2A. Story of François Hann and Marguerite Forsé (by F.Oster)

Paris, January 2008.

1. A teenager’s dream….

It is now thirty years since I discovered some old family pictures in a cupboard at my grandparents’ house. One of them was displaying my great-grandparents, Madeleine Hann and Michel Tailleur on the day of their wedding in 1897:

Madeleine and Michel are the parents of Louise, my maternal grandmother.  

Another picture was showing their grave, several decades later, in the 1950’s. Below the main inscriptions relating to them, one smaller plate indicated the names and dates of François Hann (1823-1890) and Marguerite Forsé (1825-1905):

I asked Lucienne, my mother, some questions about them. She told me that they were the parents of Madeleine. So they were my great-great-grandparents… Both were born more than 150 years ago at that time, and this discovery was for me an incredible leap into the past. Besides, my mother told me that most of the siblings of Madeleine left Europe to settle in the US. So, I might have lots of relatives on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, without knowing them, as the contact had been lost between the European branches and the American ones after WW II.
This paved the way for genealogical research I undertook during the 1980’s and 1990’s. I have identified so far more than 1000 ancestors, many of them being the ascendants of François and Marguerite. In 1996, my French cousin, Emilie, was able to resume contacts with our relatives in the US, among them Edward and Peggy. I estimate that François and Marguerite should count today 500 living descendants on both sides of Northern Atlantic.


2. François and Marguerite.
François Hann and Marguerite Forsé gave birth to ten children between 1848 and 1870. Three of them remained in Europe, whereas six (or seven) emigrated to the US in the years 1880-1890.

They lived in Lorraine, nowadays a French region, which was traditionally divided into two linguistic areas: German dialects on one side, French dialects on the other side. This is why this region has been uninterruptedly coveted both by France and Germany in the last centuries, and that borders were continually changing.

They inhabited Colmen, a small Lorrain village currently located in France, on the German side of the linguistic boundary, 4 km away from the current border with Germany. Colmen is the birthplace of the ten children of François and Marguerite.

What did François and Marguerite look like? Unfortunately we have no picture of them. Marguerite was still living at the wedding of her daughter Madeleine in 1897, but no general picture of all the attendees had been taken on that occasion. But, according to other pictures from that time we can assume that they should have looked like that:

3. Their life in Colmen.

In the 19th century, Colmen was a small village where the three main roads led to a central place forming a triangle. On one side of it stood the house of François and Marguerite. François was a blacksmith, running his business in the barn attached to the house. He also had a few cattle and owned some fields to feed them.

Marguerite and François gave birth to ten children:
1. Nicolas (b. 1848)
2. Pierre (b. 1850)
3. Michel (b. 1852)
4. Jacques (b. 1854)
5. François (b. 1857)
6. Anne (b. 1859)
7. Antoine (b. 1861)
8. Marguerite (b. 1863)
9. Catherine (b. 1865)
10. Madeleine (b. 1870)

That is almost a baby every two years, with the notable exception of Madeleine, who was born five years after Catherine, when her mother Marguerite was already 44 and her father François 47.

All these children lived to adulthood, which is really a lucky exception for that period, because of the high mortality rate among babies and children.


4. Their origins.
François is the fifth generation of the same surname, and the fourth with same first name and surname. His grandfather settled down in Colmen around 1780, coming from the neighbouring village of Neunkirchen.

His father was born in Colmen, but his mother, Catherine Hoffman gave birth to him in Pachten in 1823, her own native village, 17 km away from Colmen. Pachten belonged originally to Lorraine but was handed over to Prussia along with the region of Sarrelouis, after Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo in 1815. It is currently located in Germany.

- Nicolas HANN (around 1680-1717)
- François HANN (1713-before 1780)
- François HANN (1758-1834) - Tailor. Settled down in Colmen around 1780.
- François HANN (1794-1875) - Ploughman. Born in Colmen
- François HANN (1823-1890) - Blacksmith. Born in Pachten (Prussia)
François’s wife, Marguerite Forsé came from the village of Grosshemmersdorf, 7 km east of Colmen where she was born in 1825. Like Pachten, it was yielded to Prussia in 1815, and belongs nowadays to Germany. Marguerite is the fifth generation of Forsé, all originating from the same town.

- Valentin FORSE (around 1690-1751) - School teacher
- Stephan FORSE (around 1720-1763) - Cobbler
- Heinrich FORSE (1747-1807) - Ploughman
- Jean FORSE (1785-1848) - Ploughman
- Marguerite FORSE (1825-1905)


5. French people with a German background.
Colmen is currently located in France, in the northern part of the province of Lorraine, which traditionally belonged to the German linguistic area, along with the neighbouring province of Alsace. Lorraine is crossed by a linguistic boundary that is a consequence of the “barbarian invasions”, when Germanic peoples invaded the left bank of the river Rhine, belonging to the Roman Empire and settled down there, sharing some territories such as Lorraine with Gallic-Roman peoples. The linguistic boundary stabilized around year 1000, dividing the province of Lorraine into two parts. Since then, and till recently, this region has been continually claimed, both by France and Germany:

- In 925, the province of Lorraine was annexed by the German Holy Roman Empire.
- The Kingdom of France seized gradually the whole region between 1550 and 1766.
- In 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the bit around Sarrelouis was detached from Lorraine and yielded to Prussia (the “ancestor” country of Germany).
- Between 1871 and 1918 Prussia annexed the German-spoken part of Lorraine that became a province of the German Empire, along with Alsace.
- This happened again during WW II, between 1940 and 1945.
- In 1945, Lorraine finally came back to France.

As a result, Madeleine, the youngest daughter of François and Marguerite, changed four times her citizenship during her whole life. She was born French in 1870, and then became German in 1871, and again French in 1918. In 1940, she got the German citizenship for the second time, and became definitively French in 1944, a couple of years before her death (1946).

The mother tongue of Marguerite and François is not French, but the German dialect that is spoken in Northern Lorraine. François attended the French school in Colmen, and had probably a good command in French. He signed as “François”, and not as “Frantz”, the German equivalent of “François”, as his father and his grandfather did.

His mother, Catherine Hann, born Hoffman (1800-1881), was unable to write and could only speak the dialect.

François’s wife Marguerite used to speak the same German dialect, but she probably attended the German school, as her village, Grosshemmersdorf, was part of Prussia. Her signature reveals that she might not feel so at ease in writing.

So, did these people feel rather French or German? In 1870 a war broke out between France and Prussia. Colmen was invaded by Prussian soldiers during the summer, at a time when Madeleine, the youngest daughter of Marguerite, was still an infant. The soldiers seized the single cow of the family, whose milk was necessary to feed the baby, threatening to kill the mother. After the defeat of the French armies and the annexation of Lorraine to the German Empire in 1871, the new authorities forbade French to be taught in the village school, and imposed the German language – as it was spoken in Berlin – as the official language. The small children used to taunt the soldiers by singing songs in French and then running away. None of these episodes endeared the Prussians to the people of Colmen. Their hearts probably remained French.


6. Some remained, some emigrated.
Among the ten children of François and Marguerite, six (maybe seven) emigrated to the US in the years between 1880 and 1890. They probably did it for economic reasons as the region and its limited agricultural resources could not absorb the whole increase in population. Some of them were also encouraged to make their decisions because they did not want to remain German.

The two older boys, Nicolas (b. 1848) and Pierre (b. 1850) helped their father in his shop as teenagers and learned the trade. They left Colmen in the early 1870’s and settled down in neighbouring villages, where they also became blacksmiths. They both got married, having each several children.

Pierre Hann in the 1880's.

At the other end, the youngest daughter Madeleine (b. 1870) stayed in Colmen, probably to take care of her old parents. In 1897, seven years after the demise of his father, she married Michel Tailleur, a miller from Freistroff. The couple moved to the family house in Colmen and Michel resumed the trade of his late father-in-law as a blacksmith. Marguerite died several years later in 1905. Madeleine gave birth to eight children, but only five lived to adulthood. Both Madeleine and Michel attended the German school. So did their children. They spoke the local German dialect at home, and wrote in German. The use of French probably disappeared at that time. Michel was drafted into the German army during WW I, fortunately some distance away from the front lines, in a hospital for horses in Lorraine (he was already in his mid-forties). In 1918, as Lorraine became French again, people expressed their joy by taking to the streets, as their hearts remained French during the half-century of annexation.

Madeleine Hann in 1925 with husband Michel, their five children, and their grand-children.

Between the eldest brothers and the youngest sister, probably all the siblings (six or seven) emigrated to the US. Antoine (b. 1861) was certainly the first one to do it. He settled down in New York City in the 1880’s and got married there, having two sons. He probably helped the others rejoin him in America.

Antoine Hann in 1907 with wife Hilda and their two sons

Catherine (b. 1865) emigrated in the late 1880’s and married in the U.S. a Frenchman from the neighbouring province of Alsace, called Ambroise Walck. They got four children. Three of them lived to adulthood.

Catherine Hann in the 1920's (2nd) with husband Ambroise (1st), sister-in-law Hilda (3rd) and brother Antoine (4th)

François (b. 1857) remained a bachelor once in the U.S.

Anna (b. 1859) got married there, having two daughters.


Jacques (b. 1854) who settled in Chicago, lost contact with the others.

The most extraordinary story is about Marguerite (b. 1863). She married Jean Kieffer in Colmen, and the young couple moved in with his family. His mother was a domineering woman and delighted in making Marguerite feel like a servant. She gave birth to her first daughter in 1888, but would not tolerate being treated this way. So she started to plan her escape. She received money from her brother Antoine, in New York City. Her savings were coming along when she found she was pregnant again. Therefore, she escaped and made her way by road and by boat in order to rejoin her brother in New York. She gave birth to her second daughter in the U.S. in 1890. She became a midwife, working hard while raising her two daughters alone.

That leaves one unaccounted for: Michel (b. 1852). We don’t know if he emigrated or stayed in France. But my cousin Peggy, the grand-daughter of Catherine, can remember her Grandma saying that one of her siblings went to America and joined a wagon train heading west. At first, there were letters and then they stopped. Was that Michel? Was he in a wagon train that met Indians or starved crossing the desert? No one knows.


7. What is remaining now?
None of the descendants of François and Marguerite remained in Colmen. The family grave is still in the cemetery behind the church, having the same aspect as on the picture from the 1950’s I discovered at my grandparents’. Only the stone cross on top of the grave has been replaced by an iron one, and the plate indicating the names of François and Marguerite has disappeared.

The house has been modernized, having lost its traditional aspect of a Lorrain farm. The barn abutting the house has been destroyed. There is now a stoop at the front, and the windows have been changed to sliding ones, with metal pull down shutters.

In the centre of the triangular place is a statue depicting a soldier under the protection of an angel. It is a monument commemorating the soldiers from the town that died in World War I and World War II, either with a French or with a German uniform.

8. The common ancestors of our common ancestors.
Genealogy enables to travel in the past. We spoke a lot about the 19th century. Let’s finish this travel with a visit to the 16th century.

François and Marguerite had common ancestors, among them Eberdt Baur, who was born around 1550 in Germany. Eberdt is one of our oldest ancestors. He was a farmer in Rammelfangen, 9 km east of Colmen. His son, Claus was the mayor of Rammelfangen, but his position didn’t prevent him from being convicted of witchcraft and executed on December 13th, 1628. This is all the more surprising as the Baur’s had been known as well-off and influential people. But one must not forget that this episode took place during the Thirty-Year War, a very troubled period.

- Eberdt BAUR (around 1550 – before 1609)
- Claus BAUR (around 1570 – 1628)
- Johann BAUR (1595 – around 1640)
- Peter BAUR (around 1625 – after 1691)
- Anna BAUR (1670 – 1732)

Anna Baur gave birth to Simon Hoffman, the ancestor of François Hann, and to Maria Hoffman, the ancestor of Marguerite Forsé, as it is shown hereafter:

- Simon HOFFMAN (before 1700 – 1764)
- Nikolaus HOFFMAN (1738 - 1806)
- J.Georg HOFFMAN (1771 - after 1821)
- Catherine HOFFMAN (1800 – 1881)
- François HANN (1823 – 1890)

- Maria HOFFMAN (around 1700 – 1748)
- Barbara HEISS (1732 - 1812)
- Margaretha BONY (1762 – 1841)
- Madeleine BONY (1785 – 1856)
- Marguerite FORSE (1825 – 1905)

Special thanks to:
- Lucienne Oster, my mother, who helped me conducting my genealogical research
- Emilie Jacquemin, my French cousin, who resumed contact with our U.S. relatives
- Peggy Drab, my U.S. cousin, who provided me with old pictures and stories told by her grandma Catherine, and who kindly reviewed this document.