Aloys Breinl: Weißgerber or Bräuer?

Weißgerber image, source link

As my mom & I have been researching our Bohemian ancestors, it seemed a little odd to us that my 5th great grandfather, Sebastianus Aloysius Breinl, is sometimes listed as a Bräuer (Brewer) and sometimes as a Weißgerber (White Tanner) on different records throughout his life.  Sebastianus Aloysius Preinl/Breinl/Bräunl/Breunl, was born on 9 April 1780 in house number 210 in Graslitz, Böhmen, the son of Johann Anton Adam Preinl & Rosalia Korb.  Although his name was listed as Sebastianus Aloysius Preinl in his baptism record, he apparently went by Aloys throughout his life, as evidenced by the fact that his name was listed as Aloys (or variations of this name, including Aloysis, Aloÿs, & Alois) on every other source recorded during his lifetime, and during the lives of his children & grandchildren, that we have found for him so far.  Aloys was married to Eva Rosalia Stohwasser on 4 October 1804 in house number 201 in Graslitz when he was 24 years old.  Eva Rosalia (who went by Rosalia) was the daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer.  Aloys & Rosalia had 11 children, all born in Graslitz between 1805 and 1826.  Their children were: Johann Anton, Johanna, Theresia, Friedrich [my 4th great grandfather], Aloys, Rosalia (1), Wenzl, Johannas Nepomuk, Elisabeth, Mathilda Rosalia, & Rosalia (2).  And Aloys died on 29 June 1834 at the age of 54.  

Bräuer image, source link

Although changing occupations may not have been that uncommon for our ancestors in the United States, from what we’ve learned about our ancestors who lived in Germany and Bohemia and the guild requirements at that time, it would be very uncommon for this to have happened, especially for someone to have been a master in two different unrelated occupations.

So we decided to sort through all our sources that we had for Aloys to date and see what information they provided about his occupation.  (We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any possibility that we had accidentally collected information about two different Aloys Brienls living in Graslitz at the same time).  So we also compared the information from each of the sources about his house number, his parents’ names & his father’s occupation, his wife’s name & his wife’s parents’ names, and any other relevant details.  Here’s what we came up with so far:

Source	Aloys’ House Number	Aloys’ Occupation	Aloys’ Parents/Wife	Aloys’ Father’s Occupation	Other
Birth of Sebastianus Aloysius Preinl, 1780 (self) source link	210	—-	Parents: Adamus Preinl,  Rosalia Korb	Socius  Braxatoris et inquilinus (Beer Brewer Partner & Citizen)	Birth record note says he was married on 4 Oct 1804, died on 29 Jun 1834
Marriage of Aloÿs Bräunl & Rosalia Stowasser, 1804 (self) source link	210	none listed	Parents: Johann Anton Adam Bräunl, Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignatz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer	Herrschaft Bräumeister (Manor Master Brewer)	(Marriage date matches date in the birth record note).
Birth of Johann Anton, 1805 (son) source link	(son born in 488)	Bürger u Weißgerbermeister (Bürger & Master White Tanner)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer
Birth of Johanna, 1806 (daughter) source link	(daughter born in 210)	Bürger und Weißgerbermeister (Bürger & Master White Tanner)	Wife: Roßalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Roßalia Dotzauer		(Aloys’ daughter was born in the same house that Aloys was born in).
Birth of Theresia, 1808 (daughter) source link	(daughter born in 80)	Bürger und Weißgerber (Bürger & White Tanner)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer		[House No. 80 is the Breinl family house where we know Aloys lived & where a number of his children were born].
Birth of Friedrich, 1810 (son)  source link	(son born in 80)	Bürger und Weißgerber (Bürger & White Tanner)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer
Birth of Aloys, 1813 (son) source link	(son born in 80)	Weißgärber (White Tanner)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer
Birth of Rosalia, 1815 (daughter) source link	(daughter born in 18)	Weißgärbermeister (Master White Tanner)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignatz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer
Birth of Wenzl, 1816 (son)  source link	(son born in 80)	Weißgärbermeister (Master White Tanner)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignatz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer
Birth of Johannes Nepomuk, 1819 (son) source link	(son born in 80)	Weißgärbermeister (Master White Tanner)	Parents: Adam Bräunl & Rosalia Korp, Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignatz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer	Herrschaft Bräumeister in No. 320 (Manor Master Brewer)
Birth of Elisabeth, 1820 (daughter) source link	Aloys born in 320 (daughter born in 80)	Weißgärbermeister (Master White Tanner)	Parents: Joh. Adam Bräunl & Rosalia Korber in No. 320, Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignatz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer	Herrschaft Bräumeister in No. 320 (Manor Master Brewer)	(We know that Aloys’ parents lived in house No. 320).
Birth of Mathilda Rosalia, 1822 (daughter)  source link	80 (daughter born in 80)	Bräuermeister in No. 80 (Master Brewer)	Parents: Johann Adam Breinl & Rosalia Korb, Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignatz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer	Bräuermeister  in No. 320 (Master Brewer)
Birth of Rosalia, 1826 (daughter) source link	320 (daughter born in 80)	Weißgärbermeister in No. 320 (Master White Tanner)	Parents: Johann Adam Breinl & Roßalia Korb, Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser, daughter of Ignaz Stohwasser & Rosalia Dotzauer	Bräuermeister (Master Brewer)
Marriage of Anton (son) & Magdalena Weck, 1832 source link	(son married in 80)	Herrschaft Bräuhauspächters (Manor Brewhouse Renter)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Anton is Bräuermeister born in No. 320 (Master Brewer)
Death of Aloys, 1834 (self) source link	320	Herrschaft Bräumeister (Manor Master Brewer)			Died at age 53 (matches with birth record).
Marriage of Friedrich (son) & Amalia Dotzauer, 1836 source link	(son born in 80, son married in 522)	Herrschaft Bräuhauspächters (Manor Brewhouse Renter)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Friedrich is a Bürgers sohn born in No. 80 (Bürger’s Son)
Death of Rosalia, 1838  (wife) source link	(wife died in 80)	Bräumeister (Master Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Breunl
Birth of Christian, 1839 (grandson) source link	(grandson born in 320)	Braumeister (Master Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Anton, Christian’s father, was herschaft Braumeister born in No. 320 (Manor Master Brewer)
Birth of Ludmilla, 1839 (granddaughter)  source link	(granddaughter born in 391)	Herrschaft Bräumeister (Manor Master Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Friedrich, Ludmilla’s father, was beirbrauer born in No. 80 (Beer Brewer)
Birth of Joseph, 1841 (grandson) source link	(grandson born in 391)	Brauer (Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Friedrich, Joseph’s father, was brauer born in No. 80 (Brewer)
Marriage of Franz Hahn & Elisabetha, 1843 (daughter) source link	(daughter born in 80, daughter married in 224)	Herschaftlichen Bräuermeister (Manor Master Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser
Birth of Anna, 1846 (granddaughter) source link	80 (granddaughter born in Bleydstadt No. 99)	Herschaftlichen Bräuers in No. 80 (Manor Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Friedrich, Anna’s father, was brauer in Bleydstadt No. 99 (Brewer)
Birth of Adolph Thomas, 1849 (grandson)  source link	80 (grandson born in Bleydstadt No. 99)	Herschaftl. Bräuers (Manor Brewer)	Wife: Rosalia Stohwasser		Friedrich, Adolph’s father, was brauer in Bleydstadt No. 99 (Brewer), born in Graslitz No. 80

From listing the information chronologically from all these different sources, it’s pretty clear that this is indeed one individual — there are so many details in each of the sources about relationships, house numbers, etc. that there doesn’t seem to be any possibility that we’ve accidentally found records for two different individuals with the same name.  So, why would he have changed occupations?  We contacted Fritz Juengling who is an expert on German guilds, to ask his opinion and he said, “This is a perplexing problem. I cannot see any connection between Brau- and Weißgerber- at all. That someone would become a -meister in two different fields such as these is highly improbable and this designation is really inexplicable. The only thing that I could say is that the term -meister might not have been a guild designation to the person who wrote the documents. Maybe it was simply a loose term suggesting a promotion in a company. But this is only a suggestion from the top of my mind and in no way the real explanation.  That someone would leave a field for which he had trained for so long is also suspect.”

So we were still unsure of why this could have happened. Our next theory at this point is that maybe Aloys was the second or third son in his family.  So the father would likely have had his oldest son(s) be apprentices to be brewers like himself, and any younger sons would have worked as apprentices for other masters to learn other occupations.  But maybe later on in Aloys’ life, after he had already trained to be a Weißgerber, something happened — maybe his father and his older brother(s) died or were no longer able to work as brewers.  But maybe since he had grown up in a brewing family, and knew something about the trade from his father, and had stayed and continued to live there in Graslitz, maybe he would have been the one to take over when there was a need for a brewer???  That’s a lot of maybes.  And we don’t know if it was ever done that way or not.  But we decided that the next step is to search for the siblings of Aloys so we could see if it was even a possible scenario (if he was a 2nd or 3rd son in his family).  We’ve been going through the process of searching for his siblings, and I’ll write an update when we know more.

Travel Log: October 5th, Part 2, Graslitz, Bleistadt, & Elbogen

“. . . Then we drove further, about half an hour through a heavily wooded area on a very windy road (I'm very glad I didn't get motion sick, I was worried there for a while). 

The road to Graslitz

We have a whole list of houses for Graslitz, now Kraslice, a larger town in beautiful huge pine forests in the mountains where they used to manufacture musical instruments, but now the factories are all empty and Stanislav told us most people have to go elsewhere to work and unemployment is high.  We had lots of Breinl and Dotzauer ancestors there, and then a few others: Keilwerth, Mayer, Meinl, and Spohr that I had on my list. 

The town of Graslitz (now Kraslice)

An abandoned factory in Graslitz

A vacant old hotel in Graslitz.  My mom and I joked that we want to buy and
restore this old hotel -- just look at those cool statues lining the facade.

The Graslitz family houses that we know of are 80, 262, 306, 316, 322, 375, 383, 391, 501, 522, & 587. . . .

Here’s what we know so far about the ancestors who lived in those houses:

Graslitz No. 80 was the birth place of my 4^th great grandfather, Freidrich Breinl. 

Graslitz No. 262 was the residence of Gottfried Wenzl Dotzauer, my 5^th great grandfather.  It was also the residence of Rosalia Theresia Dotzauer, Gottfried’s sister.

Graslitz No. 306 was the home of Amalia Dotzauer Breinl, my 4^th great grandmother, and of her mother, Katharina Mayer Dotzauer (Gottfreid’s wife).

Anton Breinl, a son of Freidrich Breinl and Amalia Dotzauer, lived in Graslitz No. 316.

Graslitz No. 322 or 522 was the birth place of Amalia Dotzauer, and was the home of Amalia and her husband, Friedrich Breinl. 

Anton Breinl (son of Freidrich Breinl and Amalia Dotzauer) lived in Graslitz No. 375, and so did his daughter, Emilie Amalia Breinl.

Graslitz No. 383 was the home of Gottfried Wenzl Dotzauer and his wife Katharina Mayer, and also of their daughter Amalia Dotzauer.

Graslitz No. 391 was the home of Friedrich Breinl.  No. 391 was also the birthplace of his daughter, Ludmilla Breinl, my 3^rd great grandmother.

Anna Elisabetha Spohr, the sister of my 2^nd great grandfather Ludwig Spohr, lived in Graslitz No. 501. 

And Graslitz No. 587 was the residence of Rosalia Dotzauer, the wife of Ignaz Stohwasser (Rasalia & Ignaz’s daughter, Rosalie Stohwasser, married Aloys Breinl. Rosalie & Aloys’s son was my ancestor, Friedrich Breinl.  Not sure yet how Rosalia Dotzauer Stohwasser may have been related to the Dotzauer side of our family).

. . .We drove up one street up a hill from the Main Street and finally found a house 80, but it was a brick building that looked old, but not old enough - Stanislav told us it was built around 1890 (too new). So either it is the right location and the house had been rebuilt, or it wasn't the right place. 

A House No. 80 in Graslitz -- not sure if this may have been our ancestor's House No. 80 or not?

The thing that was different about Graslitz from all the other little towns we've seen so far is that it had new sets of numbers starting over on each street, even for the old original house numbers. The other towns just had one of each old house number in the whole town. So how are you supposed to know which house it is, even if you find one there?  There are no street names in the old records we've been finding for Graslitz, just like the other towns, so I guess we have to figure that out. We didn't find any other possibilities for those other houses there either. 

We did get to go to the church in Graslitz where Ludmilla Breinl & Karl Spohr were married (they were the parents of Ludwig, who came to America at age 14).  The church is cool, with horizontal light yellow and white stripes all around the outside, and we could see inside the locked gate at the church door to see the painted walls and ceilings.

The church in Graslitz

I just loved all the cool doors in the Czech Republic! 

Just look at those ceilings!

A sign telling when construction began and ended on the current church building.

We saw a few handwritten pages and some historical pictures posted at the church, and Stanislav said the church was rebuilt like that from the previous falling down Catholic Church that used to stand there (so the earlier church would have been where they were married), because it was rebuilt from 1893 to 1896. 

The original old church on the left, and the new church on the right.  

It would be interested to have these pages translated to we can read
what they have to say about the history of the church.

Then we asked around until we found the cemetery up on a hill, and we spent quite a while there and didn't even see a quarter of the headstones. There were Czech ones and older German ones, and there were lots with family names: Kohl, Fischer, Breinl, Stowasser, Kohler, and more. 

The Graslitz cemetery.  Pictured here are just a few of the headstones with family names
that we need to figure out exactly how we are related. 

This headstone is one that my parents had found there on a previous trip to the Czech Republic, and we know for sure how these three Breinls are related to us from an old family letter that specifically mentions their names.

And in the back there are piles of old stones all stacked together with moss growing over them. I climbed up on the overgrown piles to see if any names were visible on the piled up stones, and only two were facing up and I think only one of those had a family surname on it. Unfortunately my camera battery ran out, and Mom's battery had already run out, so we couldn't photograph the last few family name headstones we saw.

The overgrown pile of headstones at the back of the cemetery.

Searching through the pile of headstones.

On the drive back we passed through the edge of Bleistadt, now called Olavi, a small town not too far down the road from Graslitz. Friedrich Breinl and his wife lived there at one time, but I didn't have a house number for that town written on my list, and we just drove through without stopping.

Last we stopped at Elbogen, now called Loket.  Elbogen means “elbow” and it's where there's a big curve in the river around this town with a castle. We don't have ancestors in the town of Elbogen that we know of, but some were within the larger Elbogen district. We hadn't planned to stop there, Stanislav just offered to. We went in and pretty quickly left, but it was a colorful little medieval town with a very old looking castle that was built right around a large rock outcropping. There was a wine festival going on inside the castle and it was so crowded you could hardly get around. Stanislav had to beg the guy to let us just go in and take a quick look at the castle without having to pay to get in for the wine festival.

Elbogen (now called Loket)

Mom with Dr. Stanislav Boracovic

The Loket castle

Then we drove back and stopped again in Putschirn where Stanislav's sister, Rose, lives and she had us for coffee (although she was very surprised that we didn't want coffee, tea, wine, or cola). We just asked for water, and she brought out a large water bottle and poured it for us and it was carbonated water. All the water in Europe is carbonated unless you ask for "still water." I don't care for the carbonated stuff – maybe it’d be ok if you were used to having it all the time. I don't think they drink a lot of water here like we do at home.  Oh and she fed us mushrooms she had picked in the woods. They were very good. Stanislav told us Czechs love mushrooms and 95% of them pick their own mushrooms in the woods here. Cool, huh?

Well, that was a nice tour today, and we didn't have any trouble understanding him, and we could almost always figure out what each other was trying to say. Then tonight we had traditional Czech or German food (not sure which) at a place near the hotel in Karlsbad, and I actually like sour krout, and the similar dish of red cabbage, when they are made here, and not something actually sour out of a jar in the U.S.  :)

Well, tomorrow we will go to that church in the morning. . . .  Can't wait!”