Progress: January 21, 2012

 

My great-grandfather was born in the former Kingdom of Württemberg in 1840, what is known today as the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Joseph Angerbauer's naturalization record indicates that he became a United States citizen on May 31, 1870 and settled in Westchester Co, New York. Census records state his occupation as a labourer.

As I have not yet been able to find his name in ship passenger lists, I wonder if he immigrated to the States illegally? Though he could have emigrated to escape religious persecution, it is perhaps more likely, considering the year, that he left his country to avoid military service because Germany practiced compulsory military conscription at that time. The Franco-Prussian war broke out on July 19, 1870 and ended on May 10, 1871, the result of a conflict between the Second French Empire under Napoleon III and the Kingdom of Prussia. The South German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria joined together with the North German Confederation to aid Prussia. (Wikipedia)

In fact, his name does not surface in the Württemberg Emigration Index, a database compiled by Trudy Schenk, which contains the names of approximately 60,000 persons who applied to leave Germany from Württemberg from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

Yet, surprisingly, I found the Angerbauer surname in the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index on the Avotaynu website; it is included in Lars Menk’s Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames (Bergenfield, 2005). This dictionary identifies more than 13,000 German-Jewish surnames from pre-World War I Germany, including Baden-Württemberg.

Though I could not find the meaning of the Angerbauer surname, "Anger" is defined by the Dictionary of American Family Names (Oxford University Press) as follows:

South German: a topographic name from Middle High German anger ‘meadow’, ‘village green’.
French and English (of Norman origin): variant of the personal name Angier.
French: variant of the habitational name Angers. (Ancestry.com)

“Bauer’ is defined as German and Jewish (Ashkenazic). It’s said to be a

“status name for a peasant or nickname meaning ‘neighbor’, ‘fellow citizen’, from Middle High German (ge)bur, Middle Low German bur, denoting an occupant of a bur, a small dwelling or building. Compare Old English bur, modern English bower. This word later fell together with Middle High German buwære, an agent noun from Old High German buan ‘to cultivate’, later also (at first in Low German dialects) ‘to build’. The German surname thus has two possible senses: ‘peasant’ and ‘neighbor’, ‘fellow citizen’. The precise meaning of the Jewish surname, which is of later formation, is unclear. AB” (Ancestry.com)

I’ll need to get my hands on the Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames to further my research.