If only these records could speak

Looking through the register of people who left the Deutsch Wymysle church during the latter half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, the name Heinrich David Bartel caught my eye. When everyone else was emigrating to the United States, Heinrich David Bartel moved to Russia in 1910. Curious, I searched for him in GRANDMA and discovered, as we often have before, that he vanished from all records at that point. That is not the subject of this post.

I then noticed that he was not the first one named Heinrich in his family. An older brother had been given the name earlier. Clearly, the older brother had passed away before Heinrich David was born, which opened the door for a second son to be named Heinrich. That is not the subject of this post.

What I then saw in GRANDMA and confirmed from the Deutsch Wymysle church records (below) was something unusual, a sad story that longs to be told.

The scan above clearly records Heinrich David’s date of birth: 29 May 1882. He died approximately a month and a half later, on 11 July 1882. Unfortunately, the David Bartel family suffered a double loss that day, as Heinrich David’s mother, Jakobine Kliewer Bartel, also passed away.

One wonders how it was that mother and baby son died on the same day. Did some terrible illness take both by mere coincidence on the same day? Was there a fatal accident in which both were tragically lost? If only these records could speak …