Postcard of the village Helpenstell

 

These families HELPENSTELL, SEELBACH (Wilhelmina HELPENSTELL’s marriage name), KOLB and REIDER were the TUBBE'S neighbors in Nacogdoches/Texas during the first years after their immigration from Prussia. Later on they were connected by several marriages. In 1850 Wilhelm and his sister Wilhelmine Helpenstell emigrated from their home in the tiny village HELPENSTELL. It is situated abt. 2 miles from ROSBACH, 40 miles east from BONN/ Rhine. The village is on the south bank of the SIEG river. There was no bridge so they had to cross a ford to go to the small town of Rosbach with a lutheran church and a school. Wilhelm and Wilhelmine's father Ernst Helpenstell and his brother Heinrich H., owned a small area of land including a house. They earned their poor living by farming the extremly small spots of land and perhaps breeding some hens, pigs and a cow for family use only and might have been happy if they had enough to keep them away from starving. The ruins of the Ernst Helpenstell home were still in existence in 1999 when we visited it again with Sarah Tubbe who is a Helpenstell and also a Seelbach descendant. The late forties of the 19th century brought about severe misharvest and starvation. People sometimes took straw from their own roofs to feed their only pig on. The Helpenstells, after both of their parents' death, applied for permission to emigrate with the authorities in Sept.1849. Probably they then were unable to sell their property, because everybody could himself call lucky if he was able to buy a bread. So they took off one year later in fall 1850 with only 400 Thaler (Sailing passage cost 80 Thaler per head). There is a family saga telling that on board (perhaps of the Rhine steamer ?) they met the two KOLB-families who had in hands a letter from Texas from their brothers-in-law Henry and William REIDER, telling about free land over there in Texas. Info about the REIDER brothers : In the US at least Henry REIDER changed his family name into RIDER. Both brothers came to the US with the "ADELSVEREIN" in fall 1845 already and settled in Fredericksburg/Tx in the first winter after the town had been founded. They were comrades with Gerhard ROEHRIG, who built a home in Main Street which today is wellknown as historic "Loeffler-Weber House". Henry and William owned some land. Henry was a soldier in the Fort Scott Martin next to Fredericksburg for some time and later went to Nacogdoches. Having seen this letter the HELPENSTELLs on the spot decided to not go to Pensylvania as initially planned where Wilhelmina's sweetheart was already waiting for her. Instead they embarked on the sailing ship "ISIS" going from Rotterdam to New Orleans. They settled in Union Spring north of Nacogdoches city next to the county border. Wilhelm changed his name into ‘Willem’ = William. He married and donated land for the HELPENSTELL cemetery, where his first son Henry was buried in 1861, so was Martha, the second child of August and Mary TUBBE, in 1864. Information for genealogists Sources : Lutheran church books in ROSBACH/Sieg river, microfilms in the Central Church Archive in BRUEHL/Rhine), civil records in Dattenfeld, land records in Siegburg, emigration files, Main Archive Nordrhein-Westfalen in Duesseldorf family sagas in Texas given by Pat Marshall and others. History : Helpenstell village belonged to the Dukedom BERG until 1806. In 1806 the French Emperor Napoleon I occupied the whole region which in 1815 became Western part of the Kingdom of Prussia (Rhine province) and in 1871 part of the German Empire. Today Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) State : Nordrhein-Westfalen Both the village of Helpenstell and the little town Rosbach today belong to the community D 51570 Windeck IMPORTANT hint: Everybody wanting to do genealogical research in this part of Germany really should be aware of a very special custom there in 16th, 17th and 18th century : Literally every boy got "Johann" resp. "Johannes" as his first given name. This solely seems to be a sign of lutheran belief was not the name somebody was known by. As to the spelling of names there was no fixed orthography at all in those days. Instead the pastors wrote down the given names the way they heard them, ERNST or ERNEST, KATHARINA, CATHRIN or CATHRINA...who cares ? On top the variety of given names was very, very restricted. So very frequently you will come across several persons with identical names and you may only hold them apart by looking at their parents' names and the villages they came from - a specialty of that region not really facilitating any kind of research... In the very early days people were known only by their given names. Family names developed not before the 15th century or later. In the Helpenstell area family names came into use even not before 17th cty. This means that the Helpenstell family took over the name of the Helpenstell village they were living in and never left this place. The old German handwriting is hard to read espeacially on microfilms. Though the original church books are not for public use we double-checked the entries of "our" Helpenstell family in the actual old tomes. There were some more Helpenstell families living in that area, but their connection to "our" Helpenstell line is unknown.

Data of the emigrants' family

The immigrant's life and descendants

Some descendants of the Wilhelmine SEELBACH-HELPENSTELL & Bill SEELBACH family

Map of the land owned by the Helpenstells in Western Province of Prussia :