The next step I took was to sign up on the mailing list for DDVH.com. I wrote out what I knew of my grandmother’s family and asked if anyone had any connections to this same family. I received a few e-mails about the history of Backi Jarek. It was great to get a better understanding about how my grandmother’s life would have been like been coming to Canada. I also received an e-mail with a link to someone’s Morgenthaler family tree that had my great-grandmother (Katarina Morgenthaler b. 1895) and great-grandfather (Georg Klingler b. 1885) on it. The birth dates and locations were the same. My grandmother had written that her mother had two sisters named Barbara Morgenthaler (b. 1889) and Sofia Morgenthaler (b. 1894) with the years they were born. Looking at the tree, I was in shock. I had just discovered that my grandmother’s family was part of a very interesting migration of Germans into the Balkans known as the Donauschwaben. Now this family tree goes all the way back to Bendicht Morgenthaler (b. c1565) from Ursenbach, Bern, Switzerland. Bendicht is 12 generations above me, so he is my 10 times great-grandfather. I now have two branches of my family tree already researched back to the 1500 or 1600s.
Unfortunately, I have not found out much about the Klingler side further past my great-grandfather. My grandmother wrote that he fought in the first World War on the Austrian side. Towards the end of the war he was captured by the Russian army and kept captive for a year. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to confirm this or not, but definitely an interesting story. Shortly after he returned to Backi Jarek, he married my great-grandmother (Katarina Morgenthaler). My grandmother also wrote that she had an aunt named Anna, Georg Klingler’s sister. My father remembers hearing family rumours that Georg Klingler went to the United States around 1910. He got a woman “in trouble” and came back to Europe where he was quickly conscripted into the army. When my father was young he remembers the family traveling to the Cleveland, Ohio area to visit his grandfather’s cousins. That is really all that I know about the Klingler side.
