From roughly 1600 until WW I, all of Bohemia was part of the Austrian empire, ruled by the Hapsburg family. The Austrian empire also came to be called Austria-Hungaria in the late 1800s. In the aftermath of WW I, Czechoslovakia was carved out of the defeated Hapsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary), taking Bohemia and Moravia from the Austrian part, and Slovakia from the Hungarian part of the empire. Czechoslovakia was overrun by Hitler during WW II, of course, and by the time the dust settled (in 1948) the communists had taken power. After the collapse of communism, the Czechs and Slovaks decided part amicably and now Bohemia and Moravia make up the present Czech Republic, and Slovakia is independent.

Up until WW II, most of the population of far western Bohemia (or Egerland), including my ancestors, was ethnic germans. These people were/are called the Sudetendeutsch and the areas where they lived are also called the Sudetenland (just to give the place yet another name). The Sudetenland, while not having firm boundaries, included much more territory than just Egerland.

When WW II was over, to take revenge for Hitler's atrocities, the Czechoslovak government decided to resettle all these areas with Czechs. There are many different individual stories, but a typical story would be that the German residents are given one hour to gather what few possessions they could carry, then get on a train boxcar headed across the border. Once across the border, the Sudetendeutsch would be dropped at more or less random towns in Germany, with some people (or parts of a family) getting off at one town, and others getting off at another. Many other Sudetendeutsch were forced to walk from their homes in Czechoslovakia to Germany. Many died along the way, of course. Some ethnic Germans did remain in Czechoslovakia and were often opressed and treated as second-class citizens under the communists. My direct ancestors had immigrated to the US long before WW II, however.

For language, the decision between German and Czech would depend upon the preponderance of people in the parish, and German would have dominated in Egerland. German was the official state language for all of Bohemia from the 1600's until the 1920's. All towns had both German and Czech names. Once Czechoslovakia was created in the aftermath of WW I, the Czechs and Slovak's began to re-assert their national identity. During the 1920s, the maps were all changed from the German names to the Czech names. Latin could also be found in any parish in Bohemia for the official church records.

Since Bohemia remained under the control of the Catholic Austrian Hapsburg family up until WW I, most of the people there (again including the ancestors in this book) were Roman Catholics.

Nearly all the placenames found in our family tree are in two districts, called Plana and Tachov, which are now in the large Czech region of Zapadocesky (west Bohemia). The german names for these districts are Plan and Tachau. Nearly all the places, except for the cities of Plana and Tachov are very small farming villages with maybe a couple dozen houses.

Note that in presentation here, I have put all these places in the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic is of course a modern creation, and when most of the ancestors here lived, this area was part of Austria.

My Bohemian ancestors immigrated to Watonwan County, Minnesota. The next county to the north, Brown County, contains the town of New Ulm, which was an area of very heavy German-Bohemian settlement, much of it from the Bischofteinitz district district in Bohemia, which is directly south of the Tachau district.

I am especially grateful to my great-uncle, Ludwig A. Heger, for his initial work in having the records in Czechoslovakia tracked down. Edith (Buschow) Luther was able to fill in a lot of old family history and get me started with her mother's branch. I am also very thankful to Pauline (Titscher ) Fichtner of Milwaukee whose old letters led me to the Froetschl brothers and their research. And, of course, Oswald and Robert Froetschl have spent years of efforts in assembling the Nahrhaft family tree.

There is now a German-Bohemian Heritage Society (GBHS) which you might find interesting. One page of the German Genealogy website has a useful page on researching ancestors from the Sudetenland.

Printing
Are you related to most of these people? Are you considering printing out dozens (or even hundreds) of pages of the information here? If so, please let me know! I can make provide all the information here (and much more) in a more compact book format if enough people ask me to.

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Dennis J. Nicklaus dnicklaus(at)yahoo.com

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