GAUER Family - Ancestors

	The GAUER Family
	My GAUER Ancestors

My GAUER ancestors came from various hamlets (Wirschweiler, Dienstweiler, Eborn, etc) around the town of Birkenfeld, Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, Germany. They lived in this area for at least 150 years but at last the shortage of land and other pressures caused them to leave the homeland. Here is a map of the Oldenburg district in 1971 (Various villages where my ancestors were born are underlined in red).

On Sept 29, 1784 seven families of settlers including a Franz Heinrich GAUER made a private arrangement with the Polish Countess Therese Potoka to settle on her lands in a town called Bedrykowce in the Austro-Hungarian Empire province of Galicia. Franz brought along a family of "6 persons" including his wife, his sons, his brother and his nephew Johann Jacob Gauer who is my direct ancestor. As part of the deal Franz got 23 Joch of land (the equivilant of 23 acres today) and he was required to work on the Countess' crops at harvest times. Bedrykowce is now in Ukraine and spelt Bedrikivci. It is found in the district of Zaleszczyki on the Dniester River less than a mile NW of the town of Zaleszczyki. You can see Zaleszczyki on this 1882 map of Galicia (Bottom right corner, north of Czernowitz) (map courtesy of FEEFHS, 238KB) Here is a detailed map of the Zaleszczyki and Bedrykowce townships (Bedrykowce is underlined in red in the top right corner of this Military Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1789-1928 from LDS fiche #6000249, 450KB). Here is a photo of the area around Bedrykowice in the 1950s with its location marked with a small red arrow.

Johann Jacob married Maria Dorothea KUNZ, the daughter of Franz Nickel KUNZ who traveled with Franz GAUER to Galicia. Their descendants prospered but the problem of large families on limited land and friction between the settlers and their Polish landlords resulted in the grandson of Johann Jacob, Franz GAUER, emigrating with his wife Maria Elisabetha (nee HERZ/HERTY/HERTZ) and 2 year old son Rudolph from Bedrykowce to the town of Birsula (known as Kotovsk after 1935) in the Kherson District of South Russia. Here is a map of the Kherson district in 1897 ("Birzula" is underlined in red in the top left corner of this image, 156KB). The city of Odessa is at the bottom center of this map 75 km south of Birsula on the Black Sea. There was a large number of mostly agricultural German colonies in the Kherson district in the 1800s however Birsula was a Russian town and a rail center so settling in Birsula was unusual for Germans.

In 1880 Rudolph was confirmed in the Lutheran church in the town of Rosenfeld which is 35 km south of Birsula (just west of "Katarshi" in the center of this map). I speculate he was that far from home apprenticing at his trade (stonemason) which he later used in Canada.

Two years later in 1882 Rudolph's mother Elizabeth suffered a very traumatic few months as on Feb 10 her husband Franz died in Neu-Kassel, Kherson district and was buried in Sofiental, Kherson district. Then, on Apr 27th, her 6 year old son and Franz's namesake died. Finally, 3 days later on May 1st, another son, Jacob, was born.

In 1886 Rudolph married Anna SCHMALENBERG in the Evangelical Lutheran Prayerhouse in Nesselrode which now part of the southern suburbs of the city of Kotovsk, Ukraine and is known as Kujalnik. The Nesselrode prayer house was part of the Reformed Evangelical Lutheran parish of Hoffnungstal until its disappearance sometime around the Russian Revolution. Two sons, Henry and Jacob (my grandfather), were born in 1887 and 1888 respectively in Nesselrode. Nothing but a few German built houses stand in Birsula and Nesselrode. The German school, prayer house, graveyard and inhabitants have been obliterated.

In April 1890 Rudolph, his wife Anna, his sons Henry & Jacob, his mother Elisabeth, his brother Jacob and sisters Julia and Mathilde emigrated from Nesselrode to North America in response to an increasingly heavy handed Russian empire. One sister, Emilie Gauer born 1868, was left behind and her fate is still unknown. Possibly she married and the records of her and her family are still to be found but if she stayed the terrible events that swept over that area when the communists took over probably mean she or her family ended up either dead or exiled to Siberia. I will continue to search for her until I know her fate. The family took a train from Birsula to Hamburg in Germany and then embarked in steerage on the Hamburg America steamship "Augusta Victoria" for a 9 day trip across the Atlantic.

On Apr 26, 1890 they arrived in New York City and stepped off a tender at the Barge office in Battery park in downtown Manhattan. They missed using the Castle Garden Immigration office as it was closed 8 days before they arrived. They then proceeded by train to Winnipeg. In Winnipeg Rudolph built a home at 68 Lusted Ave for his family. It still stands where he built it beside the Red River. My great aunt Elsie remembered the paddlewheel steam boats landing at the dock a few yards from their home to carry people downriver to Assiniboine Park and Zoo for the day. I found the family in the 1891 Canadian census as "Rudolph Gower" and family and in the 1901, 1906, 1911 and 1916 census records. Their first Winnipeg born child was Rudolph Gauer Jr in 1893. In 2005 I got a copy of a letter sent in 1921 to Rudolph in the town of Langenburg in Saskatchewan from a Martin Gauer in Galicia. It contained a desperate plea for assistance but, sadly, this letter arrived seven years after Rudolph had passed away. Why this was sent to Langenburg is a bit of a mystery other than the fact that a Caspar Rathegeber settled there and he was a family friend as well as a neighbour from Birsula (the Gauers & Rathgebers disembarked the Augusta Victoria together).

The family flourished in Canada and Rudolph and Anna had a total of 9 children. My grandfather, Jacob GAUER, married Amelia DREGER in Winnipeg in 1910 and my father, Gordon Robert Edward Gauer, the fourth of six children, was born in 1920. I was born a third generation Canadian in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1949 to Gordon R.E. GAUER & Marjorie BELL.

Here is the details of my GAUER family tree as I currently understand it.
To give some overview of my families travels here is a general map of Europe in 1815 with the major areas where they lived and their travels marked.