Some Serendipity in Historical Research
When threads of lives cross on a single page...
I couldn’t tell you how many of the notes I’ve picked out of the historical records I’ve been digging through I happened to find on pure luck. A lucky turn of a page, a chance spotting of a “Wyg…” in the middle of a huge block of text I didn’t mean to find — time and time again a little nudge from the Spirit of Nerdy-ass Shit pushes me towards something cool or meaningful to research.
Additionally, after spending hours and hours pouring over pages and reading about the different people in Strasbourg, you start to get a sense of the trajectory of their lives. Take Bechtold Kolb, a Strasbourg resident who seems to appear like clockwork throughout the XXI records from the early 1560s into the 1600s, bumping elbows with Wygand Brack, and seemingly ever-present each time I open up a new year of the XXI records. When he pops up it’s like seeing an old friend on the street, ‘ol reliable Bechtold out for a stroll!
There’s a certain amount of welcome serendipity that tends to crop up the more time you spend in the pages, and today I had a particularly jolting moment of threads crossing 432 years ago.
It started with a simple date check…
I was putting together a small collection of documents to investigate and needed to get the exact date of Wygand Brack’s son’s marriage in 1591.
4/26/1591 in the Saint Pierre le Vieux parish, got it! But something else on this page caught my eye. Further down on the page was another name I recognized: Michael Ziegler.
Maria, his daughter, got married to Jacob Bock just a couple weeks after Wygand’s own nuptials. But why is this interesting?
Michael Ziegler competed with Wygand Brack Sr. for the position of Rhatsbott 16 years before in 1575, and eventually took Wygand’s job after his death in 1583.
Michael even has the title for the exact job post Wygand vacated upon his death written in the record: “Rhatsbotten,” and had his daughter married so shortly after Wygand’s own son that they appear on the same page of the marriage document.
16 years after their fathers applied for the same job, and 8 years after Wygand’s untimely demise and Michael finally getting hired, somehow these two lives intersected once again, this time through their children, separated only by 14 lines of text.
Reading this may not prompt the same dopamine rush and audible “AAAH!!!” to you as it did to me, but I hope it helps illustrate a few things. How much life was going on at the time of Meyer and the other fechtmeisters in Strasbourg, how lucky many researchers tend to be in their record scraping, and just how fun it can be once you start really sinking your teeth into a place!
A little serendipity to lead into the work week, and finger and toes crossed for more!