The Jews of Stühlingen

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Ralph

December 21, 2016

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 As the method for my investigation I chose prosopography, as defined and described by Lawrence Stone in 1971.3 But the current study violates some of Stone’s conditions. The group of subjects examined here is situated at the bottom rather than at the top of the social ladder. Many data items are arbitrary rather than systematic. But since much of the data is drawn from tax rolls, sequential municipal and court documents, the representation of our sample is defined. Yet, the method provides astonishing insights.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 In my initial work, I found some Karlsruhe records that a German researcher, Friedrich Wollmershäuser, an experienced genealogical investigator, had transcribed from the Karlsruhe archive for a fellow genealogist, Werner Frank. Mr. Frank generously allowed me to use the nineteen pages of extracted records, which covered selected time periods. These records enabled me to perform some simple analyses, develop a method, and run some pilot studies. The results were promising, and I hired Mr. Wollmershäuser to work through the Donaueschingen records, systematically summarizing record by record in German. Preliminary results based on this data were presented at the Thirty-second IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Paris, 2012 and published in Avotaynu4

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 As result of this publication, I was contacted by yet another fellow genealogist, Steven Guggenheim, who was looking for his ancestors in Stühlingen and the neighbouring town of Tiengen. Graciously, he granted me full access to all of the records that Mr. Wollmershäuser was to extract for him, mainly from the Karlsruhe archive, aiming for an almost complete collection of available records. Whereas the records were abstracted for me in German, records abstracted for Werner Frank and Steven Guggenheim were translated into English on the fly. Fiscal constraints did not allow the systematic collection of digital images.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0  

3Stone, “Prosopography.”

4Bloch, “The Jews of Stühlingen.”