Johann Kaspar Hasselbacher

Born in 1759 , Johann Kaspar is one of two Hasselbacher children born in Diespeck that year.  These are the earliest births for which I have records. It is possible they may be the first Diespeck Hasselbacher births. The birth of Johann Kasper in particular was important to me because his father's name is Georg.  Working backward from modern times, my 6G Grandfather's name was Georg. However, my 6G Grandmother was Margaretha Barbara Holtzberger and the first child I could identify by this couple was born in 1763.

At the time I recovered these birth records in 2005, I did not know how or when my ancestors arrived in Diespeck. There was no birth record for this Georg in the Diespeck abstracts. I could speculate that Georg was the son of Paulus (and/ or perhaps grandson of another Paulus) because the dates were right, but I did not have objective proof and there were other Georges and Pauluses in the greater family. The issue was potentially complicated by the fact that Paulus, the putative grandfather (or father) of Georg, was declared a Separatist and denied access to church privileges and protections. That meant that records of other family members might not have been entered in church records.

The Pfarrer of the Diespeck Church produced for me the original church book containing the birth (baptismal) record of Johann Kaspar shown below. It confirmed that Johann Caspar was the son of Georg Hasselbacher who was himself the son of Pauli Hasselbacher. The mother is Ana Sophia Wöhr.  Alas, I do not yet have a full translation but all of the image below appears to be Item 33 on the parchment page. (This  example makes it clear that the church abstracts do not contain all information available in the orignials.) This record was the first important link I had connecting my family with the first Hasselbacher families of Franconia and their worldwide descendants. I have no additional records at this time to know what happened to Johann Kaspar and his mother, Anna Sophia Wöhr . I have no evidence that Georg and Anna Sophia married (or were allowed to marry). The famly names of Hasselbacher, Holtzberger, and Wöhr are intertwined many times over these centuries. I am related to all of them.

Earlier this year I was able to recover the church records of Stübach where Georg and his father Paulus were born and married, thus cementing an unbroken chain of Hasselbacher records from the early 1600's in Austria to Louisville, Kentucky in 2007.  Who would have thought it possible!

Peter Hasselbacher
29 Jun 2007