Hello! I'm trying to add my three pork butcher ancestors - but finding it very difficult to negotiate the site ( I can't find the list of surnames I KNOW exists! )
I am related to the Weegmanns of Otley: Wilhelm Weegmann, from Kunzelsau, was the uncle of my Great-Grandfather, Theodor Gotthilf Fiedler ( his mother was Caroline Fiedler, nee Weegmann. ) Theo. was born in Kunzelsau in 1869 and emigrated to England aged 15, to be apprenticed to another German butcher, Mr. Heine. He married Annie Lowes, from Newcastle and settled in Shadforth, County Durham, where he worked for the Co-Operative Stores. The couple had four children: Theodore; Caroline; Frieda ( who was my Grandmother, 1901 - 2000 ) and Ernst. In 1914, Theo. was arrested, as an enemy alien, and interned on the Isle of Man. He became ill and, thanks to his sisters, who worked for the German red Cross, he was exchanged for a sick British prisoner and spent the rest of the war with his sisters in Kunzelsau. In 1918, he was refused re-entry to the U.K. - he was unable to return until the Home Office finally relented in 1927, by which time my Grandmother was 26 and married, with a 2-year-old daughter ( my mother ) and a baby son.
Theo. died in 1942, when a fall from a 'bus caused head injuries. He had never become a British citizen!
His much older half-brother, Gustav Fiedler( born in Kunzelsau in 1850,whose mother was Caroline Beyer, nee Kramer) was also a butcher in Bradford and in Newcastle. He married Elizabeth Gorner in Bradford Cathedral in 1872 and they had three surviving children: Lisette, Anna and Robert.
Gustav died in Newcastle in 1884, aged 34, of tuberculosis.
I would happily add all this to the reference library list if I could find out how!
