Meixner Family History

On my last post I added a picture of Abtsdorf.  I will add 4 more today.  All these pictures came from the website:  http://www.zwittau.de/orte/abtsdorf/abtsdorf.htm   Click on it and take a look around.  It helps if you have your browser convert the text from German to English.

Bohemia is a very interesting place.  It was around as the Kingdom of Bohemia many hundreds of years then it came under the control of the Austrian Empire starting in the 1500s.  It became Czechoslovakia in 1918, after World War I, and finally split in two in 1993 and became the Czech Republic and Slovakia. There are other complications around World War II and being under control of Russia that I will leave for you to research on your own.  


There is another complex part of the history of Bohemia that I will go into a little bit because it identifies who our ancestors were and how they were effected by the events of World War II.  


In 1881 our great-grandfather lived in an area of Bohemia that was predominantly of Germanic decent.  The majority of the rest of the country of Bohemia was of Czech decent.  There was an area around the border of Bohemia next to the bordering German speaking countries (also between Bohemia and Moravia where Abtsdorf was located) that was predominantly German in origin.  This area later became known as Sudetenland and the people as Sudeten Germans.  They are also known as German-Bohemians.  Our ancestors were German-Bohemians or Sudeten Germans.  


After World War II, about 3.5 million Sudeten Germans were forcibly expelled from their homes in Czechoslovakia and compelled to resettle in other countries.  This makes finding our long lost cousins very difficult but is one of my research goals.

The shaded areas of this chart shows the German speaking Sudetenland. 

Here is another map that shows Abtsdorf and some of the area towns.  I highlighted some of the towns of our ancestors.

Though the split between the Germans and the Czechs in Bohemia didn't culminate in expulsion until 1945, there were tensions between the two groups in the late 1800s.  By 1881 when Frank and Theresa made the decision to leave their homeland and come to the United States the rise of tensions and competition between these two groups may have contributed to their momentous decision.

Next time I will look at several other possible contributing factors in the move.