Jörg Bertsch of Baden, Germany and Erin Pence of Ohio, USA are on a search spanning 160 years and two continents. Sixteen decades ago their great-great-great grandfather, Christian Bertsch, was mayor of the small village of Scherzheim, Germany, located in the Upper Rhine Valley in the southwest part of the Grand Duchy of Baden.
In the spring of 1847, a terrible famine broke out across Germany. Mayor Bertsch, elected in 1844, organized help for the poor for his village by founding one of the first municipal soup kitchens in the state of Baden, but by the fall of 1854 he faced a challenging decision -- one that would directly involve only some citizens, but would impact the entire town. As mayor, it was his duty, imposed by the Grand Duchy of Baden, to determine which families qualified for deportation as the poorest of the poor. On September 29, 1854, he convened a meeting of the town council, inviting the heads of the fourteen families thus identified to discuss their fate. The community leaders had already concluded that it was in the best interest of both the families and the town to enable them to start a new life in the USA while releasing the community from the duty of supporting them, a duty they could no longer afford. Of the fourteen families, eleven accepted the town’s one-time offer to help them to emigrate. Mayor Bertsch expressed hope that the remaining families would make the decision to also emigrate, as the town was so impoverished as to be unable to assist even three families.
Two years ago, long after Jörg had heard and dismissed an anecdotal account of this story, he heard it again, as if for the first time. He couldn't believe it. Wanting to discover more, he began to search for proof of this 160 year old chapter of Scherzheim history. He was successful. He found the protocol of the council meeting in the archives of his hometown. And at the bottom it held his ancestor’s signature: Christian Bertsch, Mayor.
The protocol was written in the old German script, a script that has not been taught in Germany since 1941. It was not easy to decipher, but with the help of his mother, Emma Bertsch, Jörg completed the task. The document then was translated from the German of 1854 into the German of 2012, and finally into English.
After sharing this discovery with his American cousin Erin, Jörg, with her help, began the search for the descendants of those deported from Scherzheim -- the Lost 69.
Why are we searching for the Lost 69?
When we discovered this story, we felt guilty that our ancestor was involved in the deportation of eleven families -- ten percent of the population of his village! As Jörg explains,
“In 2004 we had a big anniversary festival in Scherzheim, celebrating its history from its first appearance in documentation in 1154. Gerhard Fessler, town historian, made a great speech about the most important events of its 850 years. It was an amazing afternoon with lots of talk of wars, famines, and something that made me wonder. Could it really have happened that 160 years ago sixty-nine people had to leave their homeland because they had been too poor to stay? I forgot the story for a long, long time. Then in January 2012 I got an email from Roger Liess, Fort Loramie, Ohio/USA. He told me that he was a descendant of Christian Liess, who had been deported from Scherzheim in 1855. Roger was searching for an official document for proof of his own family history. This request was the start of the 69 project. In the following weeks I researched and found the original protocol of the meeting of the committee that made the decision that sixty-nine citizens must go, dated 29th, September 1854, signed by my great-great-great-grandfather Christian Bertsch."
At the time, Christian Bertsch was 54 and a family man himself, the father of three sons and four daughters. After this event, he was mayor for another sixteen years. The more information we uncovered about those years, the more we realized what a good leader he was. During his service he saw Scherzheim through both poverty and reconstruction. In 1862 the community disassembled the old town hall, housed in a centuries-old monastery farmhouse, and under his leadership, built the present town hall on the same land, beside the church, where the old building had stood. In 1867, Mayor Christian Bertsch received the second-highest decoration of the Grand Duchy of Baden - the Silver Civil Merit Medal, an award for over thirty years of responsible work as treasurer and mayor of Scherzheim. Christian remained mayor until his eightieth birthday in 1870. He died at the age of 81 on April 18, 1871.
We are searching for the descendants of the sixty-nine deported Scherzheim citizens of 1855. Because the lives of the deported families of the neighboring village of Lichtenau were so closely intertwined with those of Scherzheim, we are including their descendants in our search as well.
We want to inform the descendants of the circumstances that led their ancestors to start their lives over in a new and unfamiliar place. We want them to be proud of their ancestors. Mayor Bertsch cared about his town and citizens and we’re sure that more than once he wondered about the welfare of the ones who left. We hope that all of the lost made a good life in America, and in honor of our great-great-great-grandfather, we are searching for confirmation that they settled and led successful lives. It may be sixteen decades later, but it will give us peace of mind that our ancestor did the right thing for his village and the people who left it behind.
Jörg Bertsch
Erin Pence