The Village We Didn't Know: How a Community of Strangers Broke My German Brick Wall
In April of 1967, my 1st cousin twice removed sat down to write a letter to her 1st cousin once removed with everything she could remember about the family. She got a lot right. She remembered that her grandmother's maiden name was Katerina Grebe and that she came from a town called Frischborn. She remembered that her grandparents had not known each other in Germany at all, but met in Dunkirk, New York, and married there. She remembered the children in order, including the two little girls who died of scarlet fever within days of each other.
"We do not know where grandfather Budd came from in Germany."
That was 1967. Her grandfather had died in 1916. Fifty-one years, and the village was already gone from the family memory.
It stayed gone for another fifty-seven.
What finally brought it back was not a database, a search algorithm, or a record collection. It was people. That is the part of this story I actually want to tell.
What I Had
I created a profile for him on WikiTree in April 2018, imported from a GEDCOM, under the name Ludwig Budd Sr. Over the next couple of years I did what you do. I found him in the 1855 New York state census as a twenty-four-year-old laborer in the household of Edwin Dennison in Forestville. I found the 1860, 1865, 1870, 1875, 1880, 1892, 1900, 1905, and 1910 enumerations. I found his 1863 Civil War draft registration in Hanover, New York. I found the land records for the farm on Bradigan Road. I found the agricultural schedule, the county land ownership atlas, and the gazetteer.
Every one of those records gave me the same thing for his birthplace.
Germany.
Except 1870, which said Prussia, and 1870 was wrong.
You cannot write to an archive and ask for the baptism record of a man born in Germany. In May 2020 I posted him to G2G as a brick wall, and three members took a run at it. Good ideas, no village.
Two years of careful work and I was standing exactly where that 1967 letter left me.
The Research Party
In November 2022, WikiTree held its first Germany research party as part of WikiTree Day. The idea is simple: people bring brick walls, volunteers who actually know the records pile on, and everyone works them together in real time.
I put up my Budd wall. What happened next I still think about.
One member went into LAGIS, the Hessian information system, and found two entries in the emigrant database: Budde, Ludwig, Homberg, 1854. A departure. A matching year. A place name. After four years, an actual place name.
A second member looked at the two entries and pointed out, immediately, that they were the same record filed twice — once under the government and once under the interior ministry. Duplicate entries are common in that database.
A third member then narrowed things down. Homberg could be Homberg (Efze) or Homberg (Ohm), and he handed over the ARCHION paths for both. He noted that Budde families still live in Homberg (Efze) today, which is a real research clue if you know to use it. He noted that a place name in an emigrant database can mean the town itself or any of the small villages belonging to that town, so if the parish register comes up empty you have to check the daughter villages too.
And then he added the single most useful sentence anyone said to me in this entire six-year process:
"If the presumed birth date is from a tombstone or obituary then it can not be assumed to be correct. Check for entries within +/- 1 year of that."
Hold onto that one.
A fourth member went into ARCHION and looked. Homberg (Efze), December 1829: no Ludwig Budde. December 1828: nothing either. Homberg (Ohm), Taufregister 1828–1845, which she described as very difficult to read: nothing.
She posted the negative results with the page links attached.
She then tracked down the one Ludwig Budde who does appear in Homberg (Efze) — born 1805 to a Gottlieb Budde and a Henriette Waßmuth — and concluded he was a different man entirely. A cousin at the absolute best.
Someone else added, drily, that the family letter had the birthday in November anyway.
So the leading theory died. But it died documented, on the profile, with citations, where it will stay. Nobody will ever have to check those two parishes again.
Seventeen Months Later
The research party ended. Life went on. I assumed that was that.
In April 2024 — a year and a half later — the member who had found the LAGIS entries edited the profile with this note attached:
"follow-up of WikiTree Day 2022 talk, hope you like it"
He had never stopped working on it. He had corresponded with a regional historical society in Germany. He had gotten hold of pages from a printed village lineage book. He had found the baptism.
Seventeen months. Nobody assigned it to him. Nobody was waiting on him. There was no deadline and no payment and no reason on earth for him to still be thinking about a dead farmer in Chautauqua County, New York.
And the answer was not Homberg. It was not even Hesse-Kassel.
Herbsen, in the Diemel valley, in the Fürstentum Waldeck. A different principality, a different archive branch, a different set of records.
Here is the entry, in the Kirchenbuch for 1822–1839, filmed on ARCHION under the Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche von Kurhessen-Waldeck, Kirchenkreis Twiste, Schmillinghausen, image 2073:
Am 18ten Decbr. wurde dem Wilhelm Budden & dessen Ehefrau Louise, geborene Rest aus Herbsen ein Sohn geboren, welcher d. 26ten eiusdem getauft wurde. Pathe war: Ludwig Fiering aus Herbsen.
Nomina: Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Budde
On the 18th of December a son was born to Wilhelm Budde and his wife Louise, née Rest, of Herbsen, and baptized on the 26th. The godfather was Ludwig Fiering of Herbsen.
There he is. Named parents. A named godfather. A village.
Now Look at the Date
The family letter said he was born 27 November 1829.
His Find a Grave memorial says 7 December 1829.
The church book, written down eight days after the fact by the man who baptized him, says 18 December 1829.
Three sources, two of them agreeing closely enough to feel like confirmation, and all three wrong. That warning about tombstone dates, given to me seventeen months earlier, turned out to be exactly right. If the search had been limited to the window the family letter suggested, we might have walked right past him.
The Other Two Sources
Two more pieces came out of this that I want to name specifically, because most American researchers have never heard of the first one. (see Germany Project Resources)
Ortssippenbücher. Village lineage books. Local historical societies in parts of Germany have compiled the entire population of a village into numbered family units, reconstructed from the church registers. For Herbsen it is volume 55 of the Waldeckische Ortssippenbücher, published in Arolsen in 1997. My great-great-grandfather is child number four of person 141, on page 148. If your German village has one of these, it will save you years. Ask whether it does.
The emigration record. Karl Thomas compiled Die waldeckische Auswanderung zwischen 1829 und 1872 from the official announcements. Entry 862, from the supplement to the Regierungsblatt, dated 15 May 1854:
BUDDE: LUDWIG, AUS HERBSEN, SOHN DES VERST. WILHELM
Ludwig Budde, of Herbsen, son of the deceased Wilhelm, requesting permission to emigrate to America. He was twenty-three. His father had been dead fourteen years.
By the following year he was cutting hay for a man named Dennison in Chautauqua County, New York.
Getting the Name Right
One last piece of housekeeping mattered more than it sounds like it should.
The profile had been created as Budd, because that is how he wrote it in America and that is how it appears on every American record and on his headstone. But he was baptized Budde, and WikiTree uses the last name at birth. So in April 2024 I merged the two profiles under Budde. The Americanized version is still on the profile as an "other last name." Nothing is lost.
Where He Stands Today
In 2018 I had a man born somewhere in Germany in 1829.
Today the profile carries his baptism, his emigration application, his parents Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Budde and Marie Friedrich Luise Rest, his grandparents Johann Konrad Budde and Christiane Friederike Heine, and his great-grandparents Johann Dietrich Budde and Anna Margreth Nehme in Hörle, back to around 1730.
Three generations behind the wall.
And Herbsen, the village nobody in my family could name for over a century, now has a One Place Study attached to it.
The Part I Have Been Saying for Years
Here is what cannot be bought: four people in Germany who read old Kurrent handwriting, who know that Waldeck records do not sit where Hesse-Kassel records sit, who know that a name in an emigrant index might point at a daughter village rather than the town, who know which government databases file the same record twice — and who will spend their evening on your ancestor because you asked in the right room and were polite about it.
Not one of them was related to me. Not one of them was paid. Not one of them had heard my great-great-grandfather's name before I posted it. One of them stayed on the problem for seventeen months after everyone else had gone home.
And here is the thing I most want people to understand: this is not a special story. This is a Tuesday. It happens at every WikiTree Challenge, and in a lot of the G2G threads I read. Somebody posts a wall, translation or transcription request, and somebody with exactly the right obscure knowledge wanders past and stops to help. I have watched it happen for other people hundreds of times, and it still gets me every single time.
The single shared tree makes it structurally possible — my question sits on the actual ancestor, permanently, where the right person can trip over it. This does not make anyone generous. The generosity is just there, in the people, and it is the whole reason I have spent so much of my life on this site in the last eight years instead of quietly building a tree somewhere else, alone.
I write about the generous genealogists in this community constantly, and I always will, because they are one of the highlights of this website.
Look at the acknowledgements section on that profile. There is a place on every WikiTree profile to thank the people who helped, and mine has four entries, including one thanking somebody for turning the church books of both Hombergs upside down. That section exists because this happens often enough to need a standard place to say thank you.
What I Take From It
Four things if you have a German wall of your own.
Put the question where the people who can answer it will trip over it. Not in a private tree, not in a Facebook thread that scrolls away in a day. On the ancestor, permanently, where a stranger with the right skills can find it two years from now. Add the category for brick walls for that country and/or surname. Ask the question in the community forum, anyone following the country and/or surname tags will see it.
Document everything. Use the research notes section of the profile to document everything you know, including the negative results. Add a time/date stamp and your WikiTree ID so that everyone that comes along after can see what and when has been done.
Explore the Germany Project. This project has several pages helpful to those researching their own brick walls in Germany:
Say thank you in public. These people are giving away expertise that professionals charge for. The least any of us can do is make sure it is visible.
It took fifty-seven years and a room full of strangers.
It was Herbsen.
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