Did the Haselbachers of Burganland fish in the Haselbach?
Did the Haselbachers of Burganland fish in the Haselbach?
I found a new cluster of Haselbacher families in eastern Austria, some of whom came to America. A sequence of personal coincidences led me to investigate these families further, revealing recurrent themes that we have commented on before in these pages. For example, to this point, the Haselbachers of Burganland all seem to originate from the village of St. Michael. We are no longer amazed to learn that the village lies adjacent to the stream, Haselbach! Modern Google maps show a Haselbach flowing between the Villages of St. Michael and Bocksdorf, the two villages from which the index Burganland family came. (A zoomed-in version shown below has the stream labeled.)
I no longer speculate that our names (whether one ‘s’ or two) are associated with geographic origins: a farm, a stream, or a village named Haselbach. I now accept this as fact. For the most part, I have assumed that we were named for the places, not the other way around. However, I am not entitled to be dogmatic about this, because I recently identified a stream named Haselbach in Rehweiler, Mittelfranken that may have been named after the Hasselbacher millers who set up shop there from somewhere else. (The Hasselbacher family that settled there did so because Rehweiler provided a place of religious refuge for their Zinzendorfer brand of Lutheranism, not because it might have had a Haselbach stream bearing their name!) That apparent exception to the rule needs to be further studied, including looking at older maps.
My point above is that I cannot yet conclude that these Austrian Haselbachers of Burgenland are related to my family line or not. Burgenland is a unique part of Austria. According to its Wikipedia entry, Burgenland has always been a different sort of place in what is today's Austria. It was also one place among others, including my own German ancestral Hasselbacher home in the Aischgrund, that received Protestant refuges from elsewhere in Austria after the Thirty Years War and the Counter Reformation. Who can tell what we may learn!
These topics and pages under construction. Come back later.
Peter Hasselbacher,
3 June 2013