The Dampf Family Tree

Over the last couple of years, I’ve dug into the ancestral family line of my grandfather, Harry Oster, born Hans Daniel Ostertag in Bad Cannstatt (Stuttgart) Germany in 1915.

It is through him that I am connected to the very large Dampf Family of Nordstetten Horb Am Neckar, in the Black Forest region of Germany, approximately 38 miles southwest of Stuttgart. Three years ago, I knew nothing beyond Grandpa Harry’s parents’ names, Elsa (nee Schwarzschild) and Ernst Ostertag.  They were brick walls and Harry, who died in 1978, left the impression that there was no extended family.  I now know that, for whatever reason, in the years following WWII and the Holocaust, as the survivors of his vast extended family from Germany re-established themselves in the United States, he became isolated from them, immersed in my grandmother Phyllis’s (nee Jacobs) family in Des Moines, Iowa - a city he rarely left after 1946. 

In my family research, Harry’s mother Elsa (nee Schwarzschild) Oster, born in Stuttgart in 1887, was the last frontier.  I finally broke through that brick wall in late 2022, because of a chance discovery of a Facebook page focused on stölpersteins in Stuttgart. Stölpersteins, or stumbling blocks, are memorial plaques in sidewalks found in Europe today. (I wrote about this toward the middle of this previous blog post). I was able to reconstruct Elsa’s immediate family because somebody, maybe someone reading this now, arranged for a stölperstein to be placed in memory of Siegfried, Elsa’s brother who perished in Auschwitz. When it was placed, a brief biography of him was drawn from the German State Archives and even though it is not online, the host of that Facebook page was able to obtain a copy for me. And from there the dominoes began to fall.  As I traced Elsa’s other brother Heinrich, and sister Gertud, who both made it out of Germany, I came across the obituary for Eric Metzger (son of Gertrud) which led me to Diane Metzger and Sandy Honeyman (daughters of Eric), my mother’s (Enid Locketz) newly found second cousins. 

Through Linkedin I was able to connect with Diane and just before Thanksgiving 2023, we had a Zoom call that included Diane Metzger and Ed Weisberg, Sandy and Jason Honeyman, my parents Enid and Michael Locketz, my aunt and uncle Helaine and Michael Damsky, along with my wife Debbie and our daughters Emma and Adina.  It was fun to connect and share family stories and some even saw family resemblance in each other. 

During that time we discovered that Eric Metzger and Harry Oster, first cousins, crossed over for two weeks at Camp Ritchie in November 1943 during their training as they became “Ritchie Boys” - US intelligence officers - that helped turn the tide of the war. I later discovered that at least four cousins were Ritchie Boys. They were first cousins Harry and Eric along with their (half) second cousins, Paul Shearer and Rolf (Ralph) Bauer.  Below are photos of my grandfather in uniform. The third one is with his wife, my grandmother, Phyllis Jacobs.

Family trees can be hard to follow. For clarity, below I am sharing a chart that represents the earliest verified members of the Dampf Family in Nordstetten. What follows is what I have gathered as I have tried to piece this family story together. If anyone reading has more information, photos, documents, addresses or corrections…I’d love to hear from you.

Meir Segal Dampf and his wife Mirjam are the earliest known names on the Dampf family line. We can go much farther back through many of the matriarchs in the tree and I’ll touch on that later. But, as far as the Dampf name, Maier Segal Dampf is the earliest I’ve found. The family, at least this part of it, arises from the darkness of the Middle Ages in Nordstetten in the form of Meir Segel Dampf and his wife Mirjam. Everything below traces back to them. The newest generation alive today represents the Tenth Generation since Meir Segel and Mirjam. I am a member of the eighth generation. It is not clear when the family officially began using the surname “Dampf” which means “steam” in English - probably pronounced Dumpf.

As luck would have it, the State Archives in Baden-Württemberg are very detailed, digitized and accessible. Meir Segal Dampf appears several times in the historical record. Mirjam, so far as I’ve found, is only mentioned once. In both cases, it is in the “third person,” in reference to their son Marx. All we know about them is that they were alive when Marx was born in 1782. Below is an excerpt from the death record for Marx upon his demise in 1861. It lists his parents names. (Shout out to my Executive Assistant Ajia Collins who has taken an incredible interest in this journey and has helped find a ton of information for me).

Marx’s headstone is where we see his father referred to as “Segal.” It says he died, on November 30, 1861 | 28. Kislev 5622 when he was 79 years old. It lists his full name in Hebrew as Mordecai Bar Meir Segel corresponding to Marx Dampf. It also tells a bit about him. It says roughly that he was a “Maskil in the Jewish way of the House of Levi and he served his brothers in his acts of compassion.” We may never know anything more about him, but that one word ‘maskil,’ gives us sense of who he was.

“Haskalah (השׂכּלה), “[the] Enlightenment,”[is] the movement which originated in 18th‑century Ger­many with the aim of broadening the intellec­tual and social horizons of the Jews to enable them to take their place in Western society. The term Haskalah, in medieval Jewish litera­ture, is from the Hebrew word sekhel (שׂכּל)  “the intellect,” but, as here applied, refers to the attitude of attraction to general knowledge, secular learning, and Western culture.” - Rabbi Louis Jacobs

Marx married Esther Kuhn, daughter of Leopold Kuhn and Sara Frank. Esther lived into her 90’s (1791-1883), a full 22 years after Marx’s death. When she died, she had many living grandchildren and great grandchildren. Her headstone below refers to her in Hebrew as Esther, the wife of Mordecai.

The Dampfs played a prominent role in the city of Nordstetten. There are some conflicting accounts and dates, but the Jewish school was originally in the building that contained the Inn that was owned by Marx Dampf.

“The building at Hauptstrasse 30 once housed the Gasthaus zur Sonne, which opened in 1822…In 1810, the Nordstetten community bought half a share in the building from the Jewish Sonnenwirt Marx Dampf in order to set up a school room for the village's Israelite children.”

As I said, the dates don’t make sense. I am hoping to connect with an archivist in Nordstetten to help sort it out and see what other records are on file which have not been digitized. But regardless of when it was…with the miracle of Google Streetview…you can see it as it stands today…the building that housed Gasthaus Zur Sonne, the Inn owned by Marx, perhaps previously owned by his parents, Maier Segel and Marjam Dampf.

The structure at Hauptstrasse 30 in Nordstetten. Looking at the house, one wonders if it could possibly be the same building inhabited by Dampf ancestors and their inn 200 years ago, part of which housed the Jewish school. But then take a closer look at the inscription at the top of the door casing below. MD…1850? 1830? Using Google Earth, you can see the location at the very center of town.

Inscription above door casing at Hauptstrasse 30 - perhaps the initials of Marx Dampf.

Marx and Esther were clearly well off and generous. This shows that in 1855, they were the second most generous donors to the Jewish Orphanage in Nordstetten.

Esther and Marx (Mordecai) subsequently had at least one child. Their son, Maier, clearly named for his grandfather, was born in 1814. In genealogy there are always going to be questions that can’t be answered. And there is a question surrounding Maier’s birth. Marx is listed everywhere as Maier’s father when there is a father listed. Below is the first page of the birth record for Maier, born October 21, 1814. I circled Dampf which might have been written in later as the ink appears to be different. To the left of Dampf, it says Maier Levi. I cannot decipher the word below that.

And here, at least for now, is the unanswerable question. On this second page, it lists Maier as “illegitimate.” Circled below. Maybe Marx and Esther were married after his birth?

Below is the catalogued translation of the Leopold Kuhn & Sarah Frank Würtemberg Family Registry. They were Esther’s parents. Maier’s grandparents. The image of the actual record is below that. At the top you can easily see Leopold and and Sara’s names. In the bottom half of the entry, there is a “1” with Esther’s name (she was their first born child), the next line is an asterisked comment, and the third line is “Maier” with his birthdate, 21 October 1814. I cannot yet decipher what the asterisked comment says, but here you see Maier listed as part of his grandparent’s household which is unusual (as least as far what I have seen).

In any event, Maier was born and between he and his two wives, Sara and Fanni, they had 20 children. Above I wrote that this part of my family tree was my last frontier and had been a dead end until recently. After our Zoom meeting in November, Diane Metzger shared a number of documents with me that turned out to include a detailed list of the entire Dampf family, mostly pre-Holocaust. That is when I realized how large my grandfather’s family truly had been.

It was from from this typed list that I started the research in the State Archives. There I was able to locate the official Würtemberg Family Registry for Maier Dampf (the grandson in the descendant chart above) and his two wives, Sara Guggenheimer and Fanni Auerbacher which confirmed the list. (This was my first discovery after Diane shared the typed documents. Everything I’ve already written about above was discovered later, but I’ve tried to summarize it in chronological order.)

First page of the Würtemberg Family Register for Maier Dampf, listing both wives Sara and Fanni, and the first 15 children.

Second page of the Würtemberg Family Register listing Children 16-20.

As I’ve worked backwards and sideways on the tree, I have come to realize that the Dampf Family, along with the Auerbach family and the Guggenheim family, made up a significant portion of the Jewish community in Nordstetten in the 19th century and before.

In 1846, the Jewish population of Nordstetten reached its highest level with 352 members. From then on it decreased continually due to migration to the cities and emigration to America. The synagogue was sold in 1925 and pulled down in 1937.” (As quoted at, https://www.ehemalige-synagoge-rexingen.de/en/nordstetten)

In 1877 when the 20th Dampf child was born, even though not all of the 20 children survived, they were a large family in Nordstetten which at time had a Jewish population of about 300. There is even a close relation to the author Berthold Auerbach (I estimate he is my 1st cousin 5x removed) whose stories are filled with characters based very likely, in some cases, on our ancestors’ friends, neighbors and family members. In the very least he depicts the world in which they lived.

Below, if labeled correctly, is a photo of Maier (1814-1899). He is the common ancestor of the people on the tree I have assembled from all this information.  This photo was shared by the family of Marion and Paul,zl Shearer.

Maier was married twice and fathered 20 children (at least according to the record…there of course could be more).  His first wife was Sara Guggenheimer born in Lengnau, Switzerland on January 9, 1824 and died in Nordstetten on April 30, 1858 when she was just 34 years old.  She and Maier had 8 children. According to the death record, and as described on her headstone below, she died on the same day as the 8th child, Natan who was 6 years old.  She seems to have had a tragic existence.  Of the eight children, only two of them outlived her...one of them was my Great Great Grandmother, Sofie Dampf who would grow up and marry Daniel Schwarzschild from Richen and move to Stuttgart.  Sofie Dampf was the third of the 20 children.    

When Sara died in 1858, Maier married again to Fanni Auerbacher, (b. DEC 15, 1831 and d. OCT 25, 1891).  Fanni likely was a cousin of Sara's.  Fanni and Maier had 12 children, with at least five of them living to adulthood.  Between Maier and his two wives, seven children appear to have died at birth or in their first year and three as young children (4, 6 & 8).   

One record shows that Maier was an Inn Keeper and Butcher. Perhaps he continued to own and opereate Marx’s Inn.

In an article about the Jewish cemetery, in reference to Emil Dampf, son of Maier and Fanni, Maier’s 17th of 20 children: The horse dealer Jakob Rothschild and the butcher Emil Dampf also came, whose father Maier Dampf had run an inn and butcher shop in Nordstetten. Emil Dampf opened his own shop on Neckarstrasse in 1894.

Sadly we also learn in a tribute to Emil’s wife Rosalee who was murdered in Treblinka, “Emil Dampf died on January 18th 1941 in a state of mental confusion. He was the last to be buried in the cemetery in Horb before the deportations started in December 1941.”

Undated photo of the Dampf home in Nordstetten. Presumably after Maeir’s lifetime as he died in 1899 a bit before electricity was installed in private homes. Light fixtures can be seen on the exterior. And a woman in the second story window! I have posted this photo to several Nordstetten groups. As of yet, no one has been able to identify the location.

Today in the world, there could be descendants of at least eight children (two of their children do not appear to have descendants) who trace their ancestry back to and through Maier and Sara or Maier and Fanni. All names below (and in my family trees and charts) primarily reflect names and spellings as given in the German records.

Maier and Sarah (Guggenheimer) Dampf (First wife)

(2 of 20) Marie (Dampf) Lowenthal (1847-1887) Married Simon Lowenthal and had at least seven children on record, two who lived to adulthood with descendants on record.

(3 of 20) Sofie (Dampf) Schwarzschild (1850-1922), Married Daniel Schwarzschild, had four children on record, all lived to adulthood, two with known descendants.

Maier and Fanni (Aurbacher) Dampf (Second Wife)

(9 of 20) Lissette/Lina (Dampf) Rothschild (1859-1935), married Sigmund Rothschild, had five children, all who lived to adulthood and several with known descendants.

(12 of 20) Mathilde (Dampf) Rothschild (1862-1940), married Married Abraham Rothschild, had one son who lived to adulthood and has known descendants. Mathilde died in the Gurs Concentration camp in France.

(14 of 20) Hänchen (Dampf) Lowenthal (1865-1939) (same Lowenthal…when her half sister Marie died, she married Marie’s widower Simon). They had four children, with some known descendants. Their youngest son, Julius was killed in action in 1915 in WWI.

(15 of 20) Max Dampf (1865-1940). Max Married Nannette and had three children who lived to adulthood and has known descendants. Max and Hänchen appear to have been twins.

(16 of 20) Jenny (Dampf) Einstein (1867-1934), married Hermann Einstein, no known descendants.

(17 of 20) Emil Dampf (1869-1941) married Rosalee. They had one child on record who lived to adulthood.

(18 of 20) Toni (Dampf) Besinger (1871-1946), married Karl with two children to lived to adulthood.

(20 of 20) Ernst Dampf (1877-1950), married Percye. No known descendants.

Which brings us to today.  

My great-great grandmother was Sofie (Dampf) Schwarzschild, Maier’s third born child. As written above, Sofie married Daniel Schwarzschild and they had four children: Siegfried, Heinrich, Gertud and Elsa. Neither Siegfried nor Heinrich had children. Both Gertrud and Elsa did…my branch descends from Elsa.

Diane Metzger (who descends from Gertrud) helped me connect with the descendants of Lissette/Lina (Dampf) Rothschild and recently when I was on vacation with my family in Florida, I was able to meet Marion Shearer and family. Marion (who turns 100 this Spring - Ad Meah V’esrim!) was married to Paul Shearer,zl - one of the Ritchie Boy Cousins, (Half) second cousin to Harry Oster and Eric Metzger. Debbie and I met with Marion along with (pictured below L-R) Joan Schwartz, Aaron Schwartz, Marion Shearer, Me, Janet Kooperman (forgive me if I have reversed Joan and Janet…we just met :-). Also present, but not pictured was Bennett Schwartz, Debbie Locketz and Aaron’s fiancé, Ariel Goodstein. They provided me with the photos above as well as telling me about other branches they’ve known. The Dampf descendants shot forth and scattered from Nordstetten to the edges of the earth.

I have not at this time explored in very much detail the line that goes back from either Sara Guggenheimer (Maier’s first wife) or Fanni Auerbacher (his second wife). The Guggenheim family, being famous, is pretty well documented. There were however five distinct Guggenheim families in Lengnau, so it is complicated. There appear to be many Guggenheims, Auerbachs, Rothschilds, Kuhns and Weils in the pedigree. And large generations. Twenty offspring, like in the Dampf tree, was not unusual. The Weil family, which our family connects directly back to through Maier’s first wife Sara, was a well documented rabbinic dynasty, which with further research, could connect back to the 1300s. The Kuhn’s also appear to reach pretty far back in the records. And there are possible links to other rabbinic dynasties…which apart from yiches could be helpful in further research.

AND…while I don’t want to get ahead of myself without a better understanding of the historical record, there is a database in the Jewish Museum of Hohenems which suggests that through Sara (nee Guggenheimer) Dampf, the tree could trace back to Rabbi Yehuda Weil who is listed as having been born around 1360, in Valls, Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain AND WAS A DESCENDANT OF THE RAMBAM (Moses Maimonides).

Again…all I knew two years ago was that Grandma Oster, Elsa (nee Schwarzschild) Ostertag came from a prominent family. Clearly she did.

It is not lost on me that it is the result of the Nazis that I am piecing a family back together through records and social media that largely lived near each other in Germany before 1939. There was some immigration before then of course, but many of the naturalization dates I’ve found are in the 30s and early 40s. And maybe it is only my branch that never grafted back onto the tree once in America…maybe I am just piecing together what others on the tree already know, but it is greatly edifying, at least for posterity, to put this part of my family story back together.

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